CBS' '60 Minutes' is unflinching in its White House coverage in the shadow of Trump's $20B lawsuit

NEW YORK (AP) — As CBS corporate leaders ponder settling President Donald Trump's $20 billion lawsuit against the network's “60 Minutes,” America's storied newsmagazine has produced some fast and hard-hitting stories critical of the new administration in every episode since Trump was inaugurated.

The latest was Sunday, when CBS News helped facilitate a performance featuring non-white middle and high school musicians who had won a contest and with it, the right to play with the U.S. Marine Corps Band. The original concert, however, was canceled because of Trump's executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

Correspondent Scott Pelley narrated six of the show's seven stories since Trump's inauguration, including Sunday's. He examined the administration’s policies toward Ukraine and tariffs, looked at changes in the Justice Department and reported on firings of government watchdogs. Shortly after his piece on the dismantling of USAID, Elon Musk suggested “long prison sentences” for those working on the show.

All came at a time when television's most popular and influential news broadcast was being watched to see how it would respond to a unique pressure.

“This may be a lawsuit that is designed to intimidate, but they are clearly making a statement that they will not be intimidated,” said Tom Bettag, a longtime television news producer who worked under Mike Wallace and Morley Safer at the CBS show.

Pelley, meanwhile, has quickly become a polarizing figure.

“Another week, another ‘60 Minutes’ story trying to discredit Trump policies,” Brent Baker, editor of the conservative media watchdog NewsBusters, wrote on X on Sunday night.

Trump's lawsuit, coupled with a parallel Federal Communications Commission investigation, accuses “60 Minutes” of election interference for the way it edited Bill Whitaker's interview last fall with Trump's 2024 opponent, Kamala Harris.

Two sound bites, broadcast on “60 Minutes” and CBS' “Face the Nation,” depicted Harris giving different responses to Whitaker in a discussion about Israel. CBS said Harris made both comments in her answer to Whitaker and that the two shows ended up using different parts of a long sound bite. CBS argued the apparent discrepancy was typical of editing and not, as Trump has suggested, that different remarks by Harris were used to make her look better.

CBS parent Paramount Global filed new motions in the past two weeks to get both the lawsuit and the FCC probe dismissed. Still, Shari Redstone, head of Paramount, is reportedly anxious for a settlement, much like Disney agreed to pay $16 million in December to end Trump's lawsuit against ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. Complicating matters is Paramount's proposed merger with Skydance Media, which needs approval from the Trump administration.

Many at CBS News resist a settlement, insisting “60 Minutes” did nothing wrong. The show's executive producer, Bill Owens, told his staff last month that he would not apologize as part of any prospective settlement.

“My precious ‘60 Minutes’ is fighting, quite frankly, for our life,” correspondent Lesley Stahl said earlier this month in accepting a First Amendment award from the Radio Television Digital News Association. “I am so proud of ‘60 Minutes’ that we are standing up and fighting for what is right.”

Neither Owens nor Pelley would comment on whether the show is trying to deliver any sort of message about the lawsuit through its work. Bettag said he believed “60 Minutes” is motivated by the importance of the stories.

What the show has done during the past two months is striking, said Bettag, now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

“The ‘60 Minutes’ people are such committed journalists that they’d consider it foolish to be doing these stories because of what is a frivolous lawsuit,” he said. “The lawsuit pales in comparison with the monumental changes Trump is trying to implement. Those correspondents and producers know that this is a moment that requires their very best work."

Some of the segments were unusually urgent for the newsmagazine, which tends to do longer-range stories that could take months to produce. Pelley's March 2 report about Ukraine came only days after the White House confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Musk's angry comment on his X social media platform came after Pelley's Feb. 16 story about the billionaire's role in the quick shutdown of the USAID office. “The world's richest man had cut off assistance to the world's poorest families,” Pelley said, noting that Musk collects “billions of taxpayer dollars” for his SpaceX company.

Hours later, Musk wrote on X: “60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”

Other news organizations have done admirable work under difficult circumstances, said Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University journalism professor. Besides Pelley, he cited the news staff of the Washington Post at a time the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shown more friendliness to Trump.

Six post-inauguration episodes of “60 Minutes” have averaged 6.32 million live viewers, down 3.7% from the same period in 2024, the Nielsen company said, although CBS says there has been an increase in streaming numbers.

Sunday’s “60 Minutes” story involved some elite high school students — each of them of either Black, Hispanic, Indian or Asian descent — who had earned the right to play with the Marine band before the show was called off.

CBS worked with Equity Arc, an organization devoted to increasing the number of minority students playing classical music, who organized the show for family and friends of the students outside Washington, D.C. Retired members of military bands were brought in to work with the students. CBS News, which wanted to interview the students and hear their music, paid for the travel and lodging of 22 of them.

Pelley called it the “concert that was not meant to be heard.”

“The original Marine Band concert would have been seen by hundreds,” he said. “Here tonight, these musicians are being heard by millions.”

Pelley's March 9 report, “Firing the Watchdogs,” was about Trump's efforts to fire inspectors general and thwart others who protect whistleblowers in government agencies. He quoted Trump as saying the firings were standard for a new administration taking office. “He's wrong,” Pelley said.

His story about the U.S. Justice Department examined the resistance among some prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

“As he continues to step up his attacks on President Donald Trump and the new administration, Pelley is elbowing aside all others to emerge as Trump's loudest TV critic,” wrote Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner.

In his stories, Pelley's deadpan voice and methodical style could not hide the sharpness of some observations. While narrating the story about USAID, Pelley noted that “It's too soon to tell how serious President Trump is in defiance of the Constitution."

David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social

FILE - "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl poses for a photo in her office in New York on Sept. 12, 2017. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

FILE - Elon Musk speaks during an event with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

FILE - Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the 2024 White House Tribal Nations Summit, Dec. 9, 2024, at the Department of the Interior in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

FILE - Scott Pelley, anchor of "CBS Evening News," at the CBS Upfront in New York, May 15, 2013. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)

FILE - The CBS logo at the entrance to its headquarters, in New York Dec. 6, 2018. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

President Donald Trump waves from the stairs of Air Force One upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Monday, March 17, 2025 (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A man who is suspected of killing two and wounding several others at Brown University has been found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

The man was found dead Thursday evening.

Investigators believe the man is responsible for both the shooting at Brown and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who was fatally shot in his Brookline home Monday, the official said. Authorities have not formally confirmed a connection between the two shootings.

The official could not publicly discuss details of the ongoing investigation and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Authorities said Thursday that they're looking into a connection between last weekend's mass shooting at Brown University and an attack two days later near Boston that killed a professor at another elite school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

That is according to three people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity. Two of the people said investigators had identified a person of interest in the shootings and were actively seeking that individual.

The attacker at Brown on Saturday killed two students and wounded nine others in a classroom in the school's engineering building before getting away.

About 50 miles (80 kilometers) north, MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro was gunned down in his home Monday night in the Boston suburb of Brookline. The 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist died at a hospital the next day.

The FBI previously said it knew of no links between the cases.

It's been nearly a week since the shooting at Brown. There have been other high-profile attacks in which it took days or longer to make an arrest, including in the brazen New York City sidewalk killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO last year, which took five days.

But frustration is mounting in Providence that the person behind the attack managed to get away and that a clear image of their face has yet to emerge.

“There’s no discouragement among people who understand that not every case can be solved quickly,” the state attorney general, Peter Neronha, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Authorities have scoured the area for evidence and pleaded with the public to check any phone or security footage they might have from the week before the attack, believing the shooter might have cased the scene ahead of time.

Investigators have released several videos from the hours and minutes before and after the shooting that show a person who, according to police, matches witnesses' description of the shooter. In the clips, the person is standing, walking and even running along streets just off campus, but always with a mask on or their head turned.

Although Brown officials say there are 1,200 cameras on campus, the attack happened in an older part of the engineering building that has few, if any, cameras. And investigators believe the shooter entered and left through a door that faces a residential street bordering campus, which might explain why the cameras Brown does have didn’t capture footage of the person.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said Wednesday that the city is doing “everything possible” to keep residents safe. However, he acknowledged that it is “a scary time in the city” and that families likely were having tough conversations about whether to stay in town over the holidays.

“We are doing everything we can to reassure folks, to provide comfort, and that is the best answer I can give to that difficult question,” Smiley said when asked if the city was safe.

Although it’s not unheard of for someone to disappear after carrying out such a high-profile shooting, it is rare.

In such targeted and highly public attacks, the shooters typically kill themselves or are killed or arrested by police, said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent and expert on mass shootings. When they do get away, searches can take time.

“The best they can do is what they do now, which is continue to press together all of the facts they have as fast as they can,” she said. “And, really, the best hope for solutions is going to come from the public.”

In the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, it took investigators four days to catch up to the two brothers who carried it out. In a 2023 case, Army reservist Robert Card was found dead of an apparent suicide two days after he killed 18 people and wounded 13 others in Lewiston, Maine.

The man accused of killing conservative political figure Charlie Kirk in September turned himself in about a day and a half after the attack on Utah Valley University's campus. And Luigi Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last year, was arrested five days later at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania.

Felipe Rodriguez, a retired New York police detective sergeant and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said it’s clear that shooters are learning from others who were caught.

“Most of the time an active shooter is going to go in, and he’s going to try to commit what we call maximum carnage, maximum damage,” Rodriguez said. “And at this point, they’re actually trying to get away. And they’re actually evading police with an effective methodology, which I haven’t seen before.”

Investigators have described the person they are seeking as about 5 feet, 8 inches (173 centimeters) tall and stocky. The attacker's motives remain a mystery, but authorities said Wednesday that none of the evidence suggests a specific person was being targeted.

Loureiro, who was married, joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he worked to advance clean energy technology and other research. The center, one of MIT's largest labs, had more than 250 people working across seven buildings when he took the helm. He was a professor of physics and nuclear science and engineering.

He grew up in Viseu, in central Portugal, and studied in Lisbon before earning a doctorate in London, according to MIT. He was a researcher at an institute for nuclear fusion in Lisbon before joining MIT, the university said.

“He shone a bright light as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague and leader, and was universally admired for his articulate, compassionate manner,” Dennis Whyte, an engineering professor who previously led MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, told a campus publication.

Loureiro had said he hoped his work would shape the future.

“It’s not hyperbole to say MIT is where you go to find solutions to humanity’s biggest problems,” Loureiro said when he was named to lead the plasma science lab last year. “Fusion energy will change the course of human history.”

This story was updated to delete a reference to MIT being an Ivy League school.

Richer and Tucker reported from Washington. Associated Press reporters Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed.

Law enforcement officers search the area for the Brown University shooting suspect, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025, in Salem, N.H. (AP Photo/Reba Saldanha)

A pedestrian walks along Brown University's campus on Thayer St. in Providence, R.I., Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025. (Lily Speredelozzi/The Sun Chronicle via AP)

This image taken from video provided by the FBI shows a person of interest in the investigation of the shooting that occurred at Brown University, in Providence, R.I., Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025. (FBI via AP)

A poster seeking information about the campus shooting suspect is seen on the campus of Brown University, Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025, in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

A woman lights a candle at a memorial set up in front of the Barus and Holley engineering building at Brown University in Providence, RI, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/ Mark Stockwell)

A Brown University student walks past a church on the Providence, RI, campus, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/ Mark Stockwell)