Last week, Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS’ flagship news program 60 Minutes, resigned, “citing encroachments on his journalistic independence,” per The New York Times. In the first show since the news of Owens’ resignation broke, 60 Minutes ended the program with a glowing, if dubious, tribute to Owens that has since gone viral online. The program took the unusual step of alleging unethical behavior by CBS’ corporate parent Paramount for Owens’ resignation, though they didn’t present any direct evidence of this. And the facts suggest that Owens isn’t exactly the paragon of integrity he’s being made out to be.
The proximate cause for said encroachments is widely assumed to be politics. According to the Times, “Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, is eager to secure the Trump administration’s approval for a multibillion-dollar sale of her company to Skydance, a company run by the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison.”
Supposedly, Redstone has also expressed a desire to settle Donald Trump’s case against 60 Minutes over allegations they deceptively edited their interview with Kamala Harris last fall. Though the Times is loathe to discuss it, there’s also lots of speculation that Redstone, an observant Jew, was less than thrilled when 60 Minutes recently ran an offensively stupid segment where veteran reporter Leslie Stahl asked a freed Israeli hostage if his Hamas captors starved him unintentionally because Hamas ran out of food. It’s well established that Hamas steals and hoards all the food and aid coming into Gaza, and it beggars belief that anyone, let alone someone who gets paid millions by a news network, would think a terrorist organization deserves the benefit of the doubt. And further, that layers of producers and editors would put this on the air.
There may be some truth to any or all of these accusations about what’s motivating Paramount and Redstone, but if Paramount is attempting to politicize 60 Minutes‘ reporting, at least they’re trying to make a buck out of it. Bill Owens spent 26 years at 60 Minutes, eventually presiding over a news operation that has willfully corrupted itself to the point where its bias has turned the show into a laughingstock. In at least one instance that I am familiar with, Owens played a pivotal role in a gross journalistic failing at 60 Minutes that ultimately helped a Democratic presidential candidate evade responsibility for an international incident that got Americans killed.
Cloud of Scandal
Since Owens joined 60 Minutes, it’s hard to know where to begin cataloging the embarrassments. Its recent defense of Hamas and its refusal to follow past precedent and release an unedited transcript of the show’s interview with Kamala Harris, who is unable to answer basic questions in ways that aren’t insultingly inane, for fear of damaging her electoral chances were just par for the course.
The most notorious incident occurred in 2004, when 60 Minutes started a news revolution, albeit inadvertently, after internet amateurs demonstrated they were often more capable than the most respected corporate news entities. Dan Rather, maybe the biggest name in TV news at the time, breathlessly reported that 60 Minutes had obtained documents showing that political pressure was applied to excuse President George W. Bush’s poor performance in the Texas Air National Guard. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard was already seen as a convenient way of avoiding the Vietnam draft. The report aired just months before Bush’s reelection, where he was running against Sen. John Kerry, who had milked his four months in Vietnam for all it was worth. Critics, however, had rightly noted that Kerry’s account of his service was full of lies and distortions, and this had been a major campaign story. Anything that could further undermine Bush’s National Guard service would be enormously helpful to the Kerry campaign and make his own Vietnam service look more honorable by contrast.
So Rather and 60 Minutes rushed to air with a dubious almost-October surprise, clearly designed to kneecap the Bush campaign. Seemingly within minutes of the report airing, bloggers — social media was not yet a thing — were pointing out that the documents Rather claimed that 60 Minutes had authenticated were clearly produced on a modern word processor, and not a typewriter as would have been the case when the documents were allegedly produced in the early seventies. Compared to the defensive nature of news organizations today, refreshingly, CBS ran a major investigation into what happened, concluded it could not stand by the story, and ended Rather’s broadcast career.
Now Owens didn’t join 60 Minutes management until 2007, and wasn’t made top producer of the show until 2019, and, as far as I know, had nothing to do with the infamous Rathergate scandal. But it’s clear that when Owens started to run things at 60 Minutes, the show was still coming out of a cloud of scandal. If Owens was cognizant of this, let alone cared about the integrity of the program, there’s not much outward evidence he made sure the program was committed to fairness.
When he popped up in the news recently being lauded for his supposed integrity, it took me a while to remember where I’d heard his name. Then I recalled that Owens was smack in the center of an absolutely wild story about Hillary Clinton — and that’s saying something — that might be one of the biggest media scandals you’ve never heard of.
‘Benghazi and the Bombshell’
In September of 2015, President Donald Trump was still an unthinkable idea, but everyone knew Hillary Clinton was running. One of her biggest liabilities was the Benghazi scandal, where Ansar al-Sharia, an al-Qaeda affiliated terror group, attacked the U.S. embassy in the Libyan city, resulting in the deaths of four Americans and the ambassador’s body being dragged through the streets on September 11, 2012. Then Secretary of State Clinton clearly dodged responsibility for the incident; to start, she had been major advocate for the 2011 NATO bombing campaign of the country, which resulted in the death of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, which destabilized the country and allowed for the rise of Ansar al-Sharia and other militia groups. (The 2011 bombing of Libya has a remarkable place in the annals of American foreign policy mistakes. The country remains a failed state with open slave markets, and it is an especially active and deadly conduit for illegal migration to Europe.)
Rather than acknowledge the basic facts of what happened, Clinton claimed that the Benghazi attack, which was obviously an al Qaeda attack on the anniversary of September 11 no less, was actually motivated by Muslims angry about a blasphemous YouTube video. As alternate excuses go, this one was particularly offensive. It was also parroted by Barack Obama and Susan Rice, and this led to the arrest of the maker of the YouTube video for unrelated parole violations, raising First Amendment concerns since the parole violations clearly weren’t the impetus for the federal manhunt that ensued. Finding someone else to blame for Clinton and Obama’s blundering was a much more likely motivation, and even years later, Republicans in Congress were still investigating and trying to get to the bottom of what went on in Benghazi.
It wasn’t just congressional Republicans that were investigating. It seems quaint now, but there was a time when if a scandal surrounding a Democrat seemed large enough, liberal corporate media organizations rolled up their sleeves and went to work. In March of 2015, a joint investigation between ProPublica and the now defunct Gawker on Clinton’s involvement in Benghazi dropped and contained some startling revelations. Hacked emails from Clinton released online in 2013 revealed that “starting weeks before Islamic militants attacked the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, longtime Clinton family confidante Sidney Blumenthal supplied intelligence to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered by a secret network that included a former CIA clandestine service officer.”
Blumenthal was a notorious political operative, renowned for his dirty tricks and fealty to the Clintons. (When Clinton ran against Obama in the Democrat primary in 2008, Blumenthal was actually the person responsible for starting the rumors Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and thus ineligible to be president — “birtherism” spread to the right-wing later.) The CIA operative in question, Tyler Drumheller, also had a very checkered reputation. The former head of the CIA’s clandestine operations in Europe, Drumheller left the agency in 2005 and quickly became a minor hero to the left for publicly questioning the intel sources the Bush administration had used to justify the Iraq War. This resulted in Drumheller’s accounts of what happened being picked apart and excoriated as dishonest and unreliable by former CIA Director George Tenet, who served as CIA director under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, in several pages of his 2007 memoir.
The other shocking thing about what Blumenthal and Drumheller were doing was that they were also working with David L. Grange, a major general who formerly ran a secret special operations unit. Grange had since founded “Osprey Global Solutions,” a private military and logistics company — think Blackwater et al. — listed as a “global partner” on the State Department’s website.
Naturally, this unholy triumvirate was in regular communication with Hillary Clinton about Global Osprey Solutions’ presumably lucrative contracts helping the transitional authority in Libya “assist in the resumption of access to its assets and operations in country” as well as training supporting forces in “rule-of-land warfare.” Per ProPublica, Tyler Drumheller LLC was also pitching its services “to develop a program that will provide discreet confidential information allowing the appropriate entities in Libya to address any regional and international challenges.” They were also directly feeding intelligence reports to Clinton. The day after the Benghazi attack, Drumheller even sent Clinton a memo saying Ansar al-Sharia was behind the attack, not people angry about a YouTube video. If Clinton was trying to extract herself from responsibility for Benghazi, it probably didn’t help that people with a direct line to her were obviously trying to exploit the situation.
Now interestingly enough, the heat on Hillary Clinton for Benghazi was still such that even 60 Minutes had turned their eye toward an exposé. This culminated in a disastrous report on Benghazi by Lara Logan in the fall of 2013. Logan’s 60 Minutes report had centered on the tale of a private military contractor named Dylan Davies, who claimed to have tried and failed to save the four people killed in Benghazi. He told an accusatory eyewitness tale of how the U.S. government could and should have done more to save the men killed in the attack. Almost as soon as it aired, there were questions about the truth of Davies’ account, which contradicted what he had told his employer, another mercenary outfit called Blue Mountain Group, as well as the State Department. The report completely fell apart and CBS went so far as to remove the transcript of Logan’s report from news services.
Logan was an unusually attractive South African reporter who’d had a meteoric rise before landing a coveted spot on America’s most prestigious news program, and there was no shortage of industry rivals looking to take her down a peg. And while the problems of Logan’s high-profile report would be notable by any standard, it certainly didn’t help that Logan’s report had dared to threaten the presidential ambitions of a Democrat presidential candidate, who the media usually handle with kid gloves. A few months after the report aired, New York Magazine ran a gossipy 6,500 word story about the 60 Minutes scandal headlined, “Benghazi and the Bombshell: Is Lara Logan too toxic to return to ‘60 Minutes?’” Logan ended up taking a leave of absence from 60 Minutes and eventually left CBS altogether.
Naturally, all the coverage of the CBS scandal was focused on Logan and didn’t really ask many hard questions about what the hell happened to 60 Minutes‘ vaunted editorial process to allow Logan’s flawed report to make it to air. At this point I’d been following the ProPublica details closely. I had previously done a lot of reporting on the government’s increasing reliance on private military companies during the Iraq War, and the maneuverings of Global Osprey Solutions caught my eye, to say nothing of the fact that anytime Sidney Blumenthal’s name appears in the news it’s a strong indication something is not right. I wrote a lengthy follow-up to the ProPublica report on Clinton’s spy ring, and some months later someone passed on a very interesting tidbit: One of the people involved in working on Lara Logan’s ill-fated 60 Minutes report was none other than Tyler Drumheller.
Ignored Corruption
Drumheller’s turn against the Bush administration garnered him a lot of favorable press, which included a glowing 60 Minutes profile, titled “A Spy Speaks Out.” In the years that followed, Drumheller developed a professional relationship with 60 Minutes. I’m told that it’s not uncommon for major news agencies to keep people with access to the world of spooks around to consult on sensitive national security matters, and in 2015 when I was reporting on all this it seemed a little less suspect than it does now, especially considering we were a year away from a torrent of dishonest leaks from the intel community attempting to tie Donald Trump to Russia.
But in the case of Tyler Drumheller, it was still plenty suspect. In an article for the now-defunct The Weekly Standard magazine, I reported that Logan’s story, which was reported on over a period of several months, was not originally focused on the problematic testimony of Dylan Davies: “A source with personal knowledge of how the report came together told The Weekly Standard that when Logan started working on the report soon after the attack, in the fall of 2012, it was originally focused on establishing al Qaeda’s role and the White House and State Department’s attempts to obfuscate this central fact. According to the source, Drumheller was working behind the scenes to discourage Logan from making her report about the Obama administration’s evading questions about al Qaeda’s role in Benghazi.” (For what it’s worth, I also wrote a longer, more detailed report on this than what appeared in the magazine for the Weekly Standard website.)
In other words, 60 Minutes‘ most high-profile journalistic failure since Rathergate came about not necessarily because Logan failed to do her job. It was more than likely a result of allowing a dubious and manipulative ex-CIA agent to shape their coverage of the Benghazi attack, even though he was concurrently currying favor with Hillary Clinton for personal profit. If you’d asked a celebrated practitioner of the political dark arts such as Sidney Blumenthal and a CIA clandestine operations expert to bump heads and find a way to discredit a 60 Minutes report that could potentially do real damage to her nascent presidential campaign, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine coming up with an operation just like this.
CBS told me on record, “Tyler Drumheller was not involved in any way on the Benghazi story,” but did not deny he had worked for the news program. This contradicted my own highly credible, albeit off the record, sources from CBS News and 60 Minutes telling me otherwise. I thought for sure my report would make some waves, but aside from a few raised eyebrows online, as far as I know 60 Minutes got no questions about what they were doing working with the likes of Tyler Drumheller from other media organizations. It didn’t help that Drumheller died from a bout with cancer two months before my report was published in October of 2015 and was no longer available to answer questions.
I went back to the Blumenthal-Drumheller well years later, after I learned the FBI was given documents that may have further explained what was going on:
The documents, quietly released as part of the FBI’s case files for the “Midyear Exam,” its code name for the Clinton email investigation, revive a lingering mystery from Clinton’s tenure as the nation’s chief diplomat: Why did Sidney Blumenthal, the former journalist and Bill Clinton White House aide, send her a series of detailed memos and reports about Libya beginning in 2011?
The documents offer an answer. They allege that Blumenthal sent the emails as a “quid pro quo” to free up classified State Department financial intelligence to help Libya recover as much as $66 billion spirited offshore by slain strongman Moammar Gadhafi.
Out of that, Blumenthal and associates stood to gain a brokers’ cut of perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.
Those documents, obtained by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch, were given directly to the Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in 2016 — right around the same time that Hillary Clinton’s associates were shopping a “dossier” on Trump’s ties to Russia. I don’t think I have to tell you which of these two foreign influence investigations into the respective presidential candidates that year was aggressively pursued by Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, and which one developed a case of bureaucratic leprosy.
Anyway, I hadn’t pondered the depths of all this frustratingly ignored and brazen corruption for years. To finally bring this home, last week it all came flooding back when I remembered a small detail from my report on what went wrong with 60 Minutes‘ Benghazi report:
A second source very familiar with CBS News operations confirmed Drumheller’s behind-the-scenes meddling and told The Weekly Standard that Drumheller’s closest relationship at CBS was with 60 Minutes executive editor Bill Owens. According to New York magazine, Owens was responsible for vetting Logan’s story.
Owens was, of course, promoted to being the man completely in charge of 60 Minutes in 2019, despite the fact he bore direct responsibility for one of the biggest errors in the network’s history a few years earlier. Fortunately for him, the blame quickly shifted to Logan, no one asked questions about his relationship to Drumheller, and unlike Rathergate, the mistake helped the Democrat presidential candidate rather than hurt them.
So when 60 Minutes signed off last week with a hoary tribute to Owens — “his was a quest to open minds, not close them” — and blamed his firing on unethical corporate overlords, I nearly did a spit take. I’m sure he was responsible for a lot of valuable journalism over the years, and to some degree the world of high stakes network news is always going to be defined by corporate politics and superficial appeals for the sake of ratings. But I still fail to see how the likes of Bill Owens did one thing during decades of constant reputational damage to make me think that 60 Minutes cared about the facts above all else.
Jesus Christ is King
