Jake Tapper didn’t mince words in denouncing President Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News over a “60 Minutes” segment, which Paramount Global settled by paying Trump $16 million.
“I will say this proudly underneath the Paramount+ banner, which is — that lawsuit was bullshit against ’60 Minutes,’” Tapper said Thursday at Variety & Rolling Stone’s Truth Seekers Summit in New York, referring to the Paramount-owned streamer’s sponsorship of the event.
The CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent was interviewed on stage by Variety Co-Editor-in-Chief Ramin Setoodeh.
Tapper said that “editing is done all the time” in TV news and “there was no bias” with the “60 Minutes” editing of an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris (who was Trump’s rival in the 2024 election).
Tapper said he’s called out a June 2024 interview Trump gave on Fox News in which he was asked by “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy whether he would declassify the government’s Epstein files if elected president. “Yeah, I would,” Trump said in the version that aired. However, the “Fox & Friends” segment edited out the rest of his answer, in which he was less decisive: “I guess I would [release the Epstein files]. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”
In the longer answer on the Epstein files question, Trump “kind of walks it back a little bit,” Tapper said. “That is a more egregious example of editing than what ’60 Minutes’ did with Vice President Harris’ answer on the Middle East, which was basically a minute-and-a-half word salad.”
Tapper alleged the only reason Paramount settled the lawsuit was “because they wanted the [Skydance-Paramount] merger to go through.” (Paramount Global, Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr have said Trump’s lawsuit was separate from the FCC’s approval of the merger.) Tapper said he believes CBS News and Paramount would have won the lawsuit. “But it wasn’t about that. It was about fealty,” he said. Tapper added, “There are going to be people who, their job is to keep the company afloat. And their job is to keep stockholders happy. And so that is a risk in this era, regardless of Donald Trump or not.”
“There is now a thirst among some to sue media organizations not for the purpose of justice or correcting the record but to bankrupt media organizations,” Tapper said. “So that is a real thing. And in this era, I think people need to be careful about it. But I don’t think that that should change our allegiance facts and the truth and making sure we talk to the other side of the story and all that.”
In January 2025, CNN was ordered to pay $5 million in damages for defaming a security contractor in a 2021 story from correspondent Alexander Marquardt that aired during Tapper’s show. The contractor, Zachary Young, sued CNN in 2022, alleging his livelihood was destroyed after the network accused him of operating in a “black market” for Afghan refugees seeking to flee the country. In a statement at the time, a CNN spokesperson said: “We remain proud of our journalists and are 100% committed to strong, fearless and fair-minded reporting at CNN, though we will of course take what useful lessons we can from this case.”
Tapper, asked how CNN’s coverage of Trump has been different in his second term, said Trump’s social media posts got more coverage in his first term. In 2025, some of Trump’s social-media rants — like his threat to revoke Rosy O’Donnell’s U.S. citizenship — may be “just trying to distract from [the] Epstein files or inflation ticking up or whatever,” and they don’t garner the level of coverage on CNN they might have in years past. What’s also different in Trump 2.0: Tapper said “the people he has around him” provide “no guardrails, none,” and have spent the four previous years preparing for “this assault on the government.” In addition, Tapper said there’s now a more established right-wing media ecosystem, which ultimately has been “exacerbating the divisions in our country.”
In covering Trump, Tapper said, it’s not always easy to get a read on what the president really means. “There is what Trump says publicly. There is what Trump posts on Truth Social. And then there is what Trump and his administration do. And those are three different things,” Tapper said. “I personally think what he does is the most important and what he posts on social media in the middle of the night is the least important.”
Tapper also spoke about the fateful June 27, 2024, debate between Trump and Biden for which the CNN anchor served as co-moderator. “It was shocking to see in person,” he said. After Biden’s answer where he said “We finally beat Medicare,” Tapper said, “I was thinking, ‘Holy fuck. What is going on?’… It wasn’t a cold… This was an 81-year-old man, who, like a lot of 81 year olds, had good moments and bad moments.”
At the event, Tapper accepted the 2025 Variety & Rolling Stone Truth Seeker Award, presented by his colleague Abby Phillip, anchor of CNN’s “News Night.”
In her introductory remarks, Phillip called Tapper a “modern-day renaissance man” and cited his bestseller “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” co-authored with Alex Thompson. In the book, Tapper “does what he does best: annoy people in power by asking the uncomfortable questions and demanding answers to those questions,” Phillip said.
“This is obviously not a job that will necessarily make you a hugely popular person,” Phillip told the audience. “And it might not make you a whole lot of friends with those people in power. And yet Jake has managed to, for many many years and through many presidents, built a career based on his reputation as being someone unafraid to ask the tough questions.”
Tapper, 56, first joined CNN in January 2013. “I’m very honored to get this award,” he said. “I’m at a stage of my life now where I have a little bit more gray hair and they start giving you awards on your way out the door. And I’ll take it.”