Tonight in Your Rights: 'Falsehoods and bias'

Why Scott Pelley's charge against CBS News leadership is verifiably true. Also: Kilmar Abrego Garcia gets unintended help from the DHS Secretary.

Bari Weiss (Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press)

Here are two of this newsletter’s convictions:

Trust comes from the presentation of the facts and evidence, and information empowers.

Three of the formerly top “60 Minutes” correspondents have made the same unsettling claim about CBS News leadership: They have told journalists to insert false and biased statements in their reporting.

On the eve of his firing on Wednesday, Scott Pelley released a statement claiming: “For my part, management has instructed me to insert falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refused them.”

His erstwhile colleague Cecilia Vega said late last month: “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.”

Sharyn Alfonsi, the other ousted correspondent making this claim, put it more diplomatically that CBS leadership tried to “sanitize factually accurate reporting.”

Collectively, they bring roughly a century of experience and credibility in hard news-gathering, but the public doesn’t need to take their word for it.

Possible Action Item:

More than 1,000 writers, directors, actors and journalists have signed an open letter opposing Paramount’s deal to acquire Warner Bros. Their open letter can be found here.

When CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss made the last-minute decision to hold a “60 Minutes” segment on the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, the memo documenting the reasons for that decision showed a real-time demand to insert falsehoods and bias. In the memo, Weiss mischaracterized the Trump Justice Department’s legal rationale for targeting immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act.

“The admin has argued in court that detainees are entitled to ‘judicial review’ — and we should explain this, with a voice arguing that Trump is exceeding authority under the relevant statute, and another arguing that he’s operating within the bounds of his authority,” she wrote.

Weiss had it exactly backwards: The Trump Justice Department argued that no judicial review was available under the Alien Enemies Act, attempting to strip hundreds of men spirited out of the United States without due process of an opportunity to fight its illegal actions in court.

The both-sides presentation that Weiss advocated was a misleading pantomime of fairness. The Supreme Court already settled the issue, rejecting the federal government’s position by a 9-0 margin. Weiss instructed “60 Minutes” correspondents to replace accurate reporting with Trump-friendly spin. That isn’t a “She said, they said.” It’s a matter of public record.

Most charitably, Weiss may have been deceived by the false spin she demanded to insert into the broadcast, but the view from inside the network is more damning.

During the clash that got him fired, Pelley said that CBS owner David Ellison sent Weiss to “murder” a program that Trump hates, even if it’s the most profitable, respected, and highest rated newsmagazine on television. Three highly respected, and now ousted, correspondents indicate that CBS management’s attempts to skew and censor the news have been systematic, and Pelley said that Weiss lied to her staff as recently as today.

In a morning editorial call, Weiss reportedly told “60 Minutes” staff that the network tried to “find a way back” with Pelley, but he “chose” a different path. In Pelley’s account of the meeting, the network’s president Tom Cibrowski raised the prospect of “firing” him during the first 15 seconds. The executives were “abrupt, dismissive and uninterested in dialogue.”

“I am pained that the staff of CBS News was misled in the Wednesday morning conference call,” Pelley said. “These executives cannot gain the trust of staff with lies. This is antithetical to everything we stand for and reveals contempt for what journalists do.”

There is room for hope: The pro-Trump spin that Weiss wanted to run on the Alien Enemies Act never aired in the final “60 Minutes” segment on CECOT, suggesting that staff pushed back successfully. I agree with some of the network’s defenders that CBS News continues to produce tough reporting by journalists with integrity every day.

That so many of the network’s stalwarts are sounding the alarm for maximum impact shows an attempt to defend what they built: How many purges can take place before the next management-endorsed lie actually airs?

The CECOT saga relates to the first item on tonight’s legal roundup: a new wrinkle in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

DHS Secretary Mullin’s misstep?

During Tuesday’s Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said that he would be “happy” to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica.

The problem with that statement was that the Trump administration has spent months telling a federal judge that Costa Rica would have been an unacceptable destination, demanding permission to send Abrego to Liberia instead.

Abrego’s legal term flagged the disconnect to a federal judge on Wednesday.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., laid the trap for Mullin in an exchange, setting up his questioning with historical background.

“I’d like you to look into this because essentially what the administration did was say to him when he was returned to the United States after being wrongfully deported to El Salvador, and the administration admitted it wrongfully deported him, after he was returned, they leveled new criminal charges against him,” Van Hollen noted. “And they said to him, if you plead guilty to these criminal charges, we’ll send you to Costa Rica, and if you don’t, we’ll send you to Liberia. Well, he said I’m not going to plead guilty to these charges, and it turns out, just a short time ago, a federal judge determined that the administration had engaged in a vindictive prosecution against him. And so my question now is, will you, the administration, agree to have him removed to Costa Rica rather than engaging in punishing him for pursuing his constitutional rights?”

At first, Mullin deflected the question, but Van Hollen caught Mullin off-guard when he noted that Costa Rica agreed to accept Abrego.

“Great,” replied Mullin, “if he’s willing to do that, we’ll be happy to send him.”

Abrego’s attorneys flagged the exchange in a filing to U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who is deciding whether the government’s quest to send Abrego to Liberia is vindictive.

Read that filing here.

SPLC: Take two?

The Trump Justice Department obtained a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday.

By Wednesday, the maneuver may already be backfiring, and the SPLC wants a judge to investigate whether to sanction prosecutors with how they rolled out the new indictment.

The superseding indictment — which, as the name suggests, replaces the original — contains no new charges or defendants, but it’s roughly seven pages longer than the original, rattling off unproven allegations in thicker detail for public consumption.

The SPLC’s attorneys argue that prosecutors proved that was the point by sending a draft of the new document to the press before it was publicly filed and docketed. The storied civil rights group argues that this violates grand jury secrecy, raising the question about whether the government should face sanctions.

“In decades of collective practice, including serving as prosecutors at DOJ, none of the SPLC’s counsel has ever seen anything remotely like what DOJ did last night—distributing what turned out not to be the actual superseding indictment returned by the grand jury and docketed today, but one that has no indication of its finality, in native Word that could be edited and reposted, and before the actual returned charges were unsealed, to a group of journalists,” the SPLC’s attorney Abbe Lowell wrote. “This conduct violates the letter and spirit of the federal rules, DOJ’s own policies, and even common-sense notions of professionalism to abide by the normal court procedure and treat those accused of wrongdoing fairly.”

A federal magistrate recently reminded prosecutors of their obligations to protect SPLC’s right to a fair trial after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was forced to correct a false statement that he made to Fox’s Laura Ingraham.

“We must rediscover the old values of our profession,” U.S. Magistrate Kelly Fitzgerald Pate wrote at the time.

The SPLC says that the government “seems not to have taken this admonition to heart.”

The judge set the SPLC’s arraignment on the superseding indictment for June 16.

Read its filing here.

In other news — and a suggested read

On Tuesday, an intermediate appellate court in New York upheld a $4.3 million judgment against Wayne LaPierre that barred the former National Rifle Association chief from holding any role as an officer or director of the group for a decade.

• It reinforced a key victory by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who filed the case accusing the NRA leadership of unlawfully mismanaging millions of donor dollars.

• “Wayne LaPierre and other senior NRA leaders broke the law by funneling millions of dollars in lavish perks to themselves and their families,” James said in a statement. “After we successfully proved our case to a jury, LaPierre was ordered to pay $4.3 million and was barred from serving as an NRA officer or director for a decade. This decision upholds the jury’s verdict and is another victory in our efforts to ensure that LaPierre is held accountable for his illegal self-dealing.”

• The Trump Justice Department sought to prosecute James for suing the NRA, characterizing the successful case as a violation of the gun group’s civil rights. But a federal judge found that the ex-Trump lawyer turned first-time prosecutor behind the probe, John Sarcone, was unlawfully appointed.

During primary elections on Tuesday, the Supreme Court reinstated gerrymandered maps in Alabama repeatedly found to have been intentionally racially discriminatory.

• The maps erase one of the state’s two Black opportunity districts.

• The Supreme Court previously affirmed an Alabama court’s findings of racial discrimination, but the 6-3 conservative supermajority signed off on the maps this time.

• When gutting the vestiges of the Voting Rights Act in the Callais decision, Justice Samuel Alito claimed that he had only updated the test for finding racial discrimination in redistricting. In the wake of the latest ruling, some legal observers said that the Roberts Court removed the fig leaf, revealing that the landmark civil rights law is truly dead.

Here’s how a recent CNN editorial puts it:

“The high court’s action demonstrated the truth that the nation’s protections for voting rights have not merely been “updated,” as Justice Samuel Alito insisted in late April.

They have been jettisoned.”

In its wake, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that her conservative colleagues have left electoral chaos in Alabama.

“Weeks ago, I warned that vacating the District Court’s injunction in these cases would ‘unleash chaos and . . . confuse voters.’ … Nevertheless, the Court forged ahead. Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought. Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos. Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent.”

Here is the full ruling and dissent.

Finally, in case you missed it, a Wisconsin-based federal judge vigorously questioned the legal basis behind the conviction of former Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan on Wednesday morning.

Catch up on the live coverage made possible by All Rise News subscribers here.