CBS News is refusing President Trump’s demand to release the full transcript of Vice President Harris’ interview with “60 Minutes” while saying it did not hide anything by editing her answer. 

In a letter to Trump’s attorneys, a CBS News senior vice president, Gayle Sproul, said the First Amendment “fiercely protects” its editorial decisions and the former president has “no legal basis to sue.”

“Nor is there any legal basis for your demand that we provide you with the unedited transcript of the interview, which we decline to do,” Ms. Sproul said.

On Monday, attorneys for Trump demanded the network release the full transcript of its “60 Minutes” interview with Ms. Harris after it clumsily released different versions of an answer she gave to a question about Israel, which has led to allegations it deceptively edited the interview to help make the vice president’s response sound more coherent.

In a preview of an excerpt of the interview released on October 6, Ms. Harris responded to a question about why Prime Minister Netanyahu does not seem to be “listening” to American officials, using what critics called a “word salad.” In the interview that aired the following evening, the “word salad” was replaced with what CBS called a more “succinct” answer.

It is standard convention for television broadcasts to edit taped interviews for concision and time reasons. However, with Ms. Harris under intense scrutiny over whether she can answer questions coherently without digressing into “word salad”, and with CBS News already under fire for exhibiting pro-Harris bias during its moderation of the vice presidential debate, the network was heavily criticized for not only for editing the pretaped interview with Ms. Harris but also for refusing to release the full transcript of the interview. 

The networks often release these transcripts for high-profile newsmaker interviews, and CBS News itself did so recently for its interview with Speaker Johnson, who criticized CBS News for selectively editing the interview to help Democrats and hurt Republicans – removing comments he made about hurricane relief and election integrity – and demanded the network release the full transcript of the Harris interview.

Ms. Sproul, the CBS lawyer, in her response to Trump’s attorneys, pushed back on the claim the interview was “doctored.” She also insisted CBS News “did not hide any part of the Vice President’s answer to the question at issue.”

“It begs logic to argue that ‘60 Minutes’ hid the first part of the vice president’s answer to the question,” Sproul said. “It did not. The public is aware of that part of her answer because ‘60 Minutes’ itself publicly distributed it by providing it to ‘Face the Nation’ for promotional purposes and posting it on X and other ‘60 Minutes’-branded social media for the same reason.”

On Sunday, in a “Statement from ‘60 Minutes’”, CBS News admitted it edited Ms. Harris’ answer to make it “more succinct,” but it denied deceptively editing the interview. The statement also took a jab at Trump for pulling out of a planned interview with “60 Minutes.” The storied news magazine program has been the go-to destination for Democrats to give interviews in recent years – including, several times, President Obama – but has had difficulty getting top Republicans, who have been increasingly wary of CBS’ institutional bias.

In a letter after the “Statement from ‘60 Minutes’”, Trump’s lawyers demanded that the network “immediately provide and release the full, unedited transcript of the 60 Minutes interview” and preserve communications and edits of the interview “in contemplation of possible litigation.” His attorneys said CBS “intentionally misled the public by broadcasting a skillfully edited interview.”

After CBS News rejected its demand to release the transcript, a Trump campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, said, “As President Trump stated – CBS committed the worst wrongdoing in broadcast history when they maliciously and deceptively doctored Lyin’ Kamala Harris’ pathetic 60 Minutes interview. CBS is on notice to preserve their documents.”

A law professor at Georgetown University, Jonathan Turley, said in a blog post about Trump’s threat to sue the network that such a case is “legally groundless” and would likely “fail.”

“The media is allowed to engage in such editing. Indeed, bias itself is not generally actionable,” Mr. Turley said. “The threats of harassing lawsuits destroys any moral high ground for Trump. It is also entirely unnecessary.”

The controversy began after it released different versions of Ms. Harris’s interview. In the excerpt that aired on “Face the Nation,” the vice president was asked why Prime Minister Netanyahu does not seem to be listening to American officials’ advice and concerns about how Israel carries out its war against Hamas.

She answered, “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”

Yet in the primetime broadcast of “60 Minutes” that aired the following evening, when she was asked the same question about Mr. Netanyahu, the “word salad” was gone. Ms. Harris responded to the same Israel question more coherently, saying, “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”

A third edit also surfaced, posted by the “Face the Nation” account on X, which included yet another answer from Ms. Harris, with a portion that did not air on TV. In the third version, the vice president spoke about America’s efforts to help Israel defend itself from attacks by Iran. She said it is America’s “imperative to do what we can to allow Israel to defend itself against those types of attacks.”

Trump has called the edits to the interview the “worst scandal” in “broadcast history.” In a Friday interview with a radio host, Dan Bongino, the former president said, “They didn’t edit. They took her entire … paragraph … and it was a long, they say, word salad.”

“It was just words, rambling words, horrible. So they take it out, and they put another statement that she made two pages later, they insert it. And nobody would’ve known the difference, and they got caught,” he added. 

Trump said he might sue the network for “election interference” and that “60 Minutes” should be “taken off the air.” He also said the network should lose its broadcast license, which lets it broadcast “over the air.”

However, the chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, a Biden appointee and former Democratic Capitol Hill staffer, denounced Trump for his “threats against free speech” and said the commission would not act.

CBS News’s refusal to release the full transcript of the interview has also led to a complaint being filed against it with the FCC.

The Center for American Rights alleged in its filing with the FCC that CBS News engaged in “significant and intentional news distortion” by changing Ms. Harris’ interview.

The CAR’s complaint acknowledges that this “kind of editing is normal in the context of a news magazine style show” like “60 Minutes.” However, it says, “CBS crosses a line when its production reaches the point of so transforming an interviewee’s answer that it is a fundamentally different answer.”

Rather than seeking to censor CBS News or strip it of its broadcast license, CAR’s complaint asks that the FCC force it to release the transcript of its interview with Ms. Harris.

While Ms. Rosenworcel dismissed Trump’s complaint, FCC commissioner Nathan Simington told Fox News Digital he does not think CAR’s complaint is “facially ridiculous.” Mr. Simington, a Trump appointee, also said it would not be “inappropriate for the commission to take it up” as it has a history of acting on news distortion complaints.

Besides the interview with Ms. Harris and its overt support for Governor Walz during the vice presidential debate,  the beleaguered network has also come under fire for how it handled internal complaints about morning show host Tony Dokoupil’s interview with anti-Israel author Ta-Nehisi Coates. In what was supposed to be a confidential all-staff meeting on the anniversary of the October 7 attack, the inexperienced leadership team of CBS News said the interview did not meet the network’s editorial standards. 

After audio of the meeting was leaked, which lit the match on the multi-front public relations crisis for the network, the outgoing chairwoman of Paramount, Shari Redstone, then publicly slammed CBS News executives for reprimanding Mr. Dokoupil. 

In the wake of the controversy, internal memos were leaked in which CBS News’ standards executives instructed staff not to refer to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and cautioned staff against referring to Hamas members as terrorists.

Oracle scion David Ellison, who is buying CBS’s parent company Paramount, is said to consider CBS “a headache,” according to Puck, due to Trump’s anger at the network. Trump’s rage in 2017 at Time Warner, due to its parentage of CNN,  created problems for AT&T when it sought to purchase the company after Trump Administration regulators sought to block the acquisition. Should he return to power, he could create similar problems for Mr. Ellison. Puck co-founder Jon Kelly said on one of his outlet’s podcasts that CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon would be ousted by the new year.