Tonight, in “We’ll take whatever iotas of backbone we can get” news: Lawyers for CBS News have started lobbing some legal counter threats at Donald Trump in his ongoing lawsuit against 60 Minutes. The company’s legal team issued legal paperwork on Tuesday stating that, if the case is forced into the discovery phase, the Paramount-owned organization will start digging through and publicizing Trump’s own financials, including his 2024 presidential campaign, the Trump Media & Technology Group and Truth Social, and the godawful meme coin he launched right before being inaugurated for a second time.
Given that Trump’s various media lawsuits—including already-settled cases with Disney and Facebook, who shelled out millions to make the bullying stop—were largely launched as a quick, cheap, and unpleasantly successful way to box the media’s ears and get them in line, the sight of anybody actually daring to fight back against one of these things is kind of surprising. But that’s the gist of a recent proposed discovery schedule from the joint legal team of CBS and Paramount Global, which are staring down the barrel of a $20 billion suit from Trump (more than the total value of the entire Paramount organization, by the by) over allegations that 60 Minutes edited an interview with Kamala Harris to try to swing the 2024 election in her direction. Basically, the filing says, if Trump is saying that these edits did $20 billion in damage to Trump and his companies (which is the legal pretext he’s using for the suits, citing various consumer protection and false advertisement laws) then CBS should get to look through those details themselves to verify it.
We’re a bit too cynical to think that, even if CBS’ lawyers managed to dig something really gnarly out of Trump’s records, it’d have any major effect on American politics. (The pitfalls of living in an increasingly post-shame society.) But still: Nobody likes having the legal system thumb its way through their balance sheets, or put what it finds there in legal filings that are then publicly available for everybody to read. Even if Paramount is just maneuvering to get Trump and the FCC off its ass as it tries to move forward with a planned merger with Skydance Media, or trying to get the final settlement amount down, or even just trying to give some token resistance so news professionals at 60 Minutes and the rest of CBS News don’t feel entirely left to the wolves, well: It’s still more than anybody else seems to have done in the face of these suits.
[via Deadline]
