60 Minutes legend Lesley Stahl delivered a scathing report on President Donald Trump’s federal election-meddling efforts just a week after an alleged editorial dust-up with her MAGA-curious boss, Bari Weiss.
Stahl, 84, dove deep into how the Trump administration has attempted to undermine the reliability of elections, speaking with state and local officials about their unprecedented actions regarding election security on 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 facility.
“In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI,” Barrett, a Democrat, told Stahl on 60 Minutes.
In January, FBI officials stormed the Fulton County election office and seized hundreds of boxes containing ballots and voter rolls 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 that to this day, she still has no idea where they went.
“I think it was all part of this concerted effort that’s happening nationwide to undermine faith in elections,” she said.
Stahl also spoke with Utah Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, who agreed that the level of federal interference in elections was unheard of.
“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external. Non-state actors, cybersecurity threats, and other things,” she said. “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”
Henderson described how Trump’s Justice Department demanded their “statewide voter registration list,” which includes voters’ sensitive personal information.
“They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: Social Security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” she said, noting that DOJ officials didn’t explain why they needed the confidential data.
Henderson dismissed the government’s claim that noncitizen voting was a major problem, saying she found only 52 cases among the over 2 million votes cast in Utah. Stahl said that the figure calculated out to two-thousandths of 1 percent.
The Utah Republican said the DOJ notified her last month that she was officially “under investigation,” but that she wouldn’t back down even despite the federal pressure.
“I’m just doing my job,” she told Stahl. “I have to tell myself it doesn’t matter what the consequences are, if—as long as I feel like I’m doing what’s right.”
Henderson continued, “I think this is an important thing for me to do—holding these guardrails, holding the line. Someone has to.”
Stahl then turned her attention to Trump.
“In America, elections are local. They’re run by towns and counties and states. It’s all in Article 1 of the Constitution. Congress makes laws regulating elections,” she explained. “But the president doesn’t have a role in running them. That hasn’t stopped Mr. Trump from signing two executive orders trying to create new federal voting rules.”
She also highlighted just how frequently Trump, 80, has belabored his claims of election fraud in the 2020 election.
“In the 21 months of President Trump’s second term, he has said, in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted more than 150 times,” Stahl said.
Speaking with the DOJ’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, Stahl pressed the Trump appointee on whether the president would go so far as to station federal ICE agents to polling locations.
“There is no plan to do that,” Dhillon, 57, answered, adding that the idea that Trump would challenge the midterm results was just “paranoia.”
“I don’t know what is going to happen, but I can tell you that absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the 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 fervent supporter of Israel and critic of media coverage in Gaza, inserted herself repeatedly into the editorial process behind the report and became “very, very hands-on.”
Weiss and her deputy, managing editor Charles Forelle, were even thinking of shelving the report for a later date, but Stahl wasn’t having it.
Stahl and Weiss then engaged in an “aggressive back-and-forth,” which resulted in the story coming to air last Sunday.
The 60 Minutes veteran, however, privately discussed quitting, according to Status.
“This is a ludicrous, twisted narrative. All ‘60 Minutes’ pieces go through a famously rigorous editorial process—which includes edits from editors. This piece 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.
