Last Friday I mentioned that 60 Minutes might find the Stormy Daniels interview they recorded last week more embarrassing for the President than they have a stomach for. Yesterday I noted, based on my own reporting, that Daniels apparently claimed in her interview with Anderson Cooper that the President sometimes liked to be treated in a humiliating or denigrating fashion by Daniels during their sexual encounters. I’m told there’s also a matter of details. Now comes more evidence that CBS seems to be slow-rolling the interview.
Let’s stipulate to the fact that no story is ready until it’s ready. CBS’s commitment to journalistic excellence is of course to be lauded. But the interview was recorded last week. It didn’t run last weekend and it apparently won’t run this weekend either. Now CBS News President David Rhodes is saying there’s more work to be done on the interview.
At a conference in Israel, Rhodes said: “The encounter between Anderson Cooper and (Clifford) was accompanied also by conversations with attorneys, documents were provided, and so we have to run all that down before it runs.”
As I said, CBS’s dedication to journalistic excellence is laudable. But this isn’t what journalists call an evergreen story. It’s very much of the moment. The public interest is close to astronomical. Perhaps reporting out Daniels’ claims is just taking that long. But there’s good reason to believe CBS and 60 Minutes are quite concerned about the nature of some of Daniels’ claims and ones that I don’t think are really confirmable at all, unless the threatened “videos” that Daniels’ lawyer is now mentioning really exist.
The other part of this is the “documents.” Is it possible that the Daniels’ team shared some of the text logs or still images that Daniels was supposed to turn over? Is that the issue? Or is this all in part a delaying tactic as CBS figures out just how much of Stormy’s story they’re willing to let her tell?
