Imagine spending weeks assembling the perfect 60 Minutes deportation tragedy, only to discover that immigration cases come with actual fucking paperwork. CBS promoted its masterpiece at 5:18 p.m. By 6:09, DHS General Counsel James Percival had publicly announced he'd pulled the man's immigration file and found a rather interesting complication. Fifty-one minutes. That's how long the celebration lasted before someone brought documents to the pity party. Just think of the production effort. The sympathetic interviews. The grieving family. The solemn atmosphere. The carefully selected emotional details. An entire television operation dedicated to making America feel terrible about deporting Moussa Diawara. The only thing missing was apparently a sufficiently thorough examination of the case they were turning into a national morality play. And the paperwork was spectacularly inconvenient. CBS emphasized Diawara's fear of religious persecution following his conversion to Christianity. Percival said the immigration file identified his claimed fear as persecution for being gay. That's the sort of discrepancy that might warrant a question or two before the dramatic music swells. Then comes the really delicious part. CBS acknowledged that America could legally deport Diawara. His protection concerned Mali. American authorities transported him to Ghana, whose government subsequently sent him to Mali. A complicated legal distinction, certainly. Almost enough to ruin the atmosphere. Somewhere between the family interviews and the finished production, the story apparently became much more emotionally compelling than the unresolved questions underneath it. And that's the exquisite black comedy of the whole disaster. 60 Minutes has spent decades cultivating an image of fearless investigative excellence. The stopwatch. The gravitas. The legendary reputation for digging relentlessly until the truth emerges. Yet its showcase deportation story was publicly challenged in less time than it takes to watch a single episode. The network famous for investigating everybody else finally encountered its most terrifying adversary. A government lawyer with access to a filing cabinet. Apparently, the one thing nobody expected at 60 Minutes was for somebody to investigate the investigation. (article below)