Donald Trump Praises The New Ellison CBS Ownership & Bari Weiss In Unaired Clip From Wide-Ranging ’60 Minutes’ Interview

Donald Trump‘s wide-ranging 60 Minutes interview did not include one moment, when he praised the new owners of CBS-parent Paramount and the “great new leader” put in charge of the news division. Bari Weiss.

“I see good things happening in the news,” Trump said. “I really do. And I think one of the best things to happen is this show and new ownership, CBS and new ownership. I think it’s the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.”

Of course, he also talked about the $16 million payout that the previous owners of Paramount made to settle Trump’s dubious lawsuit against CBS, over the way that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris last year. That settlement was widely seen as a way to remove a hurdle to obtaining the administration’s regulatory approval for Skydance’s purchase of Paramount, something that happened a couple of weeks later.

That has been followed by a series of moves that have been seen as efforts to shift CBS News rightward, and perhaps appease the White House. That has included the hiring of an ombudsman from a rightward think tank, and then the tapping of Bari Weiss, founder of the center right opinion site Free Press, as the editor in chief of the news division.

Trump said, “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person. But 60 Minutes was forced to pay me– a lot of money because they took her answer out that was so bad, it was election-changing, two nights before the election. 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.”

Although Trump’s comments on CBS News and Weiss didn’t air during the broadcast, Norah O’Donnell, who conducted the interview, told viewers of the Paramount settlement, but noted that it “did not include an apology or an admission of wrong doing.”

Weiss’ hire has put a new level of scrutiny on the news division, and O’Donnell’s interview with Trump is likely to be picked apart, for what was left in and what was left out, and for questions asked and those not addressed. O’Donnell pressed him on issues like Venezuela and China, as well as his recent pardon of the founder of the crypto marketplace Binance, Changpeng Zhao.

“I don’t know who he is,” Trump said of the man he pardoned.

She also pressed him on the ICE raids that have seen so many social media videos of masked agents hauling off parents in front of their children.

Less covered on the broadcast was what is likely to be a major issue of Tuesday’s off-year elections: The high cost of living, as inflation has gone up, not down, this year.

At least in the broadcast portion, there were no major blowups, as there was when Trump last sat down with the show, in 2020 with Lesley Stahl.

The irony, of course, is that Trump’s CBS sit down was heavily edited, given that it lasted 73 minutes but only about 28 minutes aired. When it settled with Trump, the network said that the show would also publish the unedited transcript of complete interviews with presidential candidates, which it did in the president’s case.

More to come.