Axios: 60 Minutes Lied About Trump Admin Response

Quelle surprise. Axios actually hits the lead here, although reporter Sara Fischer made sure to provide it on X/Twitter as well:

Some nuggets in here @axios:
– Can confirm WH, State Dept and DHS all provided on record comment in response to CBS News journalists’ request for comment ahead of the segment. None of those comments made airhttps://t.co/hFkRmt5Uv9

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) December 22, 2025

Readers discover that the segment didn’t include those comments in the first paragrph, although they have to get to the bottom of the story before the full picture emerges of the conflict between Bari Weiss and 60 Minutes‘ Sharyn Alfonsi:

Between the lines: According to a source familiar with “60 Minutes” correspondence with the administration, the “60 Minutes” team reached out to press officials at the White House, State Department and DHS, all of which provided comment to CBS News.

• None of those comments, which varied in length and substance, were included in the piece viewed by Axios.

That’s not a “between the lines” issue. That directly reveals why Weiss pulled the segment in the US. For some reason, however, the Alfonsi segment aired in Canada, which Fischer viewed. It’s not clear why Weiss’ order didn’t prevent the segment from airing in another country when Weiss had ordered it pulled in the US. One has to wonder whether that’s clear to Weiss as well. Supposedly, the segment was transmitted “via app” to the Canadian distributor for 60 Minutes, but shouldn’t Weiss’ decision as the editor in chief of CBS News to keep it from airing have been universal?

What is clear is that Weiss turned out to be correct in her assessment of the segment. Weiss first responded to Alfons’s claim about political motives for spiking the story by saying it “wasn’t ready” for air. Weiss then sent a more specific memo to CBS News personnel laying out the reasons for the decision, which included the need to get principals on the record to address the allegations:

New: See the memo Bari Weiss sent to some 60 Minutes staff on Sunday: pic.twitter.com/3ERieIGXLh

— Isabella Simonetti (@thesimonetti) December 22, 2025

Money quote: “Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realized we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.” Well, surprise again! According to Axios, Alfonsi did get principals to respond, including that same DHS spokesperson and more. Rather than include that input, Alfonsi not only lied in the segment about not getting a response, she or the producers of 60 Minutes misled CBS News management about it. 

And now Axios has confirmed that, which shows exactly why Weiss got hinky after seeing the segment on Thursday. This is also not the first time that Alfonsi cooked a story at CBS News, either, so Weiss may have had her antenna up in the first place. As I noted in last night’s Final Word, Alfonsi fronted a dishonest and false hit piece on Ron DeSantis in April 2021, accusing him of corruption in the deal with Publix to distribute teh COVID-19 vaccinations. It didn’t take long for social media to connect the dots:

The entire reason I recognize the name is that she was the reporter behind the bogus DeSantis/publix hit piece.

Link for a flashback: https://t.co/kSpbj2eeaf

It was one of the most blatantly dishonest pieces of journalism I can ever remember. I would never trust a reporter who… https://t.co/gH3f6oJ62Z

— AG (@AGHamilton29) December 22, 2025

Oh hey, Sharyn Alfonsi. I remember her.

From a failed 2021 “60 Minutes” hit job that went unanswered and unexplained:

“In the 60 Minutes segment that aired this weekend, CBS News’s Sharyn Alfonsi tells DeSantis, ‘Publix, as you know, donated $100,000 to your campaign, and then… https://t.co/oL7RB8BQgw

— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) December 22, 2025

Oh, and heeeyyyyy …

Sharyn Alfonsi’s producer for the botched DeSantis story (Oriana Zill de Granados) is also the producer for the CECOT story. https://t.co/BByr8wnMan

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) December 23, 2025

It was so dishonest that even a Democrat involved called Alfonsi’s report “bullshit”:

I did speak with @60Minutes. Never said I didn’t. They were very nice, but I told them that the @publix story was “bullshit”. Walked them through the whole process.The fact that I didn’t sit down on “camera” because I am responding to a 100 year emergency doesn’t change the truth https://t.co/G7QNsV42V5

— Jared Moskowitz (@JaredEMoskowitz) April 6, 2021

Even PolitiFact said at the time that CBS News owed everyone an explanation for how Alfonsi deceptively edited video of DeSantis to create a narrative rather than report the truth. The Daytona Beach News-Journal’s editors wanted an explanation too, saying that Alfonsi’s segment didn’t “even clear[] the bar as responsible opinion, let alone news. 

Of course, CBS News and 60 Minutes didn’t learn any lessons about “deceptively edited videos” and narrative creation. They would use both again last year in their desperate attempt to make Kamala Harris sound coherent, and that time it cost Paramount $16 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Donald Trump over corrupt election interference. 

And so, here we are again, but this time CBS News is under new leadership. Will reporters finally get held accountable for producing dishonest hit pieces disguised as “news”? Stay tuned … figuratively speaking only, that is. 

Update: Looks like the Wall Street Journal is getting the same story:

It seems there was reason for CBS Editor in Chief Bari Weiss to hold for further reporting the 60 Minutes story on that nasty El Salvador prison. Note this from today’s @WSJ: pic.twitter.com/BDLUO33mDd

— Brit Hume (@brithume) December 23, 2025

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