First, Donald Trump said he wanted to meet his interviewer in Butler, Pennsylvania, where targetted by a would-be assassin in July.
Then he said he was concerned he would be “fact-checked” by CBS News’s flagship investigative TV program 60 Minutes.
Finally, he said that he wanted an apology from CBS anchor Lesley Stahl for something she never said during her encounter with the then-president in 2020.
These are the “shifting” stipulations and excuses that CBS claimed on Monday it had received from Donald Trump’s campaign when it tried to arrange a sit-down interview in advance of November’s vote.
The network said last week that Trump had pulled out of a scheduled date with correspondent Scott Pelley, although the Trump campaign claimed that “nothing was ever scheduled or locked in.”
On Monday, when the interview had been meant to air, viewers instead got a message from Pelley describing the negotiations.
“It’s been a tradition for more than half a century that the major party candidates for president sit down with 60 Minutes in October,” said Pelley.
“In 1968 it was Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey; this year, vice president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump accepted our invitation. But unfortunately, last week, Trump cancelled.”
Initially, he said, Trump’s team had proposed an interview at Mar-a-Lago and an additional meeting in Butler, Pennsylvania, to which 60 Minutes agreed.
In early September, Pelley went on, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung texted CBS to say that Trump had “said yes.”
“The campaign offered shifting explanations,” Pelley alleged. “First it complained that we would fact check the interview. We fact check every story.
“Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Lesley Stahl said in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia; she never said that.”
Interviews with both Harris and running mate Tim Walz aired on CBS on Moday evening.
The Independent has asked the Trump campaign for comment.