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Donald Trump pulled out of an election season interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes that was set to air Monday, with the Republican’s camp citing fact-checking provisions and a long-running dispute over the Hunter Biden laptop story as reasons why.
60 Minutes announced the cancellation over X/Twitter.
“After initially accepting 60 Minutes’ request for an interview with Scott Pelley, former President Trump’s campaign has decided not to participate,” the show wrote in a statement. “Pelley will address this Monday evening.”
The Trump campaign denied he was ever set to appear on the program, where Harris will also sit for an in-depth interview.
“There were initial discussions, but nothing was ever scheduled or locked in,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung wrote on X. “They also insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.”
The Trump campaign official also dismissed the program as a “relic of the past, unable to keep up with the times and changing media environment, instead turning into liberal, biased propaganda.”
Trump, for his part, said he was skipping out on the 60 Minutes interview over the Hunter Biden laptop story, in which Republicans seized on damaging materials about Joe Biden’s son purportedly found on a laptop Hunter Biden supposedly left at a Delaware computer store. The FBI concluded the laptop in question belonged to Biden, who said the material linked to the computer may have been hacked or part of a Russian intel operation.
Former intelligence officials claimed the information on the computer, which Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani gave to the New York Post, was part of a Russia intelligence operation, though doubts have grown over whether this was the case in recent years.
The revelations emerged in October 2020, weeks before the election, raising suspicions it was part of a politically-motivated “October surprise” designed to smear the Democrats.
During a 2020 interview, which Trump later abruptly cut short, the Republican accused60 Minutes of refusing to cover the material purportedly found on the laptop, which contained damaging allegations about the Bidens.
Anchor Leslie Stahl said the information found on the computer couldn’t be “verified” at the time.
"First I want to get an apology because last time I did an interview with them if you remember they challenged me on the computer,” Trump said during a press conference on Tuesday following news that he would not be doing the 60 Minutes interview next week. “They said the laptop from hell was from Russia. And I said it wasn’t from Russia, it was from Hunter, and I never got an apology.”
“I’d love to do 60 minutes,” he added. “I do everything.”
The former president was mocked for not appearing in the upcoming interview.
“Afraid of the debate stage. Afraid of 60 minutes. And his campaign team - after the last three days of increasingly unhinged and unstable ranting at his rallies - is clearly afraid of exposing him beyond comfortable confines,” Harris senior adviser David Plouffe wrote on X.
“We’ll surely hear more details about why Trump was too chicken to do the 60 Minutes debate, but he has been refusing any interview where he might bump into actual facts,” added reporter Marcy Wheeler.
The Trump campaign has appeared to take issue with fact-checking in the past, including complaints about the moderators during the debate between Harris and Trump, and reports that the Republican initially refused to sit for an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists convention over fact-checking.
