In a major victory for President Trump, Paramount executives are discussing a settlement after the president hit the company with a major lawsuit over their alleged editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris that President Trump believes interfered with the 2024 election.
For context, press accounts confirmed that during an April 18, 2025, meeting, the Paramount board decided that it would be favorable to settle the case with President Trump, reportedly agreeing to pay out an undisclosed sum of money to end the president’s lawsuit, which demanded $20 billion from Paramount for defamation.
Following confirmation that a settlement was imminent, 60 Minutes ran a decidedly anti-Trump segment on May 4, 2025, despite the fact that Paramount was actively attempting to negotiate with the president. In the segment, host Scott Pelley compared President Trump’s executive orders to the behavior of a “mob boss.”
Furthermore, the controversial segment aired after the show’s executive producer, Bill Owens, resigned on April 22, 2025, saying in a memo that “it has…become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it.” Owens added that under Paramount’s leadership, he felt it was impossible to “make independent decisions based on what was right for 60 Minutes, right for the audience.”
After Owens’ resignation, President Trump weighed in on the lawsuit in an April 30, 2025, Truth Social post that provided further background on his motivation for suing the company, saying that Paramount had “cheated and defrauded the American people at levels never seen before in the political arena.”
Moving on, President Trump explained that he felt that Paramount had protected Kamala Harris by editing an interview when she gave an embarrassing response. He wrote, “Kamala Harris, during early voting and immediately before election day, was asked a question, and gave an answer that was so bad and incompetent that it would have cost her many of the votes that she ended up getting.” President Trump added that “60 Minutes and its corporate parents” had protected Harris from embarrassment when they “removed and deleted Kamala’s answer, every word of it, and replaced it with a response that she gave later to an entirely different question.”
Next, President Trump granted that the edited version of the interview with Harris was “not good, but it didn’t show gross incompetence like the one that was removed by 60 Minutes.” He then added, “In other words, 60 Minutes perpetrated a giant FRAUD against the American people, Federal Elections Commission, and the Federal Communications System.”
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Concluding his post, which got over 26,000 likes, President Trump asserted that the editing of the interview was “one of the most egregious illegalities in broadcast history,” adding, “Nothing like this, the illegal creation of an answer for a presidential candidate, has ever been done before, they have to pay a price for it, and the [New York] Times should also be on the hook for their likely unlawful behavior.”
Watch coverage of the potential settlement:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video