Bari Weiss Praised El Salvador’s Dictator Before Spiking '60 Minutes' Story on His Torture Prison
Weiss touted El Salvador’s brutal leader while her blog published jokes about Trump sending immigrants to the CECOT prison.
“The hottest campaign stop is this Salvadoran supermax.” This is what Bari Weiss’s The Free Press wrote in April about CECOT – the infamous mega prison in El Salvador where Donald Trump sent immigrants without due process and in defiance of a judge’s order.
Weiss separately gushed about the popularity of El Salvador’s president, who describes himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” and how safe he’s made the Central American nation – without noting he’s suspended basic civil liberties, has been accused of making deals with gang leaders, and has thrown thousands of innocent people in jail without giving them a fair trial.
Months later, on Sunday night, Weiss spiked a CBS News story on the treatment of immigrants Trump sent to prison in El Salvador – while offering sanctimonious lectures to the actual journalists who produce ‘60 Minutes’ about how the show’s CECOT segment wasn’t ready and didn’t include enough about the Trump administration’s bogus justifications for sending people there.
Many observers have fixated on the notion that Weiss’s decision was a favor to Trump, an outgrowth of her role being essentially installed as “Editor-in-Chief” of CBS News by a Trump-aligned billionaire. But the arc that led to Weiss’s unilateral move to spike the ‘60 Minutes’ segment shows exactly why it’s so ludicrous she’s overseeing the network’s news coverage at all – particularly as it relates to El Salvador.
And Weiss is apparently doing this all for – sources in and close to the Trump administration tell Zeteo – people who don’t even like her, or who think she’s merely a “useful idiot” embedded in the legacy media that the president loves to trash.