Less than one year after CBS parent company Paramount agreed to pay $16 million to settle the “biggest scandal in broadcast history” with President Donald Trump, the Republican had some choice words for CBS’ Norah O’Donnell.
Trump’s comments came during his 60 Minutes sitdown on Sunday, after O’Donnell hinted that the indictments of several key Democrats and Biden administration officials were “political retribution.” (Notably, CBS has already come under fire for heavily editing the interview, according to multiple Monday reports. “CBS aired a 28-minute version of O’Donnell’s interview with Trump Sunday night before later releasing a 73-minute-long extended version online and posting a full transcript of the conversation,” which prompted backlash “both sides” about what the network “chose to not include in the shortened version that aired on broadcast television,” Forbes reported. The following quotes and exchanges are from the full transcript released by CBS.)
“James Comey, John Bolton, Letitia James were all recently indicted,” O’Donnell began the line of questioning. “There is a pattern to these names. They’re all public figures who have publicly denounced you. Is this political retribution?”
The question is far from original and certainly reeks of Democrat propaganda. Even before Trump took office, corporate media, Democrats, and even Comey painted any accountability for the bad actors who weaponized the government against President Joe Biden’s political enemies as “retribution.” Trump, of course, was the primary target of this two-tiered system of justice — a fact he was quick to mention in his response.
“You know what? You know who got indicted, the man you’re lookin’ at. I got indicted, and I was innocent. And here I am, because I was able to beat all of the nonsense that was thrown at me. I got indicted. They indicted the President of the United States,” he replied.
Trump also noted that “they impeached me twice.” In the meantime, the people running President Joe Biden’s White House perverted the rule of law, threatened democracy, and clearly obstructed justice to protect Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s corrupt business dealings.
More specifically, the FBI under Comey abused its authority to launch a “seriously flawed” investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and Russia despite having no real evidence of such a conspiracy. For Comey’s part, he refused to give his testimony about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation to Special Counsel John Durham.
“These people are scum. And yet, when you go after a dirty cop like Comey or a guy like Bolton, who I hear has, I don’t know anything about it, I hear he took records all over the place, who knows. Letitia James is a terrible, dishonest person, in my opinion. Terrible. I just won the case against her. She wanted me to pay $500 million for something I didn’t do anything wrong on,” Trump added.
O’Donnell, apparently unsatisfied with Trump’s answer, tried to interrupt his account of the weaponization. But he wasn’t done.
“Wait, wait, wait. And then you tell me about me. Just so you understand, you say I went after these people. These people are bad people. They’re dishonest people,” Trump continued.
The interviewer again tried to interrupt by repeating her question, hinting that the indictments were “political retribution,” but Trump plowed ahead.
“Comey’s a dirty cop. Look, Comey’s known as a dirty cop. I’m not known as a dirty person. They indicted me many times, indicted me. They were after me. I’m lookin’ at you now. I’m President of the United States. I went through numerous indictments and two impeachments. And you tell me that I went after people? These people are dishonest,” he quipped.
Trump emphasized that “Biden didn’t have a clue” and “illegally used, as you know, a machine, the autopen in order to give pardons to people” but O’Donnell still wouldn’t let the issue go.
“Did you instruct the Department of Justice to go after them?” she asked.
“No, and not in any way, shape or form. No. You don’t have to instruct ’em because they were so dirty, they were so crooked, they were so corrupt that the honest people we have, Pam Bondi’s doin’ a very good job. Kash Patel’s doing a very good job,” he replied. “The honest people that we have go after ’em automatically.”
In contrast, Trump suggested that the DOJ and FBI under his predecessor were “instructed … to go after me, because the records now have been found.”
“So when you tell me about I went after Comey, Comey’s low on the totem pole. They went after the President of the United States. Do you know that they raided my house in Palm Beach, Florida called Mar-a-Lago? They raided my house. I had 78 or 98 FBI agents with arms come into my house. And you’re telling me, Norah, that I went after some low-life named Comey, who’s judged to be a crooked guy. He lied all over the place. He lied to Congress and did many other bad things. For that, you should be ashamed.”
O’Donnell again reiterated her “is this retribution on your part?” question, but Trump quickly fired back with “it’s the opposite.”
“I think I’ve been very mild-mannered,” he added. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap. Otherwise I couldn’t have run for president. They tried to get me not to run for president by going after me and by indicting me.”
He reviewed how Democrats tried to impeach him based “on a perfect phone call” even though they “knew that I wasn’t guilty.” The clencher, however, came when Trump again told O’Donnell “you can’t then accuse me of weaponizing government” after his entire life over the last few years was laden with the consequences of Biden’s weaponized government.
“They were horrible human beings. They went after the President of the United States. They went after my children. They went into my wife’s drawers. They went into my wife’s closets. They held the dresses up. She came back. She said, ‘Oh, what happened? What happened?’ ‘Cause she’s a very meticulous person. Everything’s nice and neat.”
Trump noted that they didn’t stop at now-First Lady Melania Trump’s wardrobe.
“They went into my office. They took things that I was allowed to have file– under the Presidential Records Act that I was allowed to have. I had records. I was allowed to have ’em. Only the president’s allowed, but I was– and it was nothing very significant anyway.”
“There was, like, nothing. Wait, just one second. They opened these– I’m a very meticulous person too. I have files, beautiful. They took the files, threw ’em all over the phone– all over the floor. They were all over the floor– and they took pictures of ’em,” Trump continued. “This is my office. I said, ‘What the hell? That’s not my office.’ They took files, they threw ’em all over, and they took pictures and they released ’em to the public that this is ‘President Trump’s office. We caught him with all of this stuff,’ like it was all over the floor in my office. These are crooked people … So don’t ask me about, ‘Did you go after?’…”
O’Donnell was clearly ready to move on at this point, but Trump got the last word on the matter.
“[James is] a total crook. She’s a low-life. Comey’s a dirty cop,” he said. As for Bolton, Trump claimed he “actually helped me a lot because he was crazy” and said people believed he was a “nut job.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
