Paramount Global is reportedly in talks to settle President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over CBS News’s deceptively edited Kamala Harris interview that aired on 60 Minutes a month prior the November 5 election.
Executives at Paramount, which is the parent company of CBS, are in talks to bring the legal battle to a close, though no dollar figures have been made public, according to multiple reports. The New York Times was the first to report the negotiations.
Any potential agreement would represent another win for President Trump in his multi-prong battles with the establishment news media. He recently received a more-than-$15 million settlement from Disney’s ABC in his defamation suit involving host George Stephanopoulos.
President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS alleges 60 Minutes engaged in election interference when it edited the Kamala Harris interview to make the former vice president appear more articulate than she was on the subject of Israel and the war in Gaza.
60 Minutes was caught red-handed when a teaser clip for the interview was posted to social media featuring Harris’ word-salad response to correspondent Bill Whitaker’s question.
When the interview finally aired on October 7, her response was significantly different, with the network appearing to have re-arranged what she said to make her sound more coherent.
Trump’s suit alleges CBS engaged in “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference through malicious, deceptive, and substantial news distortion calculated to confuse, deceive, and mislead the public.”
CBS has denied the allegations.
The settlement talks come at a pivotal moment for Paramount, with controlling shareholder Shari Redstone looking to finalize a sale of the company to David Ellison’s Skydance.
Any such sale would need approval from the federal government.
Shari Redstone strongly supports the effort to settle the suit, two unnamed sources told the Times.
Staffers at CBS are reportedly apoplectic over the negotiations with Trump’s legal team.
“Trump’s lawsuit was a joke, but if we settle, we become the laughingstock,” an unnamed CBS correspondent told CNN’s Brian Stelter.
