It will be interesting to see how this ends up being handled. It’s obvious that CBS cut this because it’s all a lie.
The careful viewer will notice that just about all of the remarks that did not air are lies, distortions, and charges that Abrego Garcia has merely been accused by the government of committing, not convicted of in court. Here’s a transcript of Noem comments that were supposedly “suppressed”:
This individual was a known human smuggler, MS-13 gang member, an individual who’s a wife beater, and someone who was so perverted that he solicited nude photos from minors. And even his fellow human traffickers told him to knock it off, he was so sick in what he was doing and how he was treating small children. So he needs to never be in the United States of America, and our administration is making sure we’re doing all that we can to bring him to justice.
In reality, Trump officials utterly failed to produce anything serious tying Abrego Garcia to MS-13, even though they actively searched for such evidence for many months in what became a kind of whole-of-government mission involving numerous senior officials and multiple major agencies.
As for the “human smuggler” claim, the government has charged him in Tennessee with trafficking migrants. But the whole case stinks: A senior prosecutor in that office resigned, reportedly because the case seemed dubious. More importantly, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have plausibly claimed that the administration tried to coerce him to plead guilty to those charges by threatening to deport him to Uganda if he did not.
It’s bad enough for government officials to go on national television and rattle off a litany of hideously damning charges as fact when they haven’t yet been proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. In this case, officials apparently went to extraordinarily depraved lengths to try to coerce a guilty plea, which doesn’t exactly exude confidence in the strength of those charges to begin with.
Indeed, on the photo-solicitation charge, Politifact points out that this isn’t even in the indictment against Abrego Garcia, and is a matter the government is merely investigating. Yet Noem keeps repeating the claim as if it’s an established truth, as she did on CBS here.
I do not think CBS has any obligation to show anything this monster says. Or any of the rest of them, for that matter. I suppose they could have shown it and fact checked it as this does. But that would have taken up a huge chunk of the broadcast.