Scott Pelley, the signature host of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” is being called out for a lie about former President Donald Trump during a recent segment where he revisited the origins of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Disinformation around the device has been ever-present since it was discovered by Rudy Giuliani in the back of a computer repair shop shortly before the 2020 election. Pelley on Sunday stated that Lesley Stahl, the veteran CBS journalist who was first approached about the laptop’s existence, initially did not dismiss it has a product of Russian disinformation, an allegation perpetuated by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and a nexus of former intelligence officials operating at the direction of then-advisory Anthony Blinken.
After “60 Minutes” aired its interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, Pelley explained that former President Donald Trump had refused the program’s request for equal time, “saying he needed an apology” from CBS “for its interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Lesley Stahl said in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that.”
Within days, Trump allies unearthed portions of his 2020 interview with Stahl, whom he said “didn’t cover” the discovery of the laptop. In a clip, Stahl can be heard off-camera saying the laptop’s veracity “couldn’t be verified.”
“Of course it can be verified,” Trump pushed back. Stahl insisted that there was no way to tell whether the laptop belonged to the son of then-candidate Joe Biden, a claim that has long since been swept into the dustbin of history.
WATCH:
Following President Biden’s election, a post-mortem of the laptop’s discovery was conducted by special counsel John Durham as he probed allegations that Russians secretly delivered a laptop containing information about Hunter Biden to Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer at the time. Photos and emails emerged from the device linking Biden to his embattled son, connections that Trump’s campaign sought to exploit as he alleged the former vice president helped his son navigate thorny overseas deals while leveraging his position in the Obama administration.
Durham in 2023 released a report concluding Trump and Russia had no connection going back to the 2016 campaign. As part of his investigation, Durham also uncovered that the Obama administration sought a warrant to surveil a foreign policy advisor to Trump and that no support could be found for charges made in the infamous Steele dossier alleging wrongdoing by Trump. Former British intelligence official Christopher Steele was offered $1 million by the FBI to corroborate the allegations made in the document but was unable to do so. Durham also reported that former vendors for the Hillary Clinton campaign refused to hand over documents he requested as part of his investigation.
