Did Bari Weiss delay 60 Minutes CECOT special on behalf of Marco Rubio?

With the airing of 60 Minutes' report on the torture of Venezuelan migrants in a Salvadoran dungeon, no one has more to lose than Marco Rubio

By Max Blumenthal

A 60 Minutes report on the torture of Venezuelan migrants in the custody of El Salvador’s notorious CECOT Supermax prison has been delayed under orders from CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who informed underlings that the piece would not run without comment from a top Trump administration “principal.”

Did Weiss delay release of the 60 Minutes CECOT special to protect Marco Rubio?

While White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has made himself the face of Trump’s deportation policy, it was Rubio who arranged to send 250 Venezuelan migrants to his friend Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, where they were publicly humiliated and tortured for months.

60 Minutes not only documented hideous abuses of the migrants in Salvadoran custody, but explained how the Trump admin falsified their relationship with Tren de Aragua by classifying anyone with any kind of tattoo as a bonafide TDA gangster - despite the fact TDA members do not identify by tattoos as MS-13 members have. (Only 3.2% of the Venezuelan migrants detained in CECOT had ever been convicted of violent crimes).

Bari Weiss justified her delay of the 60 Minutes report on the absurd grounds that “we need to do more.” Yet her comments contained a certain element of truth, as the piece had omitted Rubio’s central role in the scandal.

In personally arranging the transfer of the Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, Rubio undercut Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela, Rick Grenell, who was working on a deal with the Caracas that would have seen the migrants sent directly to their home country in exchange for 11 American prisoners, but on the condition that Chevron have its operating license extended in Venezuela. By transferring the migrants to CECOT instead, Rubio was able to deny oil revenue to Venezuela while escalating tensions with Maduro.

Rubio also kneecapped Trump’s Department of Justice through his Salvadoran scheme. In exchange for accepting the Venezuelans in his prison, Rubio promised Bukele that several valuable MS-13 informants would be removed from US custody and returned to El Salvador, where they could be silenced. The Salvador president and self-described “coolest dictator” feared that these MS-13 informants would expose his secret negotiations with the gang, busting his mythical image as an uncompromising crime fighter who reduced street violence with an iron fist. And so the DOJ was forced to relinquish valuable assets they’d spent years recruiting and cultivating.

Thanks to Rubio’s regime change mania, US taxpayers were billed millions of dollars to detain an overwhelmingly non-violent lot of Venezuelan migrants in a Salvadoran torture dungeon while diplomacy to free Americans was needlessly delayed.