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Donald Trump and Paramount Global have reportedly picked a mediator to try to settle the president’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS over the way that 60 Minutes edited an October interview with his 2024 rival Kamala Harris.
Paramount Global is anxious to close its merger deal with Skydance, with regulatory approval pending before the Trump administration via the FCC and the Justice Department. Both sides have held settlement talks, and The New York Times reported today they have agreed on a mediator to try to resolve the case. A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment, and Trump’s attorney did not return a request for comment.
Meanwhile, the Paramount-CBS legal team is challenging Trump and another plaintiff in his lawsuit, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), over their refusal to supply certain documents that would shed light on how they came up with their massive damages claims.
“Despite the size of their requested damages award, both President Trump and Representative Jackson have refused to produce evidence substantiating their damages during fact discovery,” the CBS legal team wrote in a filing in federal court in Texas today.
Among other things, the CBS legal team wrote, Trump is refusing to produce information about the holdings of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which has received almost 115 million shares of Trump Media & Technology Group stock, driven by his social media platform Truth Social. That information is the basis of Trump’s alleged damages, the network wrote.
In his lawsuit, Trump claimed that CBS’ edits of the 60 Minutes interview with Harris drove up the show’s viewership while costing Truth Social and his other media holdings traffic and audience. The lawsuit claims a violation of Texas’ Deceptive Trade Practices Act, typically used to challenge false advertising and the Lanham Act.
With the whopping damages figure and novel application of the Texas law, a number of legal observers, as well as the National Association of Broadcasters, see the lawsuit as frivolous. In a motion to dismiss, CBS called the Trump lawsuit an “affront to the First Amendment” and “without basis in law or fact.”
The prospect of a settlement of the lawsuit has created a great deal of consternation at CBS News and 60 Minutes, as it would be viewed as a cave to Trump in the name of corporate expediency.
Trump did not even participate in the Oct. 7 60 Minutes episode, but claimed that the show deceptively edited the Harris in a way to make her sound more coherent and boost her election prospects.
60 Minutes has denied Trump’s claims, and handed over a transcript of the interview to the FCC, which is conducting a separate inquiry.
At one point in the interview, correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Harris why Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not listening to the Biden administration.
Harris answered, “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. And we’re not going to stop doing that. 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 was shown giving the first part of her answer in a promo segment on Face the Nation, and the second part on 60 Minutes, which aired a day later. CBS said that the differences in the answers were due to time constraints and are a common practice in the business.
But Trump has pressed forward. He filed an amended complaint in February, doubling the amount of claimed damages to $20 billion and adding Jackson as a plaintiff. CBS has accused Trump of forum shopping, and the addition of Jackson appeared to be an effort to bolster Trump’s choice of a Texas court to litigate the case.
In the CBS filing today, the network’s lawyers noted that even though they sought to hold off on the discovery process until after the judge ruled on the motion to dismiss the case, Trump’s team refused. The network has sought an array of records as it has sought to refute the damages claim, but Trump and Jackson have made “a number of inappropriate and inapplicable objections” to the document requests.
According to CBS, in certain instances Trump and Jackson have claimed of executive privilege, even though “the Requests do not relate to events when President Trump was in office or even after he was re-elected.” Jackson also claimed “congressional privilege,” but the documents sought to not relate to his role as a legislator. Trump and Jackson also are objecting to the disclosure of their locations on the dates of the Face the Nation and 60 Minutes broadcasts, and cited that such information would “breach the preservation of national security.”
CBS’ legal team did note that there have been “two productive meet-and-confers” to try to resolve the discovery disputes, but they filed the motion to compel the production of documents so as to not waive any rights in light of a court deadline.
According to the network’s legal team, they served 130 requests on Trump and Jackson. The president and the congressman, meanwhile, made 332 requests for documents, and the network “timely responded” on March 17, according to the CBS legal team.
