This 35-year veteran of the news magazine has put Trump’s electoral obsession under the microscope.
60 minutes Legend Lesley Stahl delivered a scathing report on President Donald Trump’s federal election interference efforts, just one week after an alleged editorial spat with her nosy MAGA boss Bari Weiss.
Stahl, 84, delved deeper into how the Trump administration attempted to undermine the reliability of the election, speaking to state and local officials about their unprecedented actions regarding election security during Sunday night’s episode.
The 35-year veteran correspondent first spoke with Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett about the administration’s January FBI raid on a local Georgia election center.
“I never in my wildest dreams imagined we would be raided by the FBI,” Barrett, a Democrat, told Stahl. 60 minutes.
Barrett recounted how she rushed to the warehouse to find dozens of armed FBI agents raiding the facility.
In January, FBI officials stormed the Fulton County elections office and seized hundreds of boxes containing ballots and voter lists from the 2020 presidential election.
Barrett described how dozens of federal agents, wearing vests and carrying guns, arrived at the warehouse with a criminal search warrant. She told Stahl she had no choice but to let them seize the ballots they were looking for and to this day she still has no idea where they went.
Stahl’s report put Trump’s attempts to undermine the reliability of the election in its crosshairs.
“I think this is all part of this concerted effort that’s happening nationwide to undermine confidence in elections,” she said.
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Stahl also spoke with Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, who acknowledged that the level of federal interference in the election was unprecedented.
Henderson revealed that the DOJ was investigating his refusal to provide voter information.
The Salt Lake Tribune/The Salt Lake Tribune via Getty
“In the last two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external. Non-state actors, cybersecurity threats and others,” she said. “But now we also face threats from our own government.”
Henderson described how Trump’s Justice Department demanded his “statewide voter registration list,” which includes voters’ sensitive personal information.
“They wanted things that the law generally requires us to keep confidential: Social Security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” she said, noting that DOJ officials did not explain why they needed confidential data.
Henderson rejected the government’s assertion that non-citizen voting was a major problem, saying she found only 52 cases among more than 2 million ballots cast in Utah. Stahl said the figure was two thousandths of one percent.
The Utah Republican said the DOJ informed her last month that she was officially “under investigation” but that she would not back down, even despite federal pressure.
“I’m just doing my job,” she told Stahl. “I have to tell myself that the consequences don’t matter, as long as I feel like I’m doing the right thing.”
Henderson continued: “I think that’s an important thing for me to do: hold those guardrails, hold the line. Someone has to do it.”
Stahl then turned his attention to Trump.
Henderson said she had to stand up for what she believed was right.
“In America, elections are local. They are run by cities, counties and states. It’s all written in Article 1 of the Constitution. Congress passes laws governing elections,” she explained. “But the president has no role in their management. That did not stop Mr. Trump from signing two executive orders aimed at creating new voting rules.
She also highlighted how often Trump, 80, has pressed his claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
“Over the 21 months of President Trump’s second term, he said, in no uncertain terms, that voting could not be trusted more than 150 times,” Stahl said.
Speaking to Justice Department Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, Stahl asked the Trump appointee if the president would go so far as to send federal ICE agents to polling places.
Dhillon claimed there are “thousands” of non-citizen voting cases that the DOJ is “looking into.”
“There are no plans to do that,” Dhillon, 57, responded, adding that the idea that Trump would challenge the midterm results was just “paranoia.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I can tell you that absent some shocking and unexpected eventuality, there should be no interruption in the usual process of counting and certifying results in the states,” she told Stahl.
Stahl’s in-depth report on Trump comes just a week after a claim that she had a heated debate with CBS News editor-in-chief Weiss over a 60 minutes segment on violent Israeli settlers.
Insiders revealed to Status that Weiss, a staunch supporter of Israel and critic of media coverage in Gaza, repeatedly inserted herself into the editorial process behind the report and became “very, very involved.”
Weiss and his deputy, editor-in-chief Charles Forelle, even considered postponing the report to a later date, but Stahl would not accept this.
Stahl and Weiss then engaged in an “aggressive back-and-forth,” which resulted in the story airing last Sunday.
THE 60 minutes The veteran, however, has privately discussed his departure, according to Status.
“This is a ridiculous and twisted story. All ’60 Minutes’ stories go through a rigorous editorial process, which includes edits by editors. This story received far fewer edits than most,” a CBS spokesperson said of the report at the time.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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