Veteran investigative journalist Catherine Herridge revealed Tuesday that CBS News refused to allow her to interview billionaire Elon Musk live on X, insisting instead that she pre-tape and edit the conversation.
Herridge shared a video with subscribers to her newsletter detailing the roadblocks she faced at CBS covering the Hunter Biden laptop story and the “Twitter files,” internal documents Musk shared with independent journalists after he purchased the platform.
“So I went to the CBS executives and I said, this is the opportunity that we have. [Musk’s] saying, I want to do it live and on my platform,” Herridge recalled.
“He’s one of the most influential human beings on the planet, and the reaction from the executives was, well, we can’t do it live. And I was like, what do you mean we can’t do it live? I was like, well, we don’t know what he’s going to say,” she continued.
“Well, you know, it has to be taped. We have to have the ability to edit it. It has to be on our platform. We have to control the platform. We talked at one point about whether we could do it sort of like a simulcast between the streaming network and maybe X, but everything just got shut down.”
CBS’s actions made Herridge feel ashamed and she never followed up with Musk to explain to him the situation. She thought it would have been difficult for Musk to grasp what was going on because of his commitment to free speech.
Upon purchasing Twitter, Musk provided the “Twitter files” to independent journalists and ended internal policies that suppressed conservative users and ideas. He later rebranded the platform X and instituted a number of changes to how the platform operates.
CBS fired Herridge in February when the network was laying off staff to cut costs. The network seized her reporting files when she was terminated, a move that was met with widespread criticism. CBS ultimately returned the files to Herridge after pressure from media union SAG-AFTRA amid concerns about freedom of the press.
Herridge said she later checked the metadata and observed that her termination was finalized one day after she covered special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into whether President Joe Biden mishandled classified documents.
Although Hur did not recommend criminal charges against Biden, his report on the investigation observed Biden’s worsening mental acuity and struggles with memory, drawing severe backlash from Democrats. Biden eventually stepped aside from the presidential race in July after his disastrous debate performance caused Democrats to revolt over the octogenarian president’s mental decline.
Now, Herridge shares her investigative reporting with subscribers on X and her independent newsletter. Herridge is a longtime journalist known for reporting on national-security issues and the scandals surrounding Hunter Biden.
In the video to subscribers, Herridge revealed new information about CBS’s effort to prevent her from covering the Hunter Biden laptop story leading up to the 2020 presidential election. She described how a top executive asked her to send her files to network anchor Norah O’Donnell when she prepared to interview then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
“Norah looking for all confirmed reporting. Is there a Hunter connection to these documents? Yes, all of them in your inbox. And then I texted the documents,” Herridge recounted.
O’Donnell ended up asking Joe Biden a question about whether the laptop resembled Russian disinformation, as 51 former intelligence officials claimed without evidence in October 2020 soon after the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Former senior CIA official Michael Morell, the lead signatory of the intel officials’s letter claiming the laptop story was Russian disinformation, later testified that he orchestrated the letter after a conversation with then-senior Biden advisor Tony Blinken. Morell admitted that one of the reasons he circulated the letter was to help Biden defeat then-President Donald Trump.
“So when Norah O’Donnell had that question, I thought, did this information never reach her? I was asked to get confirmed reporting for her,” Herridge said.
“I don’t know what happened there. I never asked her. I didn’t feel that it was a welcome question.”
Herridge said she faced internal opposition from some top brass at CBS and described how the network delayed her story confirming the laptop’s authenticity until after the 2022 midterm elections.
“There were corners of support in the company for it and there were corners of support who understood the value of investigating the Hunter Biden story, but there were some elements within CBS news that were just resistant to it. It didn’t matter what the facts of the case really were,” Herridge said.
She obtained a copy of the data from Hunter Biden’s laptop that was the same as the FBI’s to ensure she could authenticate the device’s materials. The FBI retrieved the laptop data and verified it in late 2019, special agent Erica Jensen testified at Hunter Biden’s criminal gun trial earlier this year. But, the FBI spent close to a year preparing tech platforms to suppress the Biden laptop story and withheld information on its authenticity, according to a House Judiciary Committee report.
“When we did the story, we did it after the midterms. I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms and my training is that you should always do the story when it’s ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle.”
Later on, CBS rejected Herridge’s proposal to run a story about email aliases on Hunter Biden’s laptop that seemed to belong to Joe Biden. Those aliases later came up during the impeachment inquiry and Joe Biden appeared to use them to communicate with Hunter and one of his business partners, Eric Schwerin.
As an independent journalist, Herridge recently interviewed IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, whose allegations of Justice Department misconduct became another major aspect of the impeachment inquiry.
The IRS posed Shapley with an ultimatum to either resign or be demoted following Herridge’s interview. However, the agency backed off its proposal due to pressure from congressional Republicans.