Video transcript
We eventually broadcast a story about the Hunter Biden laptop after the midterm elections in 2022. We commissioned a forensic review. I got a copy of the laptop data. I have it here still. I went to a lot of effort to get the cleanest copy of the laptop data, the same data that was provided to the FBI, because I didn't want to have any professional journalistic risk for CBS News. I wanted this thing to be totally locked down. When we did the story, we did it after the midterms. I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms, and my training is that you should always do the story when it's ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle. Once we got the laptop story on the morning news, I felt that there was so much there that we could still do. For example, in the text messages, there's unfortunately the use of the N-word, the liberal use of the N-word. I thought this was worthy of a story, but I was told that it was not something that interested CBS News. Then I asked for a forensic review of the laptop, and we found that there were more than half a dozen emails that were likely used by Joe Biden. I thought that was a story. The answer that came back was, "Well, we need to know what the content is of the emails," but that was going to be a years-long process. There were a lot of reasons I was told not to do it, not to pursue it. I spent a lot of my time at CBS following the Hunter Biden story. One of the things that really struck me is this kind of disconnect. I didn't understand how a senior executive like George Cheese could tell me that this was a high priority for the network and for his boss, and yet the executives at CBS News showed producers anchors could refuse that. I came to the conclusion that they must have felt that they were more powerful than George Cheese, which was astonishing to me. I'd never worked at a place where a directive from the top would be so defied.
Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.
