Key Takeaways from the Suppressed 60 Minutes Story on CECOT

What Team Trump Has Done–and the Roberts Court Has Allowed–Is Depraved

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By Lisa Graves

Last night Canadians shared the segment on the notorious prison in El Salvador, called CECOT, that Trump apologist Bari Weiss blocked from Sunday’s episode of 60 Minutes. That segment by investigative journalist Sharyn Alfonsi reveals some real evil. Its depravity is compounded by Paramount Skydance whose stooge sought to deep-six it.

That stooge is Weiss, of course, who used the Trump administration’s refusal to comment on camera as the pretext for keeping 60 Minutes from airing the bombshell report. That segment bursts the bubble of the administration’s propaganda about the men sent to CECOT. Such an airing would embarrass any reasonable person, but perhaps not the president who greenlit Skydance to take over Paramount, which owns CBS.

Here are some key takeaways from the 60 Minutes segment she sought to suppress, along with my views of what should happen next, if things were not so corrupted.

CBS’s New Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss should be fired. The crisis she caused for the crown jewel of CBS News underscores why she should never have been given such a role in the first place. She was so tiresome as a Trumpy columnist for the New York Times. She is plainly at CBS to serve Trump and his propaganda, and she did that job. It’s not the job she should have at any actually independent news outlet. Podcaster Mike Ellis called what she did “Weisswashing” but, like the Streisand Effect, her actions have had the opposite consequence: the segment has gone viral and reached far more people than if it had aired as planned, as MuellerSheWrote noted.

The segment Weiss tried to suppress in alignment with her benefactors is called “Inside CECOT.” It reveals that the more than 200 immigrants from Venezuela who were sent to a cruel and inhumane prison for terrorists in El Salvador were not all members of the Tren de Aragua gang as the Trump administration claimed. In some ways, we already knew it was a lie, but now there are faces and voices to help people understand how big that lie was and its path of destruction. The investigation by the 60 Minutes team documents some of their real backgrounds and describes how they were seriously harmed while at CECOT, including one young man seized while awaiting a visa.

The Trump team repeatedly smeared these men without disclosing their names to the public and without proof that they had committed any terroristic or drug crimes. The 60 Minutes crew also details the “point system” Trump’s agents used to designate Venezuelans as gang members and supposed terrorists who were sent by Venezuela to the U.S., claims too flimsy to pass muster if there had been any individual hearings before an independent tribunal. The points process comes across as stupidly and deeply flawed, including the slipshod way innocent tattoos were used to assign guilt, but the poor quality of the analysis is definitely on brand for Trump’s first year back.

Weiss apparently claimed the story could not air because the Trump administration refused to comment on camera. However, as Alfonsi noted, if that excuse is tolerated it effectively hands Trump a “kill switch” to kill any story he dislikes. Just last night, he was claiming yet again that the New York Times is an enemy for writing things he dislikes. And, we know Trump likes a kill switch: it is well documented that he relied on David Pecker at the National Enquirer to catch and kill stories about him that he didn’t like.

If CBS News had any independence left, Weiss would be fired.

But the parent company of the network that was once the home of venerable journalists like Walter Cronkite, Ed Bradley, and Mike Wallace sold its soul when Paramount settled a risible claim by Trump over the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his rival, Kamala Harris, during the 2024 election. That capitulation led to the resignation of the show’s long-time Executive Producer, Bill Owens, who left in response to (wait for it) pressure from Paramount to require Trump administration approval of stories, or to not offend him, as it sought to merge with Skydance. Paramount settled Trump’s ridiculous $20 billion lawsuit for pennies on the dollar via a $16 million payout to Trump’s presidential library, but the real cost was much pricier. The deal cast Trump’s shadow over CBS, which catapulted Weiss into the driver’s seat and precipitated the station’s cancellation of Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a widely popular Trump critic. It also cleared the way for a huge deal: wiping away any potential FCC or FTC objections that could stop billionaire Larry Ellison from merging Paramount with Skydance.

Ellison’s trust owns more than 75% of the shares and equity in the new mega-firm, which is valued at $28 billion, with $8 billion in annual revenue. Not only is Larry Ellison the controlling shareholder, his son, David, is the CEO. So there are no outside shareholders with the power to force the Ellisons to fire Weiss for protecting Trump.

This summer three U.S. Senators–Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Widen–demanded answers from Larry Ellison about the sweetheart settlement, along with what Trump has claimed to be $20 million in ads aligned with his causes. The Senators called the secret deal a potential “back-door” around anti-bribery rules; Ellison has denied any impropriety. Ellison, whose net worth stemming from his work at Oracle is between $250 billion and $400 billion, is a big Trump fan. Ellison was even on a call after the 2020 election about how to undermine the results and keep Trump in power.

That relationship helped Ellison, who is one of the six richest men in the world, get a piece of TikTok, which Trump had targeted for U.S. control, just last week. Ellison is now angling to take over Warner Brothers with an eye toward blunting CNN’s critical reporting on Trump. Merging Warner Brothers with Skydance/Paramount would require approval of the long-independent Federal Trade Commission (the FTC). That is one of the agencies Trump has sought to take over by firing Rebecca Slaughter, despite a statute barring removal of commissioners without just cause. Last month, the Roberts Court held oral arguments as it considers allowing Trump to do just that: fire independent commissioners at the FTC, despite nearly 100 years of legal precedents since a case called Humphrey’s Executor barring such firings, specifically at the FTC. As Senator Whitehouse recently detailed on Legal AF with Michael Popok and me, allowing the FTC to be politicized as Trump seeks is a recipe for rampant corruption.

The Roberts Court already stayed an order from the District Court that would have temporarily blocked Trump from removing Slaughter. And John Roberts is on his side. Roberts already wrote an opinion in the Seila Law case when Trump was president in 2020 signaling his eagerness to overturn Humphrey’s Executor, which every president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has followed. It is 100% likely that Roberts will use Slaughter’s case to further help Trump consolidate presidential power under the guise of the so-called “unitary executive theory.” That rationale is a radical expansion of executive power promoted by both Project 2025 and Leonard Leo, who helped Roberts get confirmed to the Supreme Court, as I detail in my new book, Without Precedent.

Another takeaway from the 60 Minutes segment on CECOT? Kristi Noem should also be impeached. The 60 Minutes piece–which streamed on the Canadian network called Global News, a media company not owned by the Ellison family–revealed additional new reasons why Trump’s Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, should be impeached.

Numerous claims Noem made about the men handed off to CECOT have been proven to be false, and the process she authorized for choosing them is beyond faulty. As the 60 Minutes piece makes clear, Noem also participated in a photo-op staged to feature bare-chested men with Tren de Aragua gang tattoos who were not the men the U.S. deported. They were not the Venezuelans the U.S. flew to CECOT to be housed with convicted El Salvadoran prisoners. Noem went to CECOT as part of a massive propaganda campaign to claim the men she removed were violent, tattooed gangsters. The money shot was her posing in front of them like human wallpaper, while sporting a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch valued at nearly $50,000. (A separate investigation by ProPublica uncovered that a firm closely tied to her got a piece of $220 million in new advertising contracts. Senators have called for a probe of those dealings, too.)

But, due to 60 Minutes and the Canadians who shared the segment, we know that the photo of Noem posing at CECOT seen round the world was not of those Venezuelans.

Aside from the 60 Minutes investigation, just last month we got confirmation that it was Noem who ordered the plane to take the Venezuelans to CECOT despite a court order halting the flights. That is, Noem purposely violated the order of a federal court and has yet to pay any consequence for that defiance of the law. Would Trump pardon her? Probably. Should doing so be legal, no, but again we can thank John Roberts for trying to insulate Trump from any accountability in any way for his morally bankrupt pardons.

Earlier this year, federal judge Justin Boasberg found probable cause to hold the administration in contempt for willfully disobeying his order. Despite the reality that the Trump team did so, Trumplicans in the Senate approved the confirmation of Emil Bove to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit even though the then-Justice Department official (and former Trump criminal defense attorney) had told others at the Department to ignore court orders and just tell the courts “fuck you.” He denied this, but the evidence that he did so is strong. Judge Bove recently attended Trump’s partisan political rally in Pennsylvania; Fix the Court filed an ethics complaint against him.

What led to those men being sent to CECOT without any independent review was aided this spring when the Roberts Court overturned a lower court order that had blocked Trump from using the “Alien Enemies Act,” which expressly requires a war or invasion as a predicate to its invocation. There has been no such invasion, and it is only in recent months that Trump has been claiming to be at war with Venezuela to justify missile strikes targeting men in small fishing boats off the coast for supposedly being drug dealers, which is not a capital offense let alone cause for summary execution. (Trump recently escalated those claims by declaring that fentanyl is a Weapon of Mass Destruction to justify a blockade of Venezuela oil tankers and provoke a war. Meanwhile, one of Trump’s first pardons this year was for Ross Ulbricht who had been sentenced to life in prison for his role using the dark web to facilitate the sale of an array of illegal drugs, including fentanyl, even though he never sold it himself.)

Earlier this year, the five men Republican presidents appointed to the Supreme Court asserted–in an anonymous opinion–that lower courts like Judge Boasberg could not bar the mass deportations where the administration was invoking the Alien Enemies Act. That ruling specified that people who are detained could file a habeas petition, even though the government opposes any habeas petitions by people outside the United States or in the custody of another government.

The four women appointed to the Supreme Court strongly dissented from this aberrational ruling deferring to Trump. Among other things, they noted that the majority allowed the deportations of Venezuelans to proceed “without mention of the grave harm Plaintiffs will face if they are erroneously removed to El Salvador or regard for the Government’s attempts to subvert the judicial process throughout this litigation.”

The 60 Minutes segment detailed some of those grave harms. Alfonsi interviewed men who described the deplorable conditions of their confinement: torture and repeated rapes by CECOT prison guards–along with disgustingly unsanitary drinking water for prisoners and the cruelty of 24-hour lighting, which violates international law. 60 Minutes was able to interview several of the men who were released from CECOT as part of a little-publicized prisoner swap the Trump administration cut to trade them for Americans held in Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to pursue the one immigrant sent to CECOT who was returned to the U.S. and who just this month was able to stay with his wife and family while on bond awaiting trial: Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

The reality is they should all be fired. None of this should have been allowed to unfold. Why stop at Weiss and Noem? Trump should be fired, though he is the lamest of ducks while he hawks 2028 hats for a campaign for an illegal third term. In the ideal world, the members of the Roberts Court who are making up the rules for him should be fired, too. But no one will be held accountable by a Trump-controlled Congress.

The stench of this impunity reaches far and wide, with Roberts orchestrating immunity for Trump and Trump having survived two impeachment trials due to the cowardice of his legislative allies. Trumplicans in the Senate also voted to confirm puppy killers like Kristi Noem and people killers like RFK, Jr., whose anti-vaccine mania has led to deaths and pestilence. That’s not all: the Roberts Court also allowed the Trump administration to withhold billions of foreign aid funding administered by USAID, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, so far. That is just the tip of the iceberg of destruction Trump has unleashed with an assist from Republicans in Congress and on the Court.

Our nation desperately needs a robust check on the abusive policies Trump is pursuing, along with his efforts to get the major media outlets into the hands of his billionaire buddies, like Ellison. We need to send people to Congress who will stand up to Trump and to the reckless Roberts Court. All I want for Christmas is real checks and balances to protect our freedoms–plus a free press, court accountability, and a new Congress.