In an unprecedented event, President Donald Trump broke an agreement with CBS and published the full and unedited interview that journalist Lesley Stahl conducted for the CBS program “60 Minutes” on his Facebook page.
President Trump attempted to justified such a gesture by stating that he wants “everyone to see how false and manipulated the interview was”, which he walked out after less than 40 minutes of dialogue. Despite the leak, CBS has said that it still plans to air the episode as planned on Sunday.
(Note: the last time Stahl interviewed Trump, he told her that he discredits the media so that no one would believe them when they said something negative stories about him.)
Trump had his face to face with Stahl last Tuesday in the White House, with two weeks to go before the presidential election on Nov. 3. The journalist led the dialogue with issues such as the coronavirus pandemic, the loss of support among women and the draft health plan with which he wants to replace Obamacare, as the system devised by her predecessor Barack Obama is known.
In Tuesday’s interview, a solo dialogue was scheduled for a first block and then Vice President Mike Pence would join. But 37 minutes into the talk, the Republican tycoon, irritated by the way the dialogue was developing, ended the meeting.
“The first thing you said to me was, are you ready for tough questions? That is not the way to speak, it is not the way to speak, ” Trump said, criticizing the veteran journalist.
Following the publication of the interview by Trump, CBS released a statement in which it stated that what was done by the White House “will not deter 60 minutes from providing its complete, fair and contextualized reports in which the presidents have participated for decades ”. They will broadcast the interview on Sunday, as well as another with Pence. Along with those interviews, current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were also interviewed and those will be shown the same day.
During the interview, Trump dispatched himself on harsh terms to his rival, alluding to unconfirmed information published by the New York Post based on emails from Biden and his son Hunter. Apparently, the data came from a Hunter Biden computer accessed by Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and the former mayor of New York City. Stahl stopped it like this: “This is 60 minutes and we can’t put things in that we can’t verify.”
(Note: A New York Times article from Sept. 23 noted that a Republican-led inquiry into Hunter Biden and Ukraine found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden. The story from the New York Post has also faced scrutiny from its own staff, as the authors who wrote the article refused to put their name in the bylines due to questions of the article’s credibility and lack of proper vetting.)
