Trump sued ABC on March 19 for defamation over comments made by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos, who claimed during an episode of the Sunday morning talk show that Trump was found liable for rape. Stelter called the settlement, in which ABC paid Trump $15 million, a “major victory” for the president-elect.

“These cases oftentimes do not work out for Trump. But this ABC case is a major victory. I talked to renowned First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams last night. He said, look, there’s no way to say other than this is a big win for Trump,” Stelter told “CNN Newsroom” host Jim Acosta. “It’s going to embolden him to file more of these suits. But as Abrams said, he called it disturbing that this could turn, $15 million could be paid around the use of the word rape versus sexual abuse in that interview on ABC’s ‘This Week.’”

“Look, Stephanopoulos has been a Trump target for a long time. He was very aggressive in this interview that aired in March,” Stelter continued. “So Trump decided to file suit about a week later, and a judge did not throw it out. A judge let it go forward through the discovery process.”

While hounding Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina over her support for Trump during the contentious interview, Stephanopoulos brought up her history as a rape survivor while bringing up the $83 million judgement against Trump in a civil defamation case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who Mace criticized for joking about going on a shopping spree with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Mace discussed her rape during a 2019 debate in the South Carolina state legislature over a “heartbeat” bill that limited access to abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, according to the Post and Courier.

“It’s possible that ABC decided to settle this, Jim, because there might have been embarrassing emails or text messages on ABC’s servers that were going to become public,” Stelter told Acosta. “Everybody remembers that’s what happened to Fox News when Dominion sued Fox.”

“So this might have been a case where ABC is avoiding public embarrassment by paying $15 million,” Stelter continued. “But look, there’s a lot of people that say that payment is embarrassing as well. So this is not the end of the story.”

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Musk joked on X Friday about potentially purchasing the site, with the Department of Government Efficiency co-chair asking “How much does it cost?” in response to Trump Jr. posting that he had “the funniest idea ever” referring to reports that Comcast is spinning off MSNBC and other cable channels. Stelter fretted that Musk could shift the left-leaning 24-hour news network to a less-critical tone towards President-elect Donald Trump.

“The incoming President Trump is joined at the hip by the owner of the old platform Twitter, now known as X, and every tweet Musk posts is now scrutinized very carefully for clues about what he might do or not do, you know?” Stelter told “CNN Newsroom” host Kayle Tausche. “So I think this solves — this ends the argument about how important these social media platforms are. Over the weekend, for example, Musk is joking, I think, about maybe trying to buy MSNBC. It seems he’s just trying to troll. Comcast is not making MSNBC up for sale right now. Maybe something will change in a few years. But those tweets, those posts from Musk, those memes that he’s posting, it just speaks to his power and his center of power throughout this incoming administration.”

Musk completed the purchase of Twitter in October 2022 and reinstated Trump’s account the following month.

“He used some of the same phrasing that he used a few years ago, when he ended up actually buying Twitter, when he said, ‘How much is it?’ just fairly casually,” Tausche responded. “I mean, it would seem that yes, there is a fair amount of trolling going on right now, but at the same time, Comcast is cleaving off a part of the business that could potentially be an affordable acquisition. Do you think that there’s… any possibility that it’s more than a joke?”

“Well, some inside MSNBC are taking Musk’s comments seriously. Whether he’s trolling or not, there is a serious undercurrent to this, and it is the following: In some countries, where we’ve seen democratic backsliding, where some oppositional media outlets have been captured by the government, a process known as media capture, this is exactly what happens,” Stelter claimed. “An ally of the leader, like Musk, comes in and buys a media outlet that is viewed as oppositional, and then he turns the content and makes it more friendly to the person in power. That has happened before in other countries. That’s part of the concern when — even if Elon Musk is just joking, that’s part of the concern here when it comes to MSNBC.”

MSNBC ratings fell by over fifty percent following former President Donald Trump’s defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to the New York Times. MSNBC hosts and guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and repeatedly had Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who often made claims about alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia, on the air.

“But at the moment, this spin off that Comcast is doing will take at least a year to complete,” Stelter said. “There’s no immediate sale or any of that, I‘m told, that is planned. But the idea that Musk talks about it, he likes to say, ‘The most ironic outcome is the most likely.’ And in this case, it would be pretty ironic if he controlled MSNBC.”

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Over 200 people were killed by Hurricane Helene, with people in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia still struggling to recover from wind damage and flooding. Singleton noted that the Biden-Harris administration had given hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine compared to the response to the devastation in western North Carolina and other parts of the southeastern United States caused by the hurricane, after “CNN NewsNight” host Abby Phillip pointed out that Russia started the Ukraine War.

“I agree with that. Putin obviously started the war. I am not negating that,” Singleton said. “My point is that a lot of people look at how much money we spent on this conflict and they‘re asking themselves, ‘My roads are crumbling, my schools suck. We just had major disasters across the country, FEMA doesn‘t have enough money.’”

“By the way, I don’t live in that country. I don‘t live in that country, by the way. America is not that horrible,” Stelter said, prompting Singleton to respond, “Brian, if you get out of New York and talk to regular people —”

Stelter interrupted Singleton, saying he wasn’t a resident of New York but was in a “normal city.”

“My roads are not — I love New York, but my roads are not crumbling, my schools don’t suck. I just get tired of the anti-America rhetoric,” Stelter claimed.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave American roads a “D” grade in March 2021, citing “staggering maintenance backlogs.” Schools have struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels of student performance, despite a $190 billion infusion from the Biden-Harris administration.

After some back-and-forth, Singleton told Stelter to let him finish making his point.

“There are a lot of Americans who don’t live in great cities, who do have to send their kids to terrible schools. That is a fact because of their zip codes,” Singleton said. “And to sit here arrogantly and say, ‘My kids go to great schools, I live in a great neighborhood,’ that‘s your experience, not the experience of most people in this country.”

“The roads are crumbling? Where —” Stelter asked, with Singleton cutting him off with, “Come on, bro.”

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Rumble/CNN)

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