CBS asked a judge on Friday to dismiss Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the network, saying the president-elect failed to identify any legal problems with 60 Minutes’s recent interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Attorneys for the network wrote in court filings that Trump improperly accused CBS of violating a Texas consumer protection law that had nothing to do with a media outlet’s editorial practices. Trump also could not explain “how he arrived at $10 billion in purported damages” caused to his campaign and failed to include his campaign as a plaintiff, rendering the lawsuit “irrelevant,” the attorneys said.
“Whether viewed through the lens of standing, statutory construction, or the First Amendment, President Trump’s claim does not withstand scrutiny,” the attorneys wrote.
The lawsuit centers on a 60 Minutes’s interview with Harris that first aired on Oct. 5, weeks before the presidential election. CBS News aired on two different programs two different responses that Harris gave to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prompting outrage from the president and his supporters.
“Her REAL ANSWER WAS CRAZY, OR DUMB, so they actually REPLACED it with another answer in order to save her or, at least, make her look better,” Trump wrote at the time. “A FAKE NEWS SCAM, which is totally illegal. TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.”
When Trump filed the lawsuit, CBS News issued a statement saying it aired two different portions of her response and that Trump’s claims were false.
“The interview was not doctored; and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of Vice President Kamala Harris’s answer to the question at issue,” the network said.
Trump’s attorneys, Edward Paltzik and Dan Epstein, filed the complaint in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, where a Trump-appointed judge would automatically take up the case. The move prompted accusations of judge-shopping.
CBS attorneys also said the case should be tossed out because Amarillo was not an appropriate venue. CBS’s witnesses and evidence are concentrated in New York and Trump is a Florida resident, the attorneys wrote.
The lawsuit marked the latest example of Trump engaging in a long-running war with the media. In the complaint, Paltzik and Epstein accused “CBS and other legacy media organizations” of trying to “get Kamala elected.”
They pair wrote that “even with aid from the Fourth Estate, Kamala’s campaign has been unable to conceal embarrassing weaknesses, including her habit of uttering ‘word salad.’”
A CBS News lawyer said the Harris interview was edited for time purposes — not “doctored,” as Trump claimed — and that “editing is a necessity for all broadcasters.” Trump’s attorneys scoffed at the explanation.
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“This alleged innocent refrain is contradicted both by the facts of this malicious doctoring of news and by years of CBS’s journalistic animosity toward President Trump and previous Republican presidential candidates,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.
Many lawyers reacted to the lawsuit by calling it frivolous. George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley questioned the grounds for it but said discovery could still reveal that CBS News tried to “clean up” Harris’s interview response.
60 Minutes announced at the start of its interview with Harris that Trump had also agreed to an interview but then later canceled. Trump spokesman Steven Cheung disputed the claim, saying it was “fake news” and that “nothing was ever scheduled or locked in.”
