PALM BEACH, Fla. — In a wide-ranging interview at his Mar-a-Lago resort, President Donald J. Trump openly bragged to CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell that the network’s parent company had “paid me a lotta money” to resolve a high-profile lawsuit over alleged deceptive editing of a 2024 interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. The remark, delivered with a grin and a caveat—“you don’t have to put this on, because I don’t wanna embarrass you”—was conspicuously absent from the 28-minute broadcast version of the November 2, 2025, episode of “60 Minutes.” It did, however, appear in the program’s extended 73-minute “Overtime” segment posted on YouTube and in the full transcript released on CBSNews.com.
The exchange marked the president’s first sit-down with “60 Minutes” in five years and his first since Paramount Global, CBS’s former corporate owner, agreed in July 2025 to pay $16 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit. The payout—allocated to legal fees and a donation to Trump’s future presidential library, with no funds going directly to the president—resolved claims that the program had doctored Harris’s answers to make her appear more articulate during the final weeks of the 2024 campaign.
“And actually ‘60 Minutes’ paid me a lotta money,” Trump told O’Donnell, pivoting from a discussion of Harris’s speaking style. “And they put a new answer in. And they paid me a lot of money for that. You can’t have fake news. You’ve gotta have legit news. And I think that it’s happening.” The president himself suggested the segment could be cut, a courtesy that CBS producers ultimately honored for the primetime telecast.
O’Donnell prefaced the aired interview by acknowledging the settlement but emphasized that it “did not include an apology or admission of wrongdoing.” Behind the scenes, the decision to excise Trump’s boast reflected the delicate tightrope CBS walked: honoring a new corporate policy—born of the settlement—to release full transcripts of presidential-candidate interviews while protecting the broadcast from an on-air victory lap by the very litigant who had sued the network.
Origins of the Lawsuit: A Tale of Two Clips
The legal battle began on October 7, 2024, when “60 Minutes” aired portions of an interview with Harris conducted by correspondent Bill Whitaker. A teaser clip shown the previous day on “Face the Nation” featured Harris delivering a concise response to a question about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s responsiveness to U.S. diplomacy. The full Sunday broadcast used a longer, more circuitous excerpt from the same answer. Trump, then a candidate, labeled the discrepancy “election interference” and filed a $10 billion lawsuit in a Trump-friendly federal court in Amarillo, Texas, later amending the complaint to seek $20 billion under the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act.
CBS maintained that both clips were accurate excerpts from a single, unscripted response and that such editing is standard practice across broadcast news. The network released raw footage and a complete transcript in February 2025, but the case dragged on, amplified by a parallel FCC “news distortion” inquiry opened by Trump-appointed Chairman Brendan Carr.
Legal scholars roundly dismissed the suit as meritless. University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone called the Texas statute “about sales,” not journalism, while Harvard’s Noah Feldman labeled it “an outrageous violation of First Amendment principles.” Yet Paramount’s board, led by Shari Redstone, opted to settle rather than risk protracted litigation—or jeopardize a pending merger.
Merger Politics: Settlement as Leverage
The $16 million agreement, finalized July 1, 2025, arrived amid Paramount’s desperate push to secure FCC approval for an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media, backed by Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and his son David, both vocal Trump supporters. The deal required transferring CBS’s valuable broadcast licenses, giving the Trump-led FCC de-facto veto power.
Critics, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Edward Markey, branded the payout “bribery in plain sight.” The Writers Guild of America East accused Paramount of a “transparent attempt to curry favor.” Even FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the panel’s lone Democrat, decried the settlement as a “payout” that undermined editorial independence.
Paramount insisted the issues were unrelated, but the timeline told a different story: The settlement was announced July 1; the FCC green-lit the merger July 24; the deal closed August 7. Skydance further pledged to install an ombudsman to police “bias” at CBS News, hire former New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss as news-division chief, and scrap diversity-equity-inclusion initiatives—moves hailed by Chairman Carr as advancing the “public interest.”
Trump, in his “60 Minutes” sit-down, lavished praise on the new regime. “I think you have a great, new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise,” he told O’Donnell, referring to Weiss. “From what I know, she’s great.” That exchange, too, was trimmed from the broadcast.
Fallout Inside CBS News
The settlement triggered an exodus. “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens departed in April, citing lost “journalistic independence.” CBS News President Wendy McMahon followed in May, telling staff the company’s direction no longer aligned with hers. Dozens of correspondents signed a letter decrying any settlement that implied wrongdoing.
Morale plummeted further when Paramount canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in June, a move Colbert himself branded “a big fat bribe” on air. The comic’s final monologue drew 12 million viewers—his largest audience ever—before the lights went dark after 33 years.
Broader Implications for Press Freedom
First Amendment advocates warn the episode sets a dangerous precedent. “When a sitting president can extract millions from a news organization simply by threatening its corporate lifeline, the chilling effect is profound,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor. The settlement joins a string of Trump-era media capitulations: ABC’s $15 million payout over George Stephanopoulos’s on-air misstatement; Meta’s $25 million resolution of a January 6 account-suspension suit.
Trump, unbowed, crowed on Truth Social: “Paramount/CBS/60 Minutes have today paid $16 Million Dollars in settlement, and we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners.” Paramount denied any side deals, but the president’s allies at the FCC extracted concessions that effectively place government oversight inside the CBS newsroom.
A President Returns to the Scene of the Crime
That Trump chose “60 Minutes”—the very program he sued—to tout his victory was rich in irony. Conducted October 31, 2025, exactly one year after he filed the original complaint, the 90-minute session ranged across nuclear testing, China tariffs, and Venezuelan gang crackdowns. Yet the settlement loomed largest, an elephant in the gold-trimmed room.
Producers ultimately aired 28 minutes, preserving Trump’s policy pronouncements while sidelining his media-score-settling. The full Overtime release and transcript—now mandated for future candidate interviews—ensured transparency, if not absolution.
As Trump wrapped the boastful aside, he flashed a knowing smile: “I don’t wanna embarrass you.” Viewers who stuck to the broadcast never heard it. Those who streamed the extended cut witnessed a president reveling in a payout that cost a storied news division its swagger—and perhaps a slice of its soul.
The episode underscores a stark reality in Trump’s second term: In an era where regulatory levers can throttle billion-dollar mergers, even America’s mightiest newsrooms must weigh principle against survival. For “60 Minutes,” the price of peace was $16 million—and a moment of on-air humility it chose to edit away.
