‘Drowsy’ Joe Biden had to be prodded to answer questions in 2023 ‘60 Minutes’ interview, claims report
WASHINGTON, DC: The queen of the Redstone media empire, Shari Redstone, is finally shedding light on why she told CBS to cough up $16 million to make President Donald Trump’s blockbuster lawsuit disappear.
According to her, a trial could’ve pulled back the curtain on how '60 Minutes' massaged Joe Biden’s 2023 sit-down, where the former president reportedly “seemed drowsy and had to be prodded to answer.”
Joe Biden’s nap time gets cut
Viewers never saw that side of the interview. On air, Joe Biden looked alert and put-together, while interviewer Scott Pelley went out of his way to excuse his sluggishness, saying the then-commander-in-chief was just “tired” after “confronting so much peril.” Pelley even added that the fatigue had triggered Biden’s “lifelong stutter creeping back in.”
The problem was that the raw footage, according to Redstone, painted a different picture.
Notably, this wasn’t long after Biden’s chat with Special Counsel Robert Hur, who later wrote that Biden was so forgetful he couldn’t be prosecuted for mishandling classified documents because a jury would feel sorry for him.
Donald Trump’s $20 billion gambit
President Donald Trump had filed a $20 billion lawsuit claiming CBS cooked the edits in Kamala Harris’ October 2024 '60 Minutes' interview to cover up a “word salad” and make her sound sharper than she was. The case was filed in a Texas district with just one judge, Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk, who wasn’t buying CBS’s attempts to toss the suit or ship it off to New York.
By July 1, CBS waved the white flag with a $16 million settlement. The timing was key. Paramount’s $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media got the green light from the FCC just weeks before. Democrats and lefty journos screamed bribery, saying it looked like CBS was paying off Trump to smooth the merger.
But the New York Times just dropped a long profile that admitted what Redstone’s been hinting at all along. Trump’s case, widely denounced as “baseless” and “laughable” by the establishment media, was not so “black-and-white" after all.
Shari Redstone’s discovery fears
Shari Redstone told the Times she settled because she didn’t want discovery digging into CBS’s '60 Minutes' editing choices. The trial was set for September 2026, giving Trump’s team two whole years to go spelunking inside CBS News. It would have been a nightmare scenario that could’ve been deeply embarrassing for the network, she said.
Furthermore, she feared Trump’s lawyers would spotlight Biden’s October 2023 interview, which CBS staffers admitted to her had to be patched up because the president “seemed drowsy and had to be prodded to answer.” Those moments were cut.
Redstone believed that would hand Trump proof of a pattern: Democrats like Biden and Harris being edited to look more coherent and commanding than they were.
Still, she insisted, “the decision to settle was never as black-and-white as people assumed.”
CBS pushback and the ‘fateful’ Kamala Harris tape
Not everyone at CBS is backing her up. One unnamed staffer who saw the raw Biden tape said the former president “gave some typically circuitous answers, but he never had to be prodded.”
On the other hand, ex-CBS reporter Catherine Herridge pushed back in May, telling the Daily Mail that because of all the cuts in Biden’s interview, “it should be examined to determine whether CBS deceptively edited it.”
According to the Times, CBS’s refusal to release the full Harris transcript, even though CEO George Cheeks thought they had “nothing to hide," was ultimately the “fateful” move that pushed Trump into suing.
