Trump’s War With CBS News Takes a Dark Turn

Donald Trump has sent a legal demand to CBS demanding the full unedited transcript from the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.

On Truth Social Monday night, Trump posted pictures from a letter his attorneys sent to CBS claiming that the network “and its 60 Minutes producers intentionally misled the public,” and that CBS’s “manipulative editing was aimed at causing confusion among the electorate regarding Vice President Kamala Harris’s abilities, intelligence, and appeal.”

If CBS does not release the transcript, Trump is threatening legal action against the network, asking that it keeps all of its communications and documents relating to Harris’s interview in case of future potential litigation. Needless to say, Trump is driving himself nuts over the whole thing, just because he thinks the network edited Harris’s interview to make her look better.

In reality, CBS News has already responded to Trump, noting that any claims of a doctored interview are completely “false.” Still, Trump’s campaign won’t give up its outlandish war. He has bizarrely demanded that Harris drop out of the race, and his campaign has been calling for the release of the interview transcript for nearly two weeks. The former president has even called for CBS’s broadcast license to be revoked, drawing a rebuke from the Federal Communications Commission.

Trump had his own opportunity to sit for an interview with 60 Minutes, but he backed out at the last minute, making tons of excuses. First, his campaign complained about the interview being fact-checked, and then it demanded an apology for Trump’s 2020 interview, in which he stormed off set. Ultimately, the network aired all of these shifting explanations, which probably contributed to making Trump upset.

If Trump really thinks that CBS’s interview had the effect of making Harris look better, he has the option of sitting down for his own interview with 60 Minutes. But lately, the former president has canceled several interviews for outlets that won’t go out of their way to flatter him, perhaps because he knows that he’ll hurt his image just weeks before the election.

If Donald Trump wanted to distance himself from Project 2025, he sure isn’t doing a great job.

Joining Trump for his bus tour across Pennsylvania this week is Monica Crowley, his former Treasury assistant secretary for public affairs. But perhaps more importantly, Crowley is also a signed contributor to the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, which Trump has been desperately trying to disavow as the election nears.

A footnote in Project 2025 shows that Crowley is not simply a passive signatory. “All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Monica Crowley [and others] deserve special mention,” the document reads.

Crowley will join Trump as he stumps at nearly dozens stops across the state. This comes after Crowley took on a role helping JD Vance prepare for his vice presidential debate last month, serving as a mock moderator for the senator during practice sessions.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has denied his many connections to the Project 2025 manifesto and its signatories. Earlier in October, Trump ranted about “Lyin’ Kamal [sic] Harris” and her mission to “make a thing called Project 2025 the central theme of her campaign, advertising and all.”

Trump claims he has “nothing to do with it, NEVER READ IT, NEVER SAW IT,” but evidence says otherwise.

Donald Trump is no longer simply trying to distance himself from North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. Now the former president is outright pretending he doesn’t know anything about the scandal-plagued gubernatorial candidate.

At a campaign stop in the Tar Heel state on Monday, Politico asked Trump whether he would still urge his supporters to vote for Robinson. “I’m not familiar with the race right now. I haven’t looked, I haven’t seen it,” Trump said.

Within the span of eight months, Trump has gone from endorsing Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids,” to dodging questions about him.

Last month, a bombshell CNN report alleged that Robinson had left inflammatory and lewd comments on a pornography website’s message board, including calling himself a “Black Nazi.” Trump has neglected to withdraw his endorsement of Robinson or really address the scandal at all.

Still, as Trump has sought to drum up votes in North Carolina, Robinson has been notably absent and hasn’t appeared with the Republican presidential nominee since August.

Earlier this month, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz was plagued by MAGA rumors that he had sexually groomed a former student of his. Now it appears that unfounded gossip was funded by a familiar source of misinformation: Russia.

Last week, an anonymous account on X, “DocNetyoutube,” claimed that he had spoken with a former student of Walz’s who had been abused by him during Walz’s tenure as a high school teacher and football coach. That same account had a history of elevating other conspiracies and, conveniently, was deactivated shortly after the accusations gained ground. It was unclear whether the account had been offlined by the account owner or if X had removed it.

Experts believe that the Russia-aligned network called Storm-1516 was behind the account, reported Wired. Storm-1516’s content relies heavily on faked primary sources, fooling American viewers into believing that fabricated documents, audio, and video support their baseless conspiracies. NBC News estimated that the prolific group—whose false narratives have lured politicians at the highest levels of government, including Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance—is responsible for at least 50 conspiracies in the last year alone.

A video circulated by another account on X elevated a deepfake of a man identifying himself as the former student, Matthew Metro. But the real Metro—who was tracked down by The Washington Post on Monday—dispelled the outlandish smear, telling the paper that he was dismayed to find out that a group had used his identity to fuel a vicious and false attack on Walz. Metro told the Post that he had attended one of the schools that Walz taught at but had never met him.

Last month, another pro-Trump misinformation superspreader was outed as a beneficiary of Russian state-controlled media. Tenet Media, which funded the work of popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern, folded under the pressure of a Justice Department investigation that found the company had been backed to the tune of millions of dollars by Russian state-controlled media.

Weeks later, another burgeoning MAGA outlet, Intelligencer—which has no apparent connection with New York magazine’s Intelligencer—was caught with ties to Russia. Some of Trump’s closest allies were tied to the outlet, including former Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiant. Nearly half of the company’s board members are former aides, surrogates, or fake electors for Trump’s previous campaigns.

The site’s financial backing did not indicate that it had received funds directly from the Kremlin. Instead, Intelligencer began as a subsidiary of a right-wing radio station in Australia that covers a host of conservative U.S. issues, including climate change denial and Covid-19 conspiracies, until George Eliason, an American journalist with experience in Ukraine, took over the website. In recent months, Intelligencer’s conspiracy-laden articles were shared by the likes of Alex Jones and former Trump aide Roger Stone.

Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans’ outlandish claims undermining election integrity could end up hurting him in the polls, according to one prominent Republican.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defended his state’s election processes during an interview with NewsNation on Sunday, after GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene alleged Friday that there was something wrong with voting machines in Georgia’s Whitfield County. In a post on X, she had claimed that one “voter’s printed ballot had been changed from their selections made on the machine.”

Raffensberger told NewsNation that “spreading stories like that” would “really hurt our turnout on our side,” according to The Guardian. “You know, you can trust the results,” he added.

Raffensperger argued that Greene’s approach was “self-defeating”: If Republicans felt that claims of widespread voter fraud were actually true, they might be less likely to participate in an election.

It’s happened before: In 2021, according to the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one in six Republicans said they were less likely to vote in the 2022 midterms because no “forensic audits” had been done on the 2020 election results.

Whitfield County has already had a record 7,500 people cast their votes, News Channel 9 reported Monday, part of the record-breaking voting surge since Georgia first opened its polls last week.

During an appearance on Face the Nation on CBS Sunday, Raffensperger said that the issue Greene was referencing had been due to voter error.

“What happened with Whitfield County was the lady thought she had pressed a certain, you know, selection, and then when she printed out the ballot, she noted that, she saw that, and so then she made them aware of it, and it got corrected,” Raffensperger said, adding that the rumor about a faulty machine was “blown out of proportion.”

Election officials say they have not encountered any issues with the voting machines.