Did Bari Weiss try to bury 60 Minutes' CECOT report to protect Marco Rubio?
While Stephen Miller has been the public 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 truth, as Rubio’s central role in the scandal had been omitted.
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 Bukele opening his dungeon to the Venezuelans, Rubio promised him 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 prison while diplomacy to free Americans was needlessly delayed.
Mike