New 60 Minutes Boss Rakes in Millions as Top Staff Eye the Exits

CBS News is spending a lot more cash to fund Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes takeover.

Weiss’s new pick to run the venerated newsmagazine, Nick Bilton, is making far more than his predecessor. The British-born contrarian was installed as 60 Minutes’ new executive producer last week, and is reportedly salaried at $2.5 million—a million more than veteran broadcast journalist Tanya Simon, who ran the show from April 2025 to just last week, according to Page Six. 

Weiss announced Bilton’s hire the same day that she fired a large swath of the show’s crew in an event that has since been internally referred to as “Black Thursday.” The axed staff included Simon, correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi (who criticized Weiss’s decision to delay her report on a notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador), correspondent Cecilia Vega, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

Scott Pelley, who had been one of the show’s rotating faces for 22 years, was canned Wednesday after he openly questioned Bilton’s appointment during a contentious all-staff meeting earlier this week. At the same meeting, Bilton suggested that more layoffs could be on the horizon.

The show’s remaining correspondents have since begun to question their own futures at the decorated program: Correspondents Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, and Jon Wertheim reportedly held an hourlong meeting Wednesday on the matter, according to Status. Stahl’s contract has already expired, and it is not clear if it will be renewed. Three sources that spoke to the outlet shared that Whitaker is considering his options and might leave on his own accord. Anderson Cooper already left by his own volition last month.

Bilton is by no means the show’s typical hire, and many critics of the hiring decision have questioned what qualifies him to run 60 Minutes at all. Bilton has previously worked as a tech columnist, writing for Vanity Fair and The New York Times. He seemingly left the news industry during the latter half of the last decade in order to pursue screenwriting in Hollywood, and has since worked on scripts and produced projects for major studios including Lionsgate, Netflix, and Disney.

It is not publicly known how much the program’s highly respected, longtime showrunner Bill Owens made before he was forced out in April 2025 for refusing to bend to Donald Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit. Trump sued 60 Minutes over its sit-down interview with Kamala Harris prior to Election Day 2024, claiming that the program had essentially “defrauded” the American public due to a minor editing decision. Legal experts condemned the suit at the time as meritless, yet  CBS’s parent company Paramount nonetheless agreed to pay Trump $16 million in order to settle the case out of court.

In between naps during a televised White House event Thursday, President Donald Trump suggested creating a new promenade outside the Lincoln Memorial and naming it after himself.

“The Lincoln Memorial, the front was supposed to be the back, the back was supposed to be the front, it never got built,” Trump said shortly after appearing to doze off. “They wanna call it the Trump Promenade, but I don’t know if I wanna call it that. But it’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful project. And it’s gonna take the Lincoln Memorial right down to the Potomac.”

The president again appeared to struggle to stay awake after making the suggestion.

The Trump administration has already spent a massive sum on construction projects around Washington, D.C., including specifically around the Lincoln Memorial. He has dedicated $5 million of taxpayer money to covering four lion statues near the memorial in gold leaf and $13 million to redoing the Reflecting Pool. He has also proposed building a 250-foot arch, which would be so large it would overshadow the entire Lincoln Memorial. That project would cost at least $100 million.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy has joined his Democratic colleague, Cory Booker, in a court filing to block President Trump’s so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Cassidy and Booker filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit against the fund, alleging that it goes against the Constitution by making “an end-run around Congress’s institutional authority” and violating the spending, appropriations, and appointments clauses.

The senators’ brief points out that despite a federal judge temporarily blocking the fund last week, Trump refused to say it was dead in a podcast interview earlier this week. They attacked the origin of the fund, Trump’s excessively favorable settlement with the IRS following his lawsuit against the agency after his tax returns were leaked (during his own first term).

“Because the very lawsuit that sparked the settlement was collusive and therefore could not be heard in a federal court, and accordingly no monetary award would have been available through that collusive litigation, the Judgment Fund is not available,” the brief states.

It’s another anti-Trump move from Cassidy following his primary election loss last month to Representative Julia Letlow, who had the president’s endorsement. Cassidy has also taken aim at Trump’s ballroom and his choice of Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence. But the only reason he appears to be showing courage now is because he’ll be out of a job by next year.

That seems to be one of the few things that gets Republicans to criticize Trump: when he withdraws his support and ends their careers. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch MAGA acolyte, reportedly turned on Trump after he didn’t back her running for the Senate. But this effort from Cassidy at least carries some weight, and could help kill Trump’s slush fund in court.

Mere hours after his inauguration, Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 individuals who faced criminal charges for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in support of his claims that the 2020 presidential election had been “stolen.”

Dozens of those pardon recipients have since been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of other crimes, according to a new analysis by Lawfare. At least 97 January 6ers—or roughly one in 16—have been tied to a crime since the president gave them unilateral forgiveness.

The crimes they stand accused of range from petty crimes such as property damage, trespassing, and possession of drug paraphernalia, to serious felonies such as stalking, theft, defrauding government agencies, plots to assassinate law enforcement and government officials, and homicide.

At least 14 pardon recipients have since been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child porn, according to Lawfare. Another six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have been accused of different violent crimes, such as physical assault or illegal firearms possession. At least 20 have been charged for driving while drunk or public intoxication.

Notably, five individuals that Trump granted clemency have been charged with or accused of crimes that they conducted after the pardon, suggesting that the president actually facilitated more crime by prematurely kneecapping their judicial consequences.

They include Andrew Paul Johnson, who went on to commit multiple sex crimes against children months after Trump freed him from the clink. He was sentenced in March to life in prison for the crimes related to transmitting child porn and molesting a child under the age of 12.

Ryan Nichols is another pardon recipient who went on to commit more crime. Nichols was charged on May 10 after he allegedly threatened a person with a gun in a church parking lot.

Trump praised his pardon recipients as recently as Wednesday while defending his $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” referring to the honeypot’s potential awardees as “great people.”

“These are people who have lost their lives over nonsense,” Trump told the New York Post. “These were many great people, and I gave them pardons and I’m very proud to have given them pardons. And I think they should be reimbursed for a crooked government.”

It’s unclear if the slush fund will proceed, but a slew of January 6ers have already lined up for their slice of the pie. They include former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, a sex offender who bear-sprayed cops, and a convicted child molester who told his victims he would give them money from a Trump payout in exchange for their silence.

Arizona’s attorney general is still going to pursue charges against President Trump’s allies for trying to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.

Kris Mayes plans to seek a new indictment against those allies, her office announced Thursday, following the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday not to reverse a lower court ruling throwing out earlier indictments against the group of 18 people, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“The Arizona Attorney General’s Office will return this case to the grand jury,” a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, Richie Taylor, said to Politico. “We decline to comment further at this time.”

Two years ago, a grand jury indicted Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, conservative attorney John Eastman, and 15 others over a fake elector scheme to reverse Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. Trump was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. Last year, though, the case was thrown out by Judge Sam Myers, who said prosecutors didn’t show jurors the text of the Electoral Count Act, which governs presidential elections.

Mayes’s office appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court, which decided not to reopen the case on Tuesday. If Mayes secures new indictments, Arizona would join Wisconsin and Nevada as states with active criminal cases against 2020 fake elector schemes. Even if Trump won’t face prosecution for interfering in the 2020 election, the possibility remains open that his close allies could still face criminal consequences.