News/Commentary

Spiked ’60 Minutes’ feature leaked, posted online

December 23, 2025 | | Print Article

It turns out that CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss was powerless to stop the release of a controversial “60 Minutes” segment highly critical of President Donald J. Trump’s deportation policies before it was fixed to provide more context.

On Monday, the leaked problematic report by activist reporter Sharyn Alfonsi was posted to social media just a day after it was originally set to air on Sunday night’s edition of the network’s flagship “news” program before it was pulled by Weiss, igniting yet another tiresome firestorm of leftist outrage.

The “spiked” segment had been made available after it was “mistakenly” uploaded to Canada’s Global TV app after the “60 Minutes” episode aired on Canada’s Global News without the story, which alleges that illegal aliens deported by the Trump administration were subjected to torture at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador.

Left-wing journalist Yashar Ali posted the leaked segment to his blog, with it also being shared on social media platforms.

“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” claimed one deported illegal in the sensational segment, which ran for nearly 14 minutes, Variety reported.

“Four guards grabbed me, and they beat me until I bled, until the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth,” he said.

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“It’s a cell for punishment where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour, and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us while we were in there,” according to Axios.

Another one told Alfonsi in the lurid and slanted piece that failed to provide information on the violent nature of Tren de Aragua, the savage Venezuelan gang that has been labeled by some as “MS-13 on steroids.”

The main interviewee is identified as a Venezuelan college student caught up in the deportation, an obvious example of cherry-picking to misleadingly portray the vicious criminals who were deported as innocent victims of the Trump administration’s cruelty, who were mistakenly and unjustly swept up and deprived of their constitutional rights.

In a memo to disgruntled staffers obtained by Axios, Weiss explained her rationale for pulling the report, including that “The data we present paints an incongruent picture. Of the 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT, we say nearly half have no criminal histories. In other words, more than half do have criminal histories.”

“My general view here is that we do our viewers the best service by presenting them with the full context they need to assess the story. In other words, I believe we need to do more reporting here,” she said.

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But Weiss’s acting in her role as editor was rejected by her underlings, especially Alfonsi, who railed against her boss in an email to colleagues that was also leaked to the media, claiming that the decision to hold the segment back was “a political one” and not for journalistic reasons.

“Inmates running the asylum at CBS News. The 60 Minutes crew having the CENCOT piece still air in Canada shows that,” NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck wrote in a post to X after the segment leaked. “They don’t respect Bari Weiss and the Ellisons and think they can force her hand.”

“Hopefully Bari has learned from Chris Licht and not suffered the same fate,” Houck added, referring to the reform-minded ex-CNN boss who fell victim to mutinous staffers.

Chris Donaldson
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