November 6, 2023

Once again, our both siderist corporate media attempts to do a "fair and balanced" profile of someone who is actually a danger to democracy by giving them airtime instead of just bringing on credible people to rebuff their dangerous nonsense.

That's what 60 Minutes treated their audience to this Sunday when they brought on insurrectionist provoking whackaloon and former Trump lawyer John Eastman and allowed him to continue to spew lies that the election might have been stolen from Trump instead of just explaining to their audience straight out that nothing coming out of the liar's mouth is worth listening to.

While Scott Pelley did do a decent job of pushing back against a number of Eastman's lies, the words "lie" and "liar" weren't used, and they weren't used to his face. If you're going to bring someone like this on and not fact check them in real time, or make it perfectly clear to your audience that what they're spewing is b.s., then you're doing them no favors with your reporting.

One of the better portions of the interview was Mike Pence's former legal counsel Greg Jacob, who apparently let Eastman have it after he helped provoke the Trump mob to storm the Capitol on January 6th.

Jacob had advised Pence that Eastman was wrong, and that he did not have the authority to affect the outcome of the election, and was in the Oval Office when Eastman was trying to "read between the lines of the Constitution" on January 5th.

After showing footage of Eastman still trying to pretend they don't know whether the election was rigged, and him participating at the rally just before the Capitol was stormed, Jacob described what it was like to be standing next to Pence as the mob was approaching:

John Eastman: And all that we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at 1 o'clock, he let the legislatures of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not. And anybody that is not willing to stand up to do it, does not deserve to be in the office. It is that simple.

Hours later — after the president's speech — rioters were stalking Mike Pence.

Greg Jacob, the vice president's counsel, was in the capitol as Pence was reading, not judging, the vote.

Greg Jacob: We started hearing "boom," "boom," "boom." And all of a sudden, glass shattered.

The riot stopped the count. In the moment, Jacob sent emails to John Eastman. "...thanks to your bull****, we are now under siege." He called Eastman "...a serpent in the ear of the president..." The violence caused the vote count to take longer than the rules allow. So, Eastman wrote back to Jacob with a plea; since the rules were broken already, why not break one more and send the votes back to the states.

Greg Jacob: The people who stormed the building believed that the vice president had authorities that he in fact did not have and that that was a motivating factor for them in storming the building. And after you see all of that actually play out, the kind of practical implications that I had expressed to him on the fifth, "If the courts don't decide this, is it gonna be decided in the streets?" Well, the streets had come to us. And he still wanted us to go ahead and push ahead with his theory.

Scott Pelley: Which told you what about John Eastman?

Greg Jacob: He was mostly concerned with the results and didn't really care how many laws had to be broken to get there.

Eastman was forced to retire as a professor at Chapman university. He asked to get on the president's pardon list, but that didn't happen. Today, he's fighting disbarment in california. And this past August, he turned himself in, in Georgia and has pleaded not guilty.

So in other words, thanks to your bullshit, we're all going to be lucky if you don't get us killed.

I actually think Pelley has been a pretty decent journalist from what I've seen of a lot of his work, but these networks and his producers have been way too tepid with the likes of Eastman, or Trump and the rest of his enablers for that matter. Just quit platforming them at all, or at least quit platforming them without real time fact checkers that don't allow any lie to go unchallenged.

You can watch the entire segment here if you're in the mood to get your blood pressure up.

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