President Donald Trump's Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon, revealed in an interview on a right-wing show that she clashed bitterly behind the scenes with 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl during a recent interview on election policy — and complained that almost none of her ranting, including her accusations that Stahl was a "liar," made it on air.
Vince Coglianese, interviewing Dhillon, called the "60 Minutes" interview a "complete dumpster fire" because Stahl was not buying President Donald Trump's unsupported allegations of wide-scale election-rigging against him.
"Throughout the entire segment, she just kept insisting, with the help of a bunch of Democrats, that there is no voter fraud problem in America, and that it's Donald Trump and Harmeet Dhillon who are sowing the distrust in our elections by being concerned about it at all," said Coglianese. "The only breath of fresh air in the segment was you. You appear a few seconds onscreen. And I thought to myself, there's no way you just sat there for two minutes and talked to Lesley Stahl."
"I spoke to her about 30 minutes, and they ran about 90 seconds of my interview," confirmed Dhillon.
"And in that conversation, what was really going on behind the scenes?" asked Coglianese. "She seemed to be trying to guide you into saying, 'This is all fake; there really is no voter fraud concern.'"
"This is not my first rodeo on '60 Minutes,'" said Dhillon. "I know their modus operandi. She asked the same questions again and again. 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."
"I don't think anyone needs to see the whole video to see how clipped and edited it was," she added.
Dhillon, a former Republican Party operative who ran unsuccessfully for RNC chair, has been one of the more outspoken partisans within Trump's Justice Department. Her social media activity has been so inflammatory it has directly undermined key federal prosecutions.
