Former President Donald Trump is suing CBS for $10 billion over an interview with Kamala Harris that aired on "60 Minutes" earlier this month.
The 19-page lawsuit filed Thursday alleges that the network committed “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” by editing down a handful of Harris’s responses to interview questions. In addition to the massive sum, Trump's team is requesting an order that the network release the unedited interview in full.
Trump has fumed over the "60 Minutes" interview for most of this month, alleging foul play after the network aired two different portions of an answer to a question about the war in Gaza on "Face The Nation" and their flagship newsmagazine program. In the lawsuit, his attorneys claimed that CBS deceptively edited the vice president's "word salad" to harm Trump's election chances.
“CBS’s distortion of the '60 Minutes' interview damaged President Trump’s fundraising and support values by several billions of dollars, particularly in Texas,” Trump’s attorneys argued in the lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Texas.
"The lawsuit Trump has brought today against CBS is completely without merit and we will vigorously defend against it," a spokesperson for CBS told Reuters.
The lawsuit, which calls Harris’s ascent to the top of the presidential ticket an “unprecedented and anti-democratic political coup,” is littered with Trump campaign gripes against the “Democratic Party establishment” and “legacy media organizations.”
The lawsuit comes days after he told rallygoers he would go after CBS’s right to broadcast in the United States, adding that the network “should be taken off the air.”
CBS had argued Trump's gripes had no merit well before he filed the lawsuit, arguing in a sternly worded letter last week that Trump has no basis to sue or to ask for a transcript of their interview with Harris. The network's VP of legal affairs told Trump's representation that “the interview was not doctored” and that the network “did not hide any part of the Vice President’s answer to the question at issue.”
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