CBS Fired Scott Pelley. Then He Said They Told Him to Lie.
Plus: Jill Biden feared a stroke and kept campaigning anyway; Scott Pelley says CBS told him to lie (the day after he got fired); and what Tuesday's primaries actually mean*
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In Today’s Read
Scott Pelley says CBS instructed him to inject falsehoods into stories and let politicians pick their own interviewers. He mentioned it immediately after being fired for cause.
Mikie Sherrill announced “peaceful protest zones” outside Delaney Hall, state police cleared the area hours later after fireworks and gas canisters, and she’s now calling it a lawsuit problem instead of a protest problem.
Jill Biden’s memoir says she feared Joe was having a stroke during the 2024 debate, doctors were called, then they went to Waffle House, then she kept campaigning for another month. Her own party is publicly begging her to stop.
California’s governor's race has a Republican leading in early returns for the first time in years. Iowa handed Trump his first gubernatorial endorsement loss of the cycle.
Rubio testified on the Iran war, a Hellfire missile hit a tanker, and gas is $4.34.
60 Minutes Battle. CBS Fired Scott Pelley.
The Story.
Monday, veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley confronted new executive producer Nick Bilton at a staff meeting and accused incoming CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of “murdering 60 Minutes.” Audio leaked to the New York Times, where it was noted his “newscaster’s baritone was shaking.”
Bilton fired Pelley by letter Tuesday night for cause, calling it a “performative display of hostility” and “remarkable incivility and contempt.”
Pelley’s exit statement accused CBS of instructing him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and said politicians were invited to “select which correspondents would interview them.” He said he refused those instructions. He is in conversations with Bryan Freedman, the media litigator who has represented other fired news personalities. No suit filed yet. Pelley’s 60 Minutes previously ran a segment calling Trump a foreign agent; CBS settled for $16 million.
In May 2025, Pelley gave a commencement speech at Wake Forest warning graduates that “our sacred rule of law is under attack, journalism is under attack.” He never named Trump. The target was not subtle.
Backdrop: Skydance acquired Paramount (and with it, CBS) in August 2025 — deal closed, done. Weiss was brought in by the new owners after that. Paramount is now separately in the middle of a $110B acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN, HBO); that deal needs regulatory clearance and WBD shareholders approved it in April 2026. Pelley said Weiss was brought in to kill the show.
The Left's read. Martyred journalist. NPR, CNN, Rolling Stone, and Variety treated the firing as legacy journalism being gutted by corporate owners under political pressure. The "CBS told me to lie" claim ran in most pieces without meaningful pushback. The motive chain cited: Paramount is now trying to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN, HBO) in a separate $110B deal that still needs regulatory clearance. Don't antagonize the Trump administration while that's pending — so move out the old guard at CBS and install friendlier management.
The Right's read. The termination letter went viral as an example of firm, clear management. Pelley is insubordinate, entitled, and a weak messenger on journalistic integrity given the $16M Trump settlement. PJ Media headlined it: "Professional Prevaricator Scott Pelley Fired by CBS." If CBS instructed him to put falsehoods on air and he refused, why did it take getting fired for him to mention it?
What both sides are skipping. The “CBS told me to lie” claim is either the most significant journalism story in years or the best exit strategy money can buy. Both are possible. There will likely be litigation to follow and documentation revealed in the process. The left wants a martyr, the right wants a discredited hack, and both framings let everyone avoid the harder question.
I seriously doubt it. The “instructed to inject falsehoods” claim is perfectly timed, strategically deployed, and almost certainly more of an exit strategy than whistleblowing.
Here’s what I think actually happened. Pelley is a journalist who crossed fully into activism — and not quietly. His 60 Minutes produced a segment calling Trump a foreign agent that cost CBS $16 million to settle. He stood at a Wake Forest podium and gave what was functionally a political speech in a commencement robe. He leaked audio from a staff meeting to the New York Times before his own firing. These are not the moves of a neutral journalist protecting journalistic standards. This is what someone does when they believe their political views belong in their work and stop hiding them.
CBS’s new leadership is trying to bring actual balance back to a show that had spent years functioning as prestige liberal media with a stopwatch. That’s not murdering journalism. That’s acknowledging that journalism with a visible thumb on the scale has already killed itself with a significant portion of the audience.
The bigger problem isn’t Pelley. It’s what he represents. Journalism spent decades pretending to be neutral while systematically favoring one worldview in how stories were framed, which sources were elevated, and which questions got asked. The audience isn’t blind to it anymore. Pelley didn’t even try to hide it. He leaned in. And when the correction came, he grabbed a microphone and called it an attack on truth and ran to the NYT. That’s the move now. Claim that any demand for balance is actually censorship. It works great for building a personal brand.
Don’t even get me started on the martyr play. We’ve seen this game already. Colbert. Terry Moran. Every fired-or-exited media figure who’s parlayed their “heroic opposition to the regime” into an independent platform. Pelley is doing the exact same calculation in real time. He’s already talking to Bryan Freedman, which tells you this is a planned exit, not an ambush. My money is on a Substack. Ironically. The man will end up on the same platform Bari Weiss helped build, charging $10 a month to tell his subscribers what CBS wouldn’t let him say.
Watch for the platform announcement within 90 days.
Delaney Hall: She Built the Protest Zone. Then This Happened.
The Story
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill and AG Matt Platkin filed suit against GEO Group on June 2, seeking to force full health inspector access to Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed ICE detention facility in Newark. State inspectors visited on May 28 but were given access only to the cafeteria, not the full facility. DHS formally debunked the conditions allegations on May 29 in a “Correct the Record” release. Sec. Markwayne Mullin visited and reported no violations found.
Nicholas Scelfo was arrested by the FBI on federal felony charges after video caught him screaming at an unmasked ICE officer: “I’ll kill your whole family. Your whole family is dead. Your children, your wife — all dead.” He was released on $100,000 bond and barred from returning to Delaney Hall. Five of the six people arrested during the protests were from out of state. Food complaints at the facility date to 2011, under the Obama administration. Nobody protested then.
The Left’s read. The lawsuit is accountability. Detainee allegations are credible; health inspector access is a basic transparency requirement. CNN and MSNBC ran the inspectors-blocked narrative without engaging DHS’s formal rebuttal. Rolling Stone called Delaney Hall “the new front in Trump’s immigration war.” Scelfo’s arrest got light coverage; the protest characterization stayed largely “overwhelmingly peaceful.”
The Right’s read. DHS already answered this. Mullin visited and found nothing. Fox News reported a federal inspection contradicts central claims in the NJ AG’s lawsuit. Five of the six arrested were outside agitators. The governor created a designated area for disorder, and the disorder arrived on schedule.
What both sides are skipping. The food complaints go back to 2011 under Obama. Nobody protested then, nobody filed a lawsuit then, nobody flew in from out of state for it then. That’s not a gotcha. It is a relevant context for evaluating whether this is genuinely about detainee conditions or about who’s doing the detaining.
On May 29, Sherrill announced formal “peaceful protest zones” to professionalize the response at Delaney Hall. State police cleared those same zones hours later after protesters deployed fireworks and threw gas canisters at law enforcement. Scelfo threatened to kill an ICE officer’s wife and children on video. And Sherrill called the protests “overwhelmingly peaceful.”
This is a first-term governor from a blue-but-not-far-left state doing what is required. Her base needed her fighting. Swing voters can’t see riot footage running in Republican ads in October. So she praised the peaceful crowd, blamed out-of-state agitators for the violence (while not noting she’d spent days promoting the protest), and filed a lawsuit that moves the story from the street into court, where it’s slower, quieter, and doesn’t produce footage. The base reads it as fighting. Moderates read it as a process. Smart play.
Except that five of the six arrested were people she’d been implicitly inviting for weeks. The protest zone she created became the riot site. And the conditions she’s suing over existed under Obama while she was silent.
The lawsuit has real grounds. The health inspector access question is legitimate. But the framing runs into the uncomfortable fact that those exact conditions existed for years under a Democratic administration, and nobody was at the gate.
Watch how quickly Sherrill stops holding press conferences once this moves into litigation.
ICYMI
Skill in Action: Dry-Brined Chicken Three Ways
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The point of Lesson 1 wasn't really "make these chicken thighs." It was that dry brining is a skill you'll use forever. So over the weekend, I cooked dry-brined chicken three different ways, without a recipe, to show you how the same technique works across cuts, cook methods, and dinners.
The Democrats Would Like Jill Biden to Stop Talking
The Story
Jill Biden’s memoir, “View from the East Wing,” published June 2, reveals that during the June 2024 presidential debate she thought: “Is this a stroke?”
NPR reports doctors were called immediately after the debate because of her fear. She told NBC’s Craig Melvin on Today that she stayed silent because “I’m his wife. I’ve got to lift him up” and said “He did. He got older. We all saw him aging.” They went to Waffle House that night. She kept campaigning for another month. MSNBC gave her the platform to say Biden would have beaten Trump if he’d stayed. Jake Tapper wrote at CNN that her account is “rosy if not blindfolded” and questioned whether she was enabling her husband. Named Democrats are going on record: John Morgan (major fundraiser) called it “ripping open a healing scab.” Former White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said he doesn’t see “why that painful conversation for the party needed to be publicly reopened right now.” Former Biden aide Meghan Hays told C-SPAN the memoir “is not helping the party ahead of the midterm elections.” Joe Biden is also planning midterm campaign stops. So the party can’t just ignore him either.
The Left’s read. MSNBC treated the book sympathetically, leaning into the grief narrative: a wife watching her husband struggle and staying loyal. The “Is this a stroke?” line got covered as humanizing fear rather than as evidence of a cover story. Tapper was the notable exception.
The Right’s read. Townhall and Jonathan Turley went directly at the contradiction: she feared a stroke, she kept campaigning. The right is citing Tapper approvingly. When your argument is “even Jake Tapper agrees,” the receipts are solid.
What both sides are skipping. The actual political problem is that Biden is coming back onto the campaign trail in the fall. Democrats running in competitive House districts in 2026 are trying to nationalize the midterms around Republican overreach. Every day the Bidens stay in the cycle is a day Americans are reminded of Democrat failures and cover-up.
“We all saw him aging.”
If we all saw it, the Democrats running in swing states in November who went on television in 2023 and 2024 and said Biden was sharp, capable, and fully in command also saw it. The ones who signed letters urging him to stay in the race saw it. The ones who repeated talking points about his debate prep, his stamina, and his record saw it. And now those same people are on the record saying “we all saw him aging” and pointing fingers at his inner circle, as if they were passive bystanders watching a slow-motion car wreck instead of people who had every incentive to tell the truth and chose the party line instead.
That’s the live grenade the memoir drops into the 2026 cycle.
The donor problem is arguably worse. The Democratic donor class wrote nine-figure checks for a candidate they were told — repeatedly, by people who knew better — was viable, sharp, and capable of another term. Jill Biden’s memoir is now confirming, in her own words, that she feared he was having a stroke in real time and kept it to herself. Jake Tapper is saying the inner circle enabled it. Former aides are calling the book “disingenuous.” Every one of those words is a sentence in the brief that Democratic donors are now building about why they cannot trust the party’s judgment with their money. The question isn’t whether they’re angry. It’s whether that anger shows up as withheld checks in 2026.
And the left-leaning media. Don’t even get me started.
The same outlets that told us for 18 months that questions about Biden’s fitness were right-wing talking points are now covering this memoir as a humanizing portrait of a devoted wife. The gaslighting didn’t stop when he dropped out. It just changed form. The press that ran cover for this is implicated by every new detail, which is why many of them are covering the book sympathetically instead of asking the obvious question: what did you know, when did you know it, and why did you keep telling us everything was fine?
Here’s the thing: I genuinely want this book tour to go as long as possible. Keep going. More morning shows. More Craig Melvin exchanges where she gets testy under gentle questioning. More named Democrats going on record asking the Bidens to please stop. Every day the Bidens are in the news cycle is a day the 2026 frame is “Democrats hid the truth about their own candidate” instead of “Republicans are extreme.” That’s not the midterm terrain Democrats want to fight on. So, Jill: please, keep talking. Tour every city. Do the podcast circuit. Joe, feel free to make those campaign trail stops. We’ll be watching.
🗳️Special Feature: Primary Night
California
California results are not final and won’t be for roughly another week. State law allows mail-in ballots postmarked by election day to arrive up to seven days later; the Secretary of State certifies final results by July 10.
With roughly half the vote counted, Republican Steve Hilton led Democrat Xavier Becerra 27%-26% in the California governor’s race. Tom Steyer trailed by 6+ points; Katie Porter conceded. If the current order holds, it would be the first time in a decade that a Republican is on the November ballot for California governor. No projection has been made. The mail-in count runs through June 26.
LA Mayor
In Los Angeles, Karen Bass officially advanced. With 63% counted: Bass at 35%, Albert Pratt at 30%, Councilmember Nithya Raman at 22%. Pratt and Raman are still battling for the second runoff spot. No network has called it. AP projected Bass; the second slot is not confirmed.
Iowa
Iowa was the clearest story of the night. Businessman Zach Lahn defeated Trump-backed Rep. Randy Feenstra in the GOP gubernatorial primary, 37.8% to 37%, with 99% reporting. Lahn aligned himself with RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement and picked up an endorsement from former Rep. Steve King, the same Steve King that Feenstra beat in a bitter 2020 primary. Feenstra’s closing argument leaned on Trump’s late endorsement. It lost by less than a point. Feenstra conceded. It’s the first time in this cycle a Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate has lost a primary.
Iowa Senate: Ashley Hinson won the Republican primary by 50+ points over Jim Carlin. She faces Democrat Josh Turek (state rep) for Joni Ernst’s open seat in November.
One note on Iowa: this is a margin-under-one-point race in a MAHA-vs.-MAGA lane fight, not a broad repudiation of Trump. Rob Sand has been setting up his November run for two years and Iowa is looking competitive. The more interesting question is whether MAHA as a movement can hold a coalition in general. Watch November.
Rubio testified before the Senate on the Iran war for the first time since it started. He outlined a two-phase framework: Phase 1 is Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Phase 2 is nuclear talks. The same afternoon, US forces struck a Botswana-flagged oil tanker heading toward an Iranian port with a Hellfire missile, and explosions were reported near Iran’s Qeshm Island. Gas is at $4.34 per gallon. Sen. Cory Booker to Rubio: “We are the strongest nation on the planet Earth, and we’re in a stalemate with Iran.” (WaPo / CNBC)
A federal appeals court blocked the Pentagon from discharging current transgender troops but left the recruiting ban in place. The D.C. Circuit ruled the Trump administration’s policy illegally discriminated by gender identity in a divided 3-judge ruling (Talbott v. USA). The discharge block covers only named plaintiffs, not all transgender service members. Defense Secretary Hegseth posted: “See you at SCOTUS.” (Military Times)
The DOJ says it will comply with a court order pausing the anti-weaponization fund. That provision stalled the $70-72 billion ICE/CBP reconciliation bill in the Senate. Sen. Katie Britt objected to language that could benefit January 6 defendants who assaulted Capitol Police. The package missed Trump’s June 1 deadline with the J6 payout language still unresolved. (Federal News Network)
Trump signed an executive order asking AI companies to submit their most powerful models for voluntary government testing up to 30 days before public release. The order creates an “AI cybersecurity clearinghouse” and directs agencies to develop assessment benchmarks. Explicitly bars mandatory licensing or preclearance. An earlier draft required 90 days; the timeline was cut to 30 after industry pushback over innovation concerns. (CNBC)
Trump has two weeks to remove his name from the Kennedy Center. Judge Cooper’s order stands: only Congress can rename it, and the two-year renovation closure blocking all programming is blocked. Trump floated “giving it back to Congress.” The administration has not said what actually happens next. (NBC News)
A man barricaded inside a Chase Bank building in downtown Bakersfield with hostages is entering his second day. The suspect made bomb threats Tuesday afternoon before locking himself inside with several people; at least two hostages have been released and no injuries reported. FBI assumed command of SWAT operations around 11 p.m. Tuesday. Chase confirmed its branch was empty; the standoff is in a separate office suite in the same building. (NBC News)
That’s The Read.
See you Friday.
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