CBS News is preparing to bring Jeremy Adler, a communications executive who served as spokesperson for the January 6 Select Committee, into its press shop, according to Axios. The White House is not pleased.
Adler spent his time on the committee working under Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman who traded her party's standing for a starring role in the effort to prosecute Donald Trump. Now he's headed to a network that just wrote a $16 million check to settle a lawsuit with the very president Cheney spent years trying to destroy.
A White House source told Fox News Digital exactly how the administration views the move:
"CBS just destroyed whatever ounce of credibility they had left by hiring [an aide to] a prosecutor who built her career trying to put President Trump in jail."
CBS News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The timing here is remarkable. Last year, CBS agreed to pay $16 million to Trump's future presidential library or to charitable causes to settle the president's lawsuit against the network over its handling of a "60 Minutes" interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. The network stood accused of election interference leading up to the 2024 contest.
Following that settlement, Paramount CEO David Ellison took control of the network and handpicked Bari Weiss to serve as the top editor of CBS News. That looked like a signal. A course correction. A network that understood the ground had shifted and wanted to be taken seriously again.
Then they hired the spokesperson for the January 6 Committee.
A White House insider put it bluntly:
"It's really mind-boggling that Weiss and David Ellison would allow CBS to elevate such an unserious and dishonest person."
Whatever credibility dividend the Bari Weiss hire was supposed to pay, CBS just spent it. You don't settle a lawsuit over editorial manipulation, install a new top editor to signal reform, and then hand a communications role to someone whose entire professional identity was built around a partisan investigation targeting the sitting president. Not if the goal is trust.
Liz Cheney was once the third-highest-ranking Republican in the House. That feels like ancient history now. Her colleagues ousted her from the GOP conference chair in 2021 after she became a staunch critic of President Trump. She was then tapped as Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, one of only two Republicans who sat on the Democrat-dominated panel. Adam Kinzinger, a fellow Trump critic, was the other.
The committee was never a bipartisan investigation in any meaningful sense. It was a prosecution dressed in congressional clothing, and Cheney was its most useful prop: a Republican surname lending partisan proceedings the appearance of legitimacy.
The voters of Wyoming saw through it. Harriet Hageman, a staunch supporter of Trump, defeated Cheney in the 2022 midterms by a 66%-29% margin. That's not a loss. That's a repudiation.
Cheney responded by endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024. Her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, joined her. She appeared alongside the Democratic nominee on the campaign trail. The transformation was complete: from Republican leadership to Democratic surrogate in three years.
And Jeremy Adler was there for the ride, serving as the committee's public voice throughout the probe. His move to CBS doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in a context where legacy media outlets have functioned as a revolving door for political operatives, always in one direction.
This is the cycle conservative audiences have watched for years:
The press shop isn't the opinion page. It's the team that decides how a network presents itself, what stories get pushed, and which narratives get amplified. Putting a former January 6 Committee spokesperson in that role tells you everything about whose instincts will shape CBS News' public posture in the future.
David Ellison and Bari Weiss now face a simple question: Was the reset real, or was it a performance? Because you cannot simultaneously position yourself as a credible, reformed news organization and staff your communications team with people whose prior job was building the case against the president your network just paid $16 million for mistreating.
The White House noticed. The audience will, too.