Lesley Stahl began her “60 Minutes” report Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026, with a Georgia commissioner describing armed FBI agents seizing 2020 ballots from a warehouse.
The 84-year-old correspondent, a 35-year veteran of the newsmagazine who joined it in 1991, spent the segment on how President Donald Trump’s administration has worked to undermine the reliability of elections, talking with state and local officials. Her first stop was Fulton County, Ga. “In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that we would be raided by the FBI,” Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett, a Democrat, told Stahl.
In January, dozens of federal agents wearing vests and carrying guns arrived at the county’s warehouse with a criminal search warrant. They took hundreds of boxes holding ballots and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election. Barrett said she had no choice but to let them, and that to this day she does not know where the ballots went. She said she believed the raid was part of a nationwide effort to undermine faith in elections.
Utah’s 52 Cases, 2 Million Votes
Stahl’s next interview was with a Republican. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said the threats in the past two elections she oversaw were all external — non-state actors and cybersecurity threats. Now, she said, some of them come from inside the government.
Trump’s Justice Department demanded Utah’s statewide voter registration list. That included Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver’s license numbers — material the state is typically required by law to keep private, Henderson said. She said officials never explained why they needed it.
She also pushed back on the government’s claim that noncitizen voting is a major problem. Henderson said she found 52 possible cases among more than 2 million votes cast in Utah. Stahl said that works out to two-thousandths of 1 percent. Henderson said the department has notified her that she is officially under investigation over her refusal to turn over the voter information.
From 52 Cases to Thousands
Then Stahl turned to Trump, 80. “In the 21 months of President Trump’s second term, he has said, in so many words, the vote can’t be trusted more than 150 times,” she said. Elections in America are local, run by towns, counties and states under Article 1 of the Constitution, Stahl said, and the president has no role in running them. Trump has signed two executive orders trying to create new federal voting rules.
Harmeet Dhillon, 57, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights and a Trump appointee, gave Stahl a different number. She said the department is looking at thousands of noncitizen voting cases. Dhillon said there is no plan to station Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at polling locations, and that barring something unexpected, counting and certifying results in the states should not be interrupted. She called the idea that Trump would challenge the midterm results paranoia.
Screenings That Ran Into Saturday
The broadcast came a week after a leaked account of Stahl’s clash with CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss over a “60 Minutes” piece on violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which aired Sunday, Oct. 11. Stahl privately discussed quitting over the dispute, people familiar with it said.
Weiss, a supporter of Israel who has criticized media coverage of the war in Gaza, and her deputy, managing editor Charles Forelle, the former deputy editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, brought a heap of broad editorial notes, insiders said. Screenings ran into Saturday. The public listings, normally out on Friday, were not released until the Sunday morning of the broadcast. Forelle suggested holding the piece for a later date. Stahl objected, and it aired.
CBS rejected that account. A spokesperson said every “60 Minutes” piece goes through a rigorous editorial process that includes edits from editors, and that this one received far fewer edits than most. Stahl and fellow correspondents Bill Whitaker and Jon Wertheim met Monday, Oct. 12, for a discussion that has not been described.
Weiss had stepped into a December 2025 piece about the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, wanting to give the Trump administration more time to comment. The piece ran a month later with few changes. Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s contract was not renewed.
Stahl signed a two-year deal with CBS News after Weiss fired Scott Pelley, Alfonsi, Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon and three other senior producers. Skydance owner David Ellison called Stahl personally and promised to respect the editorial independence of “60 Minutes.” Sources who know her said she would never quit the show.
On Sunday’s broadcast, Henderson said the federal pressure would not move her, and that holding the guardrails is an important thing for her to do. “Someone has to,” she told Stahl.