Award-winning investigative journalist Catherine Herridge, who was fired from CBS News, unloaded all of her thoughts to Tucker Carlson in a lengthy interview released Thursday.
Herridge previously accused her former employer CBS of “journalistic rape” after the network allegedly seized all of her computers, records and files and locked Herridge out of her email upon informing her of her termination. Herridge admitted “there was tension” at the network when she “sort of turned [her] lens” on President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
“Did you feel — could you feel it at the company that, like, people didn’t want you to do this?” Carlson asked.
“I’ve always tried to be respectful of my former employers. And I testified to Congress that, I mean, there was tension over the Biden reporting. Especially when I sort of turned my lens on to President Biden,” Herridge said.
“Oh, didn’t like that, huh?” Carlson commented. “I’m sorry. That’s, it’s, I’ll say it. You don’t need to. I’m not even speaking of CBS specifically. So corrupt to me, that’s just absolutely ridiculous, because it’s not a reporter’s job to cover for a politician, right? I’m just checking.” (RELATED: ‘I Don’t Mean To Call You Stupid, But’: Tucker Utterly Stumps Reporter By Simply Asking For A Citation)
“Well, you know, I, I like to think that I call balls and strikes,” Herridge said. “People like to talk about the Hunter Biden reporting at CBS. But I was also the reporter who obtained the audiotape of President Trump apparently bragging about these Iran documents at Mar-A-Lago. But they don’t talk about that.”
Carlson said it was “super obvious” that CBS fired Herridge “before the election” due to her reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. Herridge commented on Hunter Biden’s reported attendance at White House meetings regarding his father’s presidency and reelection bid.
“I guess what has my attention is that over the last couple of years, there has been such an effort by the white House to distance the president from his son, especially in terms of business affairs. But now they’re really sort of joined, joined at the hip, apparently. I don’t know that independently, but, they’re very — they just, did their relationship really suddenly change in that moment or not? Or maybe it’s always been like that. I don’t know the answer to that,” Herridge remarked.
The ex-CBS News reporter also mentioned that she believes CBS could have led “earlier” on the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“I want to be respectful of my former employer. I think that there was an opportunity to lead earlier on that story. I guess I would leave it at that,” Herridge said.
Herridge said it’s CBS’s “choice” whether she would “work there or not,” but he called the seizing of her records “a terrible red line.”
Herridge’s layoff via Zoom call was part of CBS’s massive purge of around 800 staffers in February. She explained that her firing from CBS News was “completely different” than when she departed from other major media companies. Despite her unwillingness to touch on “all the details,” the investigative journalist said a “very vigorous back and forth” occurred regarding the return of her records. (RELATED: ‘It Felt A Little Dirty’: Tucker Carlson Tells Chris Cuomo He ‘Went After’ Him)
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“When I had left other major organizations, ABC and Fox, it was completely different,” Herridge said. “There was an understanding that you would go through your materials, you would take with you what was essentially your reporting materials and you would leave what belonged to the company.”
“And I knew from people at CBS that what was happening to me was not standard,” she continued. “One person in particular said that, when their office was cleaned out, they put in dirty coffee cups and post-it notes. I mean, everything came back to them.”
Herridge told Carlson that she lost her company health insurance, which was “a very big deal” because she has a son with a “chronic medical condition.”
“One of our sons asked me, ‘mom, are you going to go to jail?’ And I wanted to tell him that in this country where we say we value — I get a little choked up when I think about it — but, you know, in this country where we say we value democracy and we value a vigorous press, that it was impossible. But I couldn’t offer him that assurance,” Herridge said.
