A 35-year veteran of “60 Minutes” handed her latest report to the election officials who say the threat now comes from inside the federal government.
Lesley Stahl, the 84-year-old “60 Minutes” correspondent, devoted a report that aired Sunday, Oct. 18, to how President Donald Trump’s administration has worked to undermine the reliability of elections, built on interviews with state and local officials and broadcast a week after her leaked clash with her new boss, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss.
Stahl told viewers the midterms are “just two weeks away” and that Trump “is using his power to intimidate the people who run our elections, putting the voting system under remarkable stress.”
A Raid She Never Imagined
The report opened with a Georgia commissioner describing armed FBI agents seizing 2020 ballots from a warehouse. Stahl’s first stop was Fulton County, Ga., where Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, a Democrat, said dozens of federal agents arrived at the county’s warehouse in January wearing vests, carrying guns and holding a criminal search warrant. Hundreds of boxes of ballots and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election left with them, Barrett said.
“In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI,” Barrett told Stahl. Letting the agents proceed was her only option, she said, and the whereabouts of those ballots remain unknown to her even now.
Barrett said she believed the raid was part of a nationwide effort to undermine faith in elections. In the Oct. 18 broadcast, she called the January raid “political theater aimed at undermining the 2026 and 2028 elections.”
The Lieutenant Governor Who Refused
Non-state actors and cybersecurity threats accounted for every danger she faced in the past two elections she oversaw, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, told Stahl, and all of them came from outside. Some now originate inside the government, she said.
Utah’s statewide voter registration list was the target of a demand from Trump’s Justice Department, Henderson said, including Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver’s license numbers — records state law typically obliges officials to keep private. She said officials never gave good answers about why they needed it.
Henderson also pushed back on the government’s claim that noncitizen voting is a major problem. Her review turned up 52 possible cases among more than two million registered voters in Utah, and Stahl put that figure at two-thousandths of one percent. “State audits have shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare, though it does happen,” Stahl said.
Henderson said the department told her last month that she is under investigation.
A postal inspector intercepted a letter containing white powder addressed to her office and turned it over to the FBI, Henderson said on Oct. 18. Similar letters reached election offices in at least 32 states and more than three dozen members of Congress, and preliminary tests found no hazardous material; as of Oct. 20, no suspect had been identified.
The federal pressure would not move her, Henderson said, and she described holding the guardrails as an important thing for her to do. “Someone has to,” she told Stahl.
Charges Land the Day After Airing
Stahl tallied how often the 80-year-old president has questioned the ballot. “In the 21 months of President Trump’s second term, he has said, in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted more than 150 times,” she said.
Elections in America are local, Stahl said, run by towns, counties and states under Article 1 of the Constitution, and the president has no role in running them. Trump has signed two executive orders trying to create new federal voting rules.
Stahl reported that the Justice Department’s “latest move came on Friday when the Justice Department threatened to prosecute California election officials if they knowingly count mail-in ballots from 20,000 people the Trump administration says are likely noncitizens,” a reference to Friday, Oct. 16. On Monday, Oct. 19, the day after the segment aired, the department charged “more than two dozen foreign nationals” in California with voting as noncitizens.
A different number from Henderson’s came from Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee who serves as the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, who told Stahl the department is looking at thousands of noncitizen voting cases. No plan exists to station Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at polling locations, Dhillon said, and barring something unexpected, counting and certifying results in the states should not be interrupted. Paranoia was her word for the idea that Trump would challenge the midterm results.
In an interview with Vince Coglianese on a right-wing show, Dhillon said she spoke with Stahl for about 30 minutes and that only about 90 seconds aired. “I actually called her a liar on more than one occasion, and she did not run those clips where she actually said blatant lies and I said, ‘Lesley, that’s a lie.’ And she was self-aware enough not to run those parts,” Dhillon said. “I don’t think anyone needs to see the whole video to see how clipped and edited it was,” she added.
Fight Over the West Bank Piece
The leaked account described Stahl’s clash with Weiss over a “60 Minutes” piece on the West Bank that aired Sunday, Oct. 11. People familiar with the dispute said Stahl privately discussed quitting over it.
A heap of broad editorial notes came from Weiss and her deputy, managing editor Charles Forelle, who previously served as deputy editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, insiders said. Screenings ran into Saturday. The broadcast’s public listings, which normally go out on Friday, did not appear until the Sunday morning it aired. Forelle suggested holding the piece for a later date. Stahl objected, and the piece aired.
CBS rejected that account. A CBS spokesperson said every “60 Minutes” piece goes through a rigorous editorial process that includes edits from editors, and that this one received far fewer edits than most.
Stahl and fellow correspondents Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim met Monday, Oct. 12.
Weiss had stepped into a December 2025 piece about the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, wanting to give the Trump administration more time to comment. That piece ran about a month later, on Jan. 18, with a new introduction from correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi.
Stahl signed a two-year deal with CBS News. The deal came after Weiss fired Scott Pelley, Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon and three other senior staff members.
Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison called Stahl personally and promised to respect the editorial independence of “60 Minutes.” Sources who know her said she would never quit the show.
