A 35-year veteran of “60 Minutes” went back on the air with armed FBI agents, hundreds of seized ballot boxes and a tally of how many times the president has told the country the vote can’t be trusted.
“60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, 84, aired that report Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026, examining Trump administration efforts to undermine the reliability of elections and building the segment on interviews with state and local officials — a week after her clash with her new boss, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, leaked.
Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights and a Trump appointee, pushed back on Wednesday, Oct. 21, telling a right-wing show that she spoke with Stahl for about 30 minutes and that only about 90 seconds of it aired.
Hundreds of Boxes, Still Unaccounted For
Stahl made her first stop in Fulton County, Ga., where Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, a Democrat, described the morning federal agents arrived at the county’s warehouse. Dozens of them came in January wearing vests and carrying guns, with a criminal search warrant, Barrett said.
Hundreds of boxes holding ballots and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election left with the agents. Barrett said she had no choice but to let them, and that the whereabouts of those ballots remain unknown to her to this day. A nationwide effort to undermine faith in elections was, in her view, what the raid served.
“In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI,” Barrett told Stahl.
A Republican Who Wouldn’t Hand It Over
Stahl’s next interview was with a Republican, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson. Every threat to the past two elections she oversaw came from outside, Henderson said — non-state actors and cybersecurity threats. Some of them now come from inside the government, she said.
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department demanded Utah’s statewide voter registration list, material that included Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver’s license numbers. Henderson said the state is typically required by law to keep that information private, and that officials never gave good answers about why they needed it.
Henderson said she found 52 possible noncitizen cases in Utah, among more than two million registered voters. Stahl did the math on air: two-thousandths of one percent.
The department has notified Henderson that she is officially under investigation over her refusal to turn over the voter information. She said on the broadcast that the federal pressure would not move her, and that holding the guardrails was an important thing for her to do.
“Someone has to,” she told Stahl.
A postal inspector had intercepted a letter containing white powder addressed to her office, Henderson said on Oct. 18, and the letter went to the FBI. Similar letters reached election offices in at least 32 states and more than three dozen members of Congress. No hazardous material turned up in preliminary tests, and as of Oct. 20 no suspect had been identified.
The Interview Dhillon Says Got Clipped
Stahl told viewers that elections in America are local, run by towns, counties and states under Article I of the Constitution, with no role for the president in running them. Trump, 80, has signed two executive orders trying to create new federal voting rules.
“In the 21 months of President Trump’s second term, he has said, in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted more than 150 times,” Stahl said in the segment.
Dhillon gave a different number, saying the department is looking at thousands of noncitizen voting cases. No plan exists to station Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at polling locations, she said, and barring something unexpected, counting and certifying results in the states should not be interrupted. Paranoia was her word for the idea that Trump would challenge the midterm results.
Dhillon later told Vince Coglianese on a right-wing show that she had repeatedly challenged Stahl during the taping.
“I know their modus operandi. She asked the same questions again and again. I actually called her a liar on more than one occasion, and she did not run those clips where she actually said blatant lies and I said, ‘Lesley, that’s a lie.’ And she was self-aware enough not to run those parts,” Dhillon said.
Of the edited segment, she added: “I don’t think anyone needs to see the whole video to see how clipped and edited it was.” Coglianese called the “60 Minutes” interview a “complete dumpster fire.”
Why Weiss Let the Piece Air
The leaked account described Stahl’s clash with Weiss over a “60 Minutes” piece on the West Bank that aired Sunday, Oct. 11. Stahl privately discussed quitting over the dispute, according to people familiar with it.
Weiss’ deputy, managing editor Charles Forelle, the former deputy editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, worked on the piece alongside her. Insiders described a heap of broad editorial notes from Weiss and Forelle, screenings that ran into Saturday, and public listings that normally go out on Friday but stayed unreleased until the Sunday morning of the broadcast. Forelle suggested holding the piece for a later date. Stahl objected, and the piece aired.
CBS rejected that account. A rigorous editorial process that includes edits from editors applies to every “60 Minutes” piece, a CBS spokesperson said, and this one received far fewer edits than most. Stahl met Monday, Oct. 12, with fellow correspondents Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim.
Weiss chose not to hold the West Bank piece in part to avoid more bad press for Skydance owner David Ellison, “whose company just acquired Warner Bros. Discovery,” sources told The Post. Weiss had been positioned to run CNN after the merger, but Ellison opted to retain CNN boss Mark Thompson.
“I assume she got the message that she needs to tone things down,” said a former CBS exec.
Weiss had intervened once before, in a December 2025 piece about the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, saying she wanted to give the Trump administration more time to comment. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi supplied a new introduction when the piece ran about a month later, on Jan. 18, 2026. The dispute led to Alfonsi leaving CBS, with her contract not being renewed.
Stahl joined the newsmagazine in 1991. She signed a two-year deal with CBS News after Weiss fired Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon and three other senior staff members. Ellison called Stahl personally and promised to respect the editorial independence of “60 Minutes.” Sources who know her said she would never quit the show.
