Former CBS investigative reporter Catherine Herridge revealed Thursday what many Americans long suspected but were told was a “conspiracy theory”: CBS News executives deliberately delayed her reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop—not because it wasn’t ready, but because the timing wasn’t politically convenient.
Herridge, who now works as an independent journalist after being laid off by CBS in February 2024, made the revelation in a video posted on X. Her departure came amid a high-profile legal fight over journalist source protections—one she waged while clashing internally with CBS leadership.
According to Herridge, her reporting on the laptop’s contents was ready before the 2022 midterm elections, but executives chose to sit on it.
“When we did the story, we did it after the midterms,” Herridge said. “I argued against that because it was ready before the midterms and my training is that you should always do the story when it’s ready to go. You should not be dictated by the political cycle.”
Apparently, that rule only applies when the reporting doesn’t threaten Democrats.
Herridge said once the story finally aired on CBS’s morning news program, it was obvious there was much more to investigate—material that never made it to air.
“In the text messages, there’s unfortunately… the use of the N word, the liberal use of the N word,” she said, noting the volume and seriousness of the material that remained untouched.
For context, the Daily Caller News Foundation confirmed the authenticity of parts of the laptop as early as October 2020—just weeks before the presidential election. The Washington Post and New York Times followed up much later, quietly confirming the data’s authenticity in March 2022, well after Joe Biden was safely in office.
Herridge also detailed the lengths she went to ensure the integrity of her reporting, describing “a lot of effort to get the cleanest copy” of the laptop data—undercutting years of media claims that the story was too “uncertain” or “dangerous” to report.
Meanwhile, reality has been inconvenient for the narrative. In June 2024, a Delaware jury convicted Hunter Biden on three felony gun charges related to his 2018 firearm purchase. He later pleaded guilty to federal tax charges in September 2024—only to be pardoned by his father, then-President Joe Biden, on December 1, 2024. So much for “no one is above the law.”
Herridge’s troubles with the media establishment didn’t stop there. She faced civil contempt charges after refusing to comply with an order from U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper—an Obama appointee—demanding she reveal sources from a 2017 Fox News investigation involving suspected Chinese espionage. Herridge later testified before the House Judiciary Committee, detailing both the legal pressure she faced and her termination from CBS.
In an ironic twist, Paramount, CBS News’ parent company, has since been acquired by Skydance, which appointed Bari Weiss, co-founder of The Free Press, as editor-in-chief of CBS News—suggesting even corporate America may have realized the credibility crisis had gone too far.
CBS News did not respond to a request for comment.
Shocking, right? A major network delaying verified reporting to protect Democrats, then punishing a journalist who insisted on doing her job. But don’t worry—the same people who buried the story will still lecture Americans about “threats to democracy” and “misinformation.”
