“The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable,” Scott Pelley said late Tuesday just hours after being fired from CBS News after almost 40 years at the network. “The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well,” the former CBS Evening News anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent added in a scathing parting salvo to CBS News boss Bari Weiss, newly minted 60 EP Nick Bilton and Paramount CEO David Ellison.

As Ellison seeks full approval of his $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery from the federal government, a blunt Pelley accused CBS News of bending the knee to Donald Trump.

Revealing that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” Pelley stated “incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc.” Throwing Free Press founder Weiss well under the bus in a chaotic news division now in open revolt I hear, Pelley continued: “In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.”