Kristi v CBS

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused CBS News of selectively editing footage from her Sunday interview, cutting some of her remarks about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who was mistakenly deported and returned to the U.S. to face separate charges.

In a statement on Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said CBS “deceptively” edited the secretary’s answers, cutting about four minutes from the nearly 17-minute interview when it aired on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

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“Secretary Noem’s ‘Face The Nation’ interview was edited for time and met all CBS News standards,” a spokesperson for CBS News said in a statement to The Hill. “The entire interview is publicly available on YouTube, and the full transcript was posted early Sunday morning at CBSNews.com.”

  The Hill

CBS thought it might avoid trouble by honoring Trump's extortion to the tune of $16M (for another claim of unfavorable editing) and firing Stephen Colbert. They weren't paying attention to the fact that Trump doubles down on people who bow to his pressure, like any bully anywhere.

So, Noem published the edited portion online in a tweet.

In Noem’s Sunday interview, sections of her responses cut for the live broadcast include allegations against Abrego Garcia that have not been substantiated and which his lawyers deny.

Those include allegations that the Maryland resident “was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who was a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors and even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off,” which Noem said in the section of the interview that DHS claims was removed from the live broadcast.

If they want to dictate what airs, they should stick with Fox News interviews.

Earlier this week, attorneys for Abrego Garcia asked a federal judge to issue a gag order against Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi to bar them from making “baseless public attacks” against their client, who faces human smuggling charges stemming from a traffic stop in 2022.

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“If Kilmar Abrego Garcia did not want to be mentioned by the Secretary of Homeland Security, then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes,” a DHS official told The Hill on Friday morning.

Again, they haven't proven that he did commit heinous crimes - or any crimes at all beyond illegal entry. They've been embarrassed by their original removal of Mr. Abrego to an El Salvador prison in error, and they're determined he should not go free. So they're digging the hole their in deeper.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys were told their client could be deported to Uganda, but a federal judge said Monday that the administration is “absolutely forbidden” from removing Abrego Garcia until a hearing is held.

So perhaps it’s time for news organizations to state unabashedly and affirmatively that they are not in the business of amplifying Trump officials’ lies and smears, and any official who feels entitled to such amplification can go stuff it. Perhaps other journalists should stand with them as they do so. Let Noem shriek into the MAGA disinformation abyss about it all she likes—this is a sleazy little scam, and there’s no need to get pushed around by it any longer.

  New Republic

UPDATE 09/06/2025:

If you need more evidence that there’s zero percentage in trying to appease or bargain with authoritarians, check out what happened this weekend when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attacked CBS News for supposedly editing her Face the Nation appearance in a deceptive way. Unsurprisingly, it concerned the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, about whom Noem and other Trump officials have lied relentlessly for months on end.

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It’s bad enough for government officials to go on national television and rattle off a litany of hideously damning charges as fact when they haven’t yet been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. In this case, officials apparently went to extraordinarily depraved lengths to try to coerce a guilty plea, which doesn’t exactly exude confidence in the strength of those charges to begin with.

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Not airing footage of Noem’s lies and smears unchallenged was, journalistically speaking, the correct thing to do. CBS News is under no obligation to air them, and arguably should not have.

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CBS’s response to this latest saga has been largely defensive and even taken on a pleading quality. In a sense, posting the full video of the interview—including numerous unrebutted lies about Abrego Garcia—lets Noem and her falsehoods get their way, and then some.

  New Republic

CBS now belongs to Trump.  For free.