President Donald Trump’s legal team added new claims to its lawsuit against CBS News on Friday after 60 Minutes released the unedited transcript of former Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview that aired a month before the election.
Trump sued CBS in October for engaging in “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion,” arguing the interview’s deceptive editing made Harris look more favorable. The $10 billion lawsuit was filed five days before the election. Two days after the transcript’s release, Trump doubled the damages incurred to $20 billion.
The amended lawsuit argues CBS harmed Trump by diverting traffic from his Truth Social platform, costing him financial loss. Fox News and Variety were among the first news outlets to report on the updated suit.
“As an owner of a significant interest in a media enterprise in competition with Defendants, President Trump was damaged by Defendants’ false advertising of the Interview and Election Special,” the complaint states. “As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ misconduct, significant viewership was improperly diverted to Defendants’ media platforms, resulting in lower consumer engagement, advertising revenues, and profits by TMTG and President Trump’s other media holdings.”
On Wednesday, 60 Minutes published the raw transcript and video in conjunction with the Federal Communications Commission after the agency requested the materials in response to a “news distortion” complaint filed by the Center for American Rights. The hourlong CBS news program had previously declined to release the materials.
At issue in the preelection interview is a moment in which Harris answers a question from 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker, who said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not listening to the Biden administration during Israel’s war with Hamas.
“Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” Harris responded.
This part was revealed in a preview clip on CBS’s Face the Nation the day before the prime-time special. When the interview aired, however, her response was cut in half.
“We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end,” Harris said in the heavily edited prime-time special.
The more concise answer came in response to blowback from conservatives, who mocked Harris for offering what her critics equated to a “word salad.”
Citing similar instances, Trump’s attorneys amended the lawsuit after reviewing the unedited transcript.
“Once Defendants finally released the unedited version of the Interview, it became apparent that they had engaged in gross broadcast distortion cover-up and manipulated not only Harris’s Reply about Prime Minister Netanyahu, but the Interview in its entirety,” the court filing reads.
In one of the exchanges highlighted in the lawsuit, Whitaker asked Harris how the number of illegal border crossings “quadrupled” in the first three years of the Biden administration following Trump’s first term.
“There are a variety of factors that relate to what we have seen globally, and what we are not immune from at our own border in terms of what we have seen in terms of the surge of immigration and irregular migration,” Harris replied at length. “And there are solutions at hand, but we’ve got to have leaders who are solution-oriented, which we’ve been and are, and I am going forward, instead of leaders who want to make it a problem they can run on.”
The former vice president ultimately lost the election, in part, due to her avoidance of media interviews during the first month of her short-lived campaign. She eventually agreed to give sit-down interviews, but by then, voters had the impression that she couldn’t think quickly on her feet.
Regarding Trump’s lawsuit, the $20 billion in damages stems from a legal claim of “unfair competition” under the federal Lanham Act on top of the original Texas consumer fraud claim. The suit was filed in Amarillo, Texas, where a Trump-appointed judge presides.
The litigation adds Representative Ronny Jackson (R., Texas) as a plaintiff, claiming the lawmaker sustained unspecified “substantial damages” on the Texas claim.
It also adds CBS parent company Paramount Global as a defendant because its Paramount+ streaming service platformed the 60 Minutes interview. Additionally, Paramount is looking to settle the lawsuit with Trump in hopes of preventing the FCC from halting its proposed merger with Skydance Media. Unless the Trump administration intervenes, the merger will close in the first half of the year.