The Tennessee Star’s CEO and editor-in-chief, Michael Patrick Leahy, and lead reporter, Tom Pappert, strongly condemned CBS’ “60 Minutes” segment featuring fired Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Erez Reuveni, calling it a “propaganda-palooza” piece that distorted the facts surrounding Reuveni’s firing and the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.
On Sunday night, “60 Minutes” aired a segment featuring journalist Scott Pelley interviewing Reuveni, who was fired over his handling of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation case and other immigration cases.
Earlier this year, Reuveni filed a whistleblower complaint alleging misconduct by Trump-era DOJ officials, claiming he attempted to advise his former client, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that it was planning to engage in illegal activity in three separate immigration court cases, but was “thwarted, fired, and publicly disparaged” for his efforts by the Trump administration.
Reuveni was fired earlier this year after claiming in a legal filing that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was an “administrative error.”
On Monday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, Leahy and Pappert dissected Reuveni’s “60 Minutes” interview, criticizing Pelley and CBS for portraying Reuveni as a whistleblower and victim.
Starting off with Pelley’s claim during the interview that Reuveni was “effective” in “defending President Donald Trump’s first term immigration policy,” Pappert disagreed, pointing to Reuveni’s disastrous defense of Trump’s Executive Order 13780, titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” in 2017.
“He was not successful in Trump’s first term. He was the lawyer appointed to defend the administration on the Muslim ban where Trump identified, I think it was, 11 predominantly Muslim nations from a list created by the Obama administration and said, we’re going to limit immigration from these countries because of the number of terrorists in them. Erez Reuveni was the guy defending the Trump administration, and anybody who remembers that, remembers that it resulted in immediate injunctions, horrible press coverage, and some of it was enjoined.
“Now, at the end of the day, the order that Trump signed remained in effect. However, there were so many judges along the way that came in and enjoined certain parts of it that the meat of what Trump wanted to accomplish, some say, was not accomplished. So for Erez Reuveni to claim that this is a feather in his cap is a wild stretch in my opinion,” he added.
Pappert further accused CBS and Pelley of distorting the legal context surrounding the Abrego Garcia case, in which Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan gang members.
He argues that these individuals were tied to state-sponsored gangs, designated terrorist organizations, and thus did not have standard due process rights.
“MS-13 and Tren De Aragua and other cartels and Central and South American gangs have been classified foreign terrorist organizations. This is the same designation using the same law that was applied for ISIS, for Al-Qaeda, for all of these terrorists that the United States has been at war with,” Pappert explained.
“So to say that there is some sort of due process necessity or requirement for these individuals would be to say that every Al-Qaeda terrorist that was killed by our brave soldiers overseas over the past two and a half decades, those were all murders and we should have brought them to America and tried them before an Obama-appointed judge, it’s an insane idea,” he added.
Leahy agreed, adding, “[Members of designated terrorist organizations] don’t have a right to be heard by a judge. Now, illegal aliens who aren’t criminals and who aren’t parts of terrorist groups do have certain due process rights, but not the same rights that American citizens have.”
Leahy and Pappert explained how CBS misled viewers by omitting the fact that the detainees were being held in Texas—outside the jurisdiction of Judge James Boasberg, who had issued a verbal order in D.C. halting deportation flights of Tren de Aragua gang members—and that the challenge to their deportation was orchestrated by partisan attorneys exploiting a sympathetic judge.
Leahy mocked Pelley for treating Boasberg and Reuveni as impartial, arguing instead that Boasberg is openly anti-Trump and manipulated judicial procedure to obstruct the deportation flights.
He also noted how Boasberg issued a verbal order late on a weekend, after the deportation planes had already taken off.
“All of these left-wing attorneys were queued up to bring a challenge into Judge Boasberg’s case. They know Boasberg hates Trump and has said so publicly he is going to be doing everything he possibly can to undermine Trump. Now, Boasberg, if he’d done the right thing, would’ve said, ‘I’m sorry, you left wing attorneys, the proper venue is not the District of Columbia. The proper venue is Texas.’ But he didn’t do that. Why? Because he wanted to challenge the Trump administration,” Leahy explained.
“On a Saturday morning…this judge who hates Donald Trump issues a verbal order, not a written order to say stop the planes…What they’re angry about here is that they didn’t move quickly enough to legally stop the deportation of these Tren de Aragua criminal gang members,” he added.
Pappert and Leahy stressed that the DOJ’s actions were consistent with national security law and that Reuveni’s behavior of criticizing his client in court was a betrayal of professional ethics.
“It seems that according to Reuveni, the only proper action would’ve been to go before Boasberg and say, ‘I hate my client. I hate Donald Trump. They’re bad people, issue a really mean ruling, judge. This is awful.’ That seems to be what Reuveni wanted to happen,” Pappert said.
Further, Leahy and Pappert rejected the claim that the government willfully violated court orders and argued that CBS’ portrayal of events was emotionally manipulative and legally flawed, particularly the idea that a verbal or unofficial court order should have halted the deportations in progress.
“Omissions and misrepresentations: those two words alone characterize this segment of 60 Minutes,” Pappert said.
With regard to Abrego Garcia’s ties to MS-13, Leahy and Pappert pointed to multiple immigration court decisions from 2019 that, in their view, supported the claim that Abrego Garcia was affiliated with the gang.
They accused Reuveni of acting more like Garcia’s defense lawyer than a government attorney by allegedly ignoring this prior evidence and presenting an incomplete case to the court.
“Reuveni was acting as a defense attorney for Abrego Garcia, not as a DOJ lawyer,” Pappert said.
Leahy and Pappert called for a rebuttal opportunity on CBS, calling the network’s new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, who has publicly criticized media bias, to step in and uphold journalistic integrity by offering them equal time to present what they view as the full, factual story.
“We demand equal time on CBS, so Tom Pappert and I can present the facts of the case to totally destroy the false arguments made by Scott Pelley and Erez Reuveni,” Leahy said.
“If Bari Weiss really cares about good journalism, this is her golden opportunity. I certainly hope she’ll take it,” Pappert added.
Tune in now to The Michael Patrick Leahy Show – your AMERICA FIRST news talk!
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– Read more at @TheTNStarhttps://t.co/eUQvXgVbMj— MichaelPatrick Leahy (@michaelpleahy) October 20, 2025
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
