’60 Minutes’: Lesley Stahl Delivers Scathing Trump Report After Clash With Bari Weiss

Just a week after a behind-the-scenes clash with CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl returned to Sunday’s (October 18) broadcast with a scathing report on Donald Trump.

The report touched on the upcoming midterms and the president’s attempts to undermine election voting. Stahl spoke with state and local officials about what some consider to be election interference and intimidation tactics by the U.S. government.

“In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI,” Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett told Stahl about the Trump administration’s FBI raid on a local Georgia election facility back in January. “They had vests. They had guns. They had all of the equipment on their belts as if they were raiding a drug house.”

Barrett said she was forced to hand over hundreds of ballots and voter rolls, and to this day, has no idea what the FBI did with the material. “I think it was all part of this concerted effort that’s happening nationwide to undermine faith in elections,” she added.

Stahl also spoke with Utah Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, who said the level of federal interference is unheard of.

“In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor the threats were all external,” she shared. “Non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things. But now we also have threats coming from within our own government.”

Henderson noted how the Justice Department demanded their “statewide voter registration list,” which contains confidential information. “They wanted things that we typically are required by law to keep private: social security numbers, full dates of birth, driver’s license numbers,” she explained.

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Stahl turned to Trump, noting that while elections are run locally, it “hasn’t stopped Mr. Trump from signing two executive orders trying to create new federal voting rules.” She said that in the 21 months of Trump’s second term, he has said, “in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted more than 150 times.”

Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, downplayed these concerns about interference in the upcoming midterms.

“Well, I don’t know what is going to happen, but I can tell you that absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states,” she told Stahl.

Stahl’s latest report comes a week after she reportedly considered quitting over a clash with Weiss about a segment on Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Stahl has worked for the show since 1991 and,  alongside Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim, was one of three longtime correspondents to stick with the show amid months of behind-the-scenes turmoil.