Trump picks Northern District of Texas for lawsuit over Harris's CBS interview
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Republican nominee Donald Trump sued CBS News on Thursday over an interview with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris that aired on its 60 Minutes program earlier this month, arguing that the network’s edit of the sit-down was “deceitful” and “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.”
The long-shot claim was filed in the Northern District of Texas courthouse where Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump nominee, is the sole judge. While Trump has complained about the 60 Minutes interview for weeks, it is standard for television networks to edit interviews for broadcast, especially to fit time restraints.
A spokesperson for CBS News called the lawsuit “completely without merit” and said in a statement that 60 Minutes “fairly presented the Interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”
Thursday’s lawsuit appears to be another example of what critics call “judge shopping”—when a person or group files a lawsuit in a carefully chosen court where they believe the judge will be inclined to rule in their favor.
Much of the anger over judge shopping has been focused at the Northern District of Texas, which has become a hub for lawsuits by Republican officials and conservative groups. Kacsmaryk, known for his long-held antiabortion beliefs, has heard multiple suits involving federal government decisions that appear to have no clear reason to be filed in his courthouse.
In ruling on those cases, he has suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, a critical abortion medication; blocked the Biden administration from ending the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” program; and struck down two Biden administration protections for transgender people. The mifepristone decision was overturned on appeal.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The lawsuit said it was filed in Texas because CBS engages in “substantial and not isolated business activities” there. “The Interview was aired in Texas, remains accessible to the general public in Texas, and has been viewed by individuals in Texas,” the complaint said.
The filing is Trump’s latest attack against media outlets that have angered him.
The former president, who backed out of his own 60 Minutes interview, has been fixated on Harris’s segment since it aired earlier this month. He complained that the show featured a shorter version of the vice president’s answer to a question about Israel than was shown in a clip previewing the interview.
Trump previously called for the network to lose its broadcasting license over how it edited the interview, even though the federal government does not issue licenses for such television networks.
“This is obviously a public relations stunt, an attempt to undermine the credibility of not only Harris and not only of CBS News, but of all traditional mainstream legacy media,” said Robert Jensen, an emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “Traditional mainstream legacy media reports critically about Trump’s deceptions, his coarse language, his lies, his abusive language, and so Trump is always trying to undermine the credibility of those journalists.”
The lawsuit seeks unusually high damages of $10 billion, alleging that the editing of the interview “damaged President Trump’s fundraising and support values by several billions of dollars, particularly in Texas.” It demands that CBS post the full recording of the interview as well as the unedited transcript of Harris’s response.
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