60 Minutes - 2/21/2021: Attack on the Judiciary, Handcuffed to the Truth, QAnon

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

In an interview with Bill Whitaker, U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas, whose son was killed, says FBI evidence found suggested the gunman was also targeting Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Scott Pelley reports on the efforts to hold Syrian President Bashar Assad accountable for the atrocities committed against his own people in Syria's civil war. And DHS official Elizabeth Neumann tells Lesley Stahl hate groups are targeting disillusioned QAnon followers. Those stories on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. This federal judge's son was murdered, her husband wounded, in a brazen and well-planned attack on her home. 60 Minutes has learned that same gunman had another jurist on his hit list. They found another gun, a Glock, more ammunition. But the most troubling thing they found was a manila folder

with a workup on Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Who holds those responsible for war crimes accountable? In Syria, it's often civilians who have bravely defied a sadistic dictator and the 21st century's worst atrocities. As you'll hear tonight, they have risked their lives to tell the stories of the men, women, and children who continue to be murdered by their own government. Democracy has prevailed. A month after Joe Biden was inaugurated, the QAnon movement finds itself at a moment of truth. We don't want, we don't want. Their prophecy of President Trump vanquishing his enemies

in an apocalyptic reckoning didn't materialize. Stop the steal! Stop the steal! Joe Biden gets sworn in and you started seeing chatter online. I've been conned. This has all been a scam. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Nora O'Donnell.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more, tonight on 60 Minutes. Half the time, someone is unhappy with a judge's ruling. The normal recourse is an appeal. But in the caustic atmosphere of today's politics, there's a real chance the disgruntled party will threaten the judge. In the last five years, threats of federal judges have jumped 400% to more than 4,000 last year, many of them death threats, sometimes ending in violence.

Now, judges are breaking with tradition and publicly calling on lawmakers to provide more protection. One of the strongest voices is federal judge Esther Salas. This past July, she was at home in New Jersey, in the basement with her son Daniel, cleaning up after his 20th birthday party when a man disguised as a FedEx driver pulled up outside. Danny turned around and he said, let's keep talking. I love talking to your mom. And it was at that exact moment that the doorbell rang. And before I could stop him, he just shot up the stairs. The next thing I hear is, boom! It just sounded like a mini-bomb. And then I hear, no! And then I hear, boom, boom, boom! And I just screamed,

what is happening? When I got upstairs, it was something no mother should ever see. Daniel lying bleeding by the door, Mark, her husband, on his knees holding his side. Daniel was barely clinging to life. I didn't even know what to do. I remember picking up his shirt and seeing the bullet hole. You know, we were screaming, Daniel, hold on and don't leave us. And then I just, as I think about that day, I just, I realized I was watching my only child fade

away. Daniel died on the way to the hospital. Mark is lucky to be alive. How seriously injured was he? Mark was shot three times. In the right chest, the left abdomen, in the arm. A close-knit family, they called themselves the Three Musketeers. Judge Salas told us Daniel, a college sophomore, was the center of their universe. From his wounds, the FBI said it appeared Daniel had tried to block the gunman. When did you realize that the attack was meant for you?

It wasn't until the FBI debriefings. They've looked at this case inside and out. Tell me, ma'am, you were the target. He wanted to get you. The shooter was Roy Den Hollander, a 72-year-old lawyer. He harbored deep hatred for women and left behind a bitter manifesto. He accused Judge Salas of being, quote, a lazy Latina, dragging her feet on his lawsuit. Police found his body the next day.

He had shot himself. The FBI discovered he had killed another lawyer a week before. Then he went hunting for Judge Salas. He knew where, obviously where I lived. He knew my routes to work. He knew the church we attended. He had Daniel's school. He knew baseball games.

Just a complete workup on me and my family. The information that he got, all from legal sources? All open sources, they call it. We met Judge Salas outside her home six months after Daniel's murder. She told us her husband needs additional surgery. The house has been sold. 20 years of wonderful memories, she told us her husband needs additional surgery. The house has been sold. Twenty years of wonderful memories, she told us, and one that's excruciating.

We are living every parent's worst nightmare, making preparations to bury our only child, Daniel. Last August, in a highly unusual move for a federal judge, Judge Salas made a personal plea to lawmakers on YouTube. We may not be able to stop something like this from happening again, but we can make it hard for those who target us to track us down. Since Daniel's funeral, Judge Salas has become a crusader for federal legislation to scrub judges' personal information from the internet. Her mission became more urgent when the FBI discovered a second locker in New Jersey

belonging to her son's killer. What did they find? What was in the locker? They found another gun, a Glock, more ammunition. But the most troubling thing they found was a Manila folder with a workup on Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor. Yes. Chilling. What do you think when you find that a Supreme Court Justice was on his list? More than on his list, on his sights. They had her favorite restaurants,

where she worked out, her friends. Tonight is the first time that plot has been revealed. Who knows what could have happened, but we need to understand that judges are at risk. We need to understand that we put ourselves in great danger every day for doing our jobs. This fact has to wake us up. As the first Hispanic woman to serve as a district court judge. Judge Salas told us she never dreamed she'd be putting her family in harm's way when she was sworn in in 2011. The last judicial security upgrade was 15 years ago, after Chicago Judge Joan Lefkow came home one night and found her husband and mother shot dead by a disgruntled plaintiff. The new legislation to be taken up by the Senate is seeking more than $250 million for home security and 1,000 more deputy marshals.

It would erase a long list of personal data online, such as a home address, driver's license, and in becoming a public person, don't you have to give up some of your personal details for the sake of accountability? You're right. I did choose to become a public servant. And if anyone has a problem with what I've ruled in a particular case, they can appeal. If anyone is upset, the courthouse address, you know, it's known to everyone. Come to the courthouse. But why do you need to come to my house? We can't show you, but U.S. Marshals now provide round-the-clock security for Judge Salas. She told us judges are increasingly threatened online. Last year, there were 4,200 threats against federal judges. She read us a few of those. We, quote, must start killing these corrupt politicians and judges and their families,

end quote. Another one. The judge is a traitor and has a death sentence. And this is since the death of Daniel? This is since Daniel's murder in this very house. One other one, just in Mississippi, quote, I will kill you. I just want to get the gun and come down there and blow all their brains out. State of Washington versus Donald J. Trump.

But perhaps no judge in the country has felt the heat of online threats more than senior U.S. District Judge James Robart. No hate, no fear, everyone is welcome here. Emotions were already running high when Judge Robart temporarily blocked former President Trump's first travel ban, barring some Muslim travelers. Critics posted his home phone and address online, but nothing prepared him for the tsunami of hate when President Trump used his Twitter bully pulpit to scorn him as a so-called judge. When you call someone a so-called judge, what you do is you attack the judiciary. You may not even have wanted to convey that message, but that's the message which your 40 million Twitter followers took down, which was

you were never authorized to issue this decision. Death threats flooded in. Then President Trump tweeted again. If I recall, he also said to blame you if there should be a terrorist attack on the country. People took that as somehow I was giving permission for their families to be endangered. And then the tone for a number of the messages turned into, you must be stopped. What did you think about that when the president attacks you? I thought he had a right to attack my decision. I don't think that criticizing a judge is acceptable. I recognize there's a dispute on that.

There is no dispute at the point that you start to talk about, I'm going to kill you or I'm going to hurt you, or more importantly to me, I'm going to hurt your family, that's over the line and can't be tolerated. Judge Robart was bombarded with 40,000 messages. 1,100 were serious enough to be investigated. There were so many death threats that U.S. Marshals set up camp around the judge's house. The idea of needing a bomb-sniffing dog to go into a restaurant before we could have lunch impacts you, but you just try to not let that bother you.

That actually happened? Yes. If you want to know how to be really unpopular with restaurant owners, show up with your dog, which runs around the restaurant barking, and a number of U.S. Marshals who are noticeable. You're chuckling now, but I take it that at the time you didn't see the humor in this. No, I didn't.

Then federal investigators uncovered something more ominous. Thousands of threats that looked to be from Americans were actually from Russia, part of a long game by Vladimir Putin to splinter American democracy. If Putin can undermine a significant segment of the population's willingness to accept a court's decision, then he can cause chaos in this country.

Suzanne Spalding ran top cybersecurity operations for both Democratic and Republican administrations. She told us Russia undermines the justice system by fanning some American suspicions that judges are partisan. What did Judge Robart do to put himself in Russia's crosshairs? They attacked him, his decision as reflecting his personal political preferences, as opposed to following the rule of law. And that leads people to conclude that it is appropriate to make threats of violence,

and as we saw in the tragic case of Judge Salas, to actually carry out an attack of violence. How big a threat do you think this is? You know, I think we got a taste of that on January 6th. Spalding told us since the siege of the Capitol, there's more pressure on law enforcement to determine which online threats might turn into physical attacks. Take the example of this Alabama man who answered the online call with a truckload of weapons and a hand-scribbled hit list. Second from the top, an Indiana judge.

So how do you answer people who will say that what I say online, even if it's aggressive, it's my First Amendment right? So you do have a First Amendment right to express your opinion, even if it's an unpopular opinion. But threats of violence, incitement to violence, those are things that law enforcement can legitimately look into, particularly when it's against our public servants. Judge Salas lives with those threats.

But when the courthouse reopens after the pandemic, she told us Daniel would want her to keep going. Will you be concerned when you reenter this courtroom? You know, we're changed forever. You know, Mark and I are different people today, sadly. But as far as what I do on the bench, no, that's not going to change. I'm not going to let Mr. Hollander

take that away from me. My integrity, my work ethic, and my pride. No, he won't take that. Sometimes historic events suck, but what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have children watching 60 Minutes tonight, that's usually a good thing.

But this story is not for them. The images you are about to see are the honest evidence of the greatest war crimes of the 21st century. President Biden and his national security team will soon face a horror that erupted a decade ago when many of them were in the Obama administration. March will bring the 10th anniversary of the popular uprising that began Syria's civil war. The Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has gassed the innocent, bombed hospitals and schools, and made thousands disappear. The evidence is hard to watch, but it should be seen. Many risked their lives to tell this story so that even if Assad is never arrested, he will be forever handcuffed to the truth. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did this. These are civilians

of a Damascus suburb called Ghouta. In 2013, Ghouta was held by rebels, so the Syrian army shelled the neighborhood with internationally banned nerve gas. 1,400 men, women, and children were exterminated. Assad had chosen to meet the popular uprising against him not with diplomacy, not with war among soldiers, but with terrorism without restraint. We have murder, we have extermination, we have torture, we have rape. Stephen Rapp is helping to build cases against Assad and his regime. Rapp prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and Sierra Leone and served as U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues for six years until 2015. Will there be justice for what's happened in Syria?

I'm an optimistic American. I've seen other situations that we thought were pretty hopeless, where nobody thought there'd ever be justice, where we succeeded. The possibilities are there. And one of the ways that we build toward that is get the solid evidence now. Much of what he calls solid evidence was abandoned in the war zone. More than 900,000 government documents have been smuggled out and archived by the Independent Commission for International Justice and Accountability. The commission is funded in part by the U.S. and European Union. Stephen Rapp is the commission's chair. Do the documents that have been collected so far lead all the way to President

Assad? There's no question they lead all the way to President Assad. I mean, this is a top-down, organized effort. There are documents with his names on that. Clearly, he organizes this strategy. Then we see orders down through the system to pick people up. We see reports back. We see reports back about, well, we've got a real problem here. There are too many corpses stacking up. Among the corpses is Ahmad al-Musulmani, a 14-year-old who was last seen on a bus headed to his mother's funeral. His family told Human Rights Watch that Assad's military stopped the bus and found a protest song on Ahmad's phone. His family next saw his face two years later

when this image of his tortured body was smuggled out by the man concealed in the blue windbreaker. Our job became solely to take photographs of the bodies of dead human beings that had been tortured to death or killed in the different intelligence branches. The photographer's alias is Caesar. He was in the military. In the military, yeah.

We spoke to him with the translation help of Muaz Mustafa of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which works to protect civilians. Cesar had been a military photographer for 13 years. In 2011, he was ordered to make a record at morgues that received the dead from Assad's secret prisons. We added a masking effect because his images are too horrific for television. The reality of what he saw broke Caesar's allegiance to the regime.

To protect Caesar's identity, these are his words in Mustafa's voice. It was very clear that they were tortured. Not tortured for a day or two, tortured for many, many long months. They were emaciated bodies, purely skeletons. There were people, most of them had their eyes gouged out. There was electrocution, you could tell by the dark spots on their body that was used there. There was utilization of knives and also big cables and belts that was used to beat them. And so we could see every type of torture on the bodies of these

individuals. Every type of torture but the depravity of the gouged eyes leaves to the imagination how maiming was calculated to coerce information. By 2013, the bodies overflowed the morgues and spilled across a parking garage at this military hospital. When I would take photographs, I would think, how can this government be capable of doing this to its own people? I would also have feelings of sadness and anger at what I've seen, and at the same time, a feeling of fear that at any single moment, there's no reason that I wouldn't face the very same torture and be photographed later.

How did you get the photographs out? Every single day, I would get on the computer. I would use a flash drive to get all of the photographs that were taken that day, load them onto the flash drive, and then in a secret and risky way, go out from work and reach a close friend of mine, Sammy, who would then take the flash drive and upload the flash drive on a daily basis onto his personal computer. This is Cesar's friend, Sammy, also an alias. For more than two years, he uploaded the daily flash drives smuggled by Caesar. We interviewed Sami again with the help of Muaz Mustafa.

It was a responsibility upon us, upon Caesar and I, a responsibility to the Syrian people to be able to show them, prove to them, let them know what has been the fate of their loved ones. I remember I had a neighbor, and her son was a friend of mine. And I was looking at his photograph in one of the flash drives that Caesar had brought to me that day. And I remember every single day that mother would go back to the intelligence branch asking about her son, asking any information about him. And I couldn't even tell her the truth because we didn't want to be exposed as we were doing this documentation. This is victim 9,700.

That's right. Sami pointed out the irony of police state bureaucracy, Arabic numerals which one day may be a treasure for prosecutors. We blurred the numbers to protect the families of the dead. With each body, there's usually three numbers associated with it written on different parts of their bodies. The first being the number of the detainee. The second is the number of the intelligence branch

that tortured that individual to death. And the third number was given by the doctor, which was a sequential number signifying which number of dead body he or she was. You would think that the regime would want to hide all of these things. People are basically covering their backside, following the procedures, and people will follow those procedures at peril of getting in trouble. But in the process of doing it, they're creating some of the strongest evidence that any of us who prosecuted crimes here or elsewhere have ever seen.

How do we know that Caesar's photographs are authentic and actually do show what they purport to show? Well, our own FBI verified the metadata and determined that everything was rock solid, that a whole group of photos represented real people and real events. The FBI analyzed Caesar's images. In the 242 pictures it sampled, the FBI says the image files exhibit no artifacts or inconsistencies. One prisoner Caesar did not photograph is this man, who goes by the alias Ali. He was imprisoned because of the place of his birth. Where were you born?

In Columbus, Ohio. But you moved to Syria as a child. Correct. In 2012, on a trip from the U.S., Ali flew to Damascus. It was the second year of the war. He never made it out of the airport. His U.S. passport was a ticket to an underground prison. One of the high-ranked intelligence officers told me, we don't care if you are American.

We can't kill you. We can't keep you detained forever. Three weeks of interrogation seemed like forever. He told us his feet were beaten with plastic pipe until he couldn't stand. Others, he said, were suspended on a wall by handcuffs and doused with boiling water. But the worst for him was a prisoner he never saw. Ali overheard an interrogation, a boy judging from the screams. That night I heard a child between 12 and 13 years old screaming, Mama, please help me out from the hell. When he screamed, he's just after a pool of water. And then I can hear the whipping and hitting by, like, plastic pipe or, like, something like that.

As capriciously as he was taken, Ali was released to his family, who hadn't known for 23 days why he never showed up at baggage claim. Torture is one of many war crimes committed by Bashar al-Assad's regime. In 2017, we visited a bombed hospital. Thousands of medical facilities, schools, and neighborhoods have been leveled by Assad and his ally, Russia. Assad has used banned chemical weapons more than 300 times, according to an investigation by the Global Public Policy Institute. In all, about a quarter million civilians are dead. Eleven million have been forced from their homes. Assad's opposition has committed atrocities, too, but the scale

cannot be compared. I did all of this. I risked my life and the lives of my family in order to show and to expose to the entire world the true face of this dictatorship of the Assad regime. We've got better evidence against Assad and his clique than we had against Milosevic in Yugoslavia or we had in any of the war crimes tribunals in which I've been involved in. To some extent, even better than we had

against the Nazis at Nuremberg, because the Nazis didn't actually take individual pictures of each of their victims with identifying information on them. You'd love to go to court with this evidence. This would be a great trial against Assad himself. Trouble is, Assad has nearly won the war. The U.S. and others have imposed sanctions, but most criminals will be safe in Syria.

The U.N. tried to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court, but that was vetoed by Russia and China. If Assad gets away with impunity, court, but that was vetoed by Russia and China. If Assad gets away with impunity, what has the world lost? If the word is that you can commit those crimes and that you can get away with it, and this is the way that you suppress a popular uprising, then others will do the same thing. The future will be much more dangerous than the past, and a lot of what we built will be destroyed. Already destroyed is what Syrians built over thousands of years. Assad is condemned to be

the monarch of all he surveys. His trial may be distant, but the witnesses are patient. Blind witnesses who challenge the world to see. Young witnesses for whom time no longer matters. They will wait, because a crime buried without justice is never laid to rest. In just three years, the extremist ideology of QAnon has captured the minds and imaginations of tens of millions of Americans. Their core belief? A global cabal, including Democrats, Hollywood elites, and members of what they call the Deep State, control much of our lives. The cabal commits atrocities, including pedophilia, Satan worship, and cannibalizing children. But it will be vanquished by Donald Trump in an apocalyptic day called The Storm. QAnon was born when an anonymous character named Q began posting cryptic riddles in an

online forum known for hosting hateful and racist content. The movement prospered in pandemic isolation, its followers occasionally erupting in acts of violence, culminating in the assault on the Capitol. But the prophesied storm never happened. Instead, Donald Trump left office, and QAnon followers have found themselves at a moment of truth. Joe Biden gets sworn in, and you started seeing chatter online, I've been conned, this has all been a scam, and they were out, which is great. That is rare for radicalized individuals.

Elizabeth Newman was in charge of policy to counter domestic extremism at the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration. The prophecies did not happen. The storm didn't happen. Is there an opportunity right now to, as we say, off-ramp some of these people? Absolutely. For many, it was a light switch effect. But for others, you see them struggling. They're trying to make sense of it.

And so they're very vulnerable right now. They're vulnerable to being convinced about some of these newer theories. There's a new one that March 4th. March 4th is the day that President Trump is going to return and he's going to be president again. If we're at a moment where some of these people are disillusioned and maybe open to new ideas, are far-right extremists, white supremacists, even neo-Nazis jumping in to this breach right now and trying to peel them off and radicalize them even more. Yes, they see opportunity.

They have been posting guides on how to approach a disheartened QAnon adherent, making clear that you don't want to make fun of their ideology, you don't want to be too direct about your white supremacist views. You want to be empathetic. Newman resigned in April because, she says, President Trump kept pouring fuel on the rising threat of homegrown extremism. At Homeland Security, when you were there, was QAnon on your radar as a threat? The general consensus at that time period was

it could be a low-level policing concern because we had a few incidents of people conducting violence. But by and large, its ideology is not one that promotes violence, at least at that time. What shifted? What turned QAnon into a more violent kind of conspiracy group? It didn't become a violence problem until Donald Trump lost the election.

And then they felt like, oh, well, we better fix that because otherwise Donald Trump can't fix this other big problem of the deep state. And we are going to take out the deep state. QAnon supporters charged into battle with the crowd storming the Capitol on January 6th. Some were easy to spot with their Q signs and Q chants.

We are people where we don't want, we don't want. Inside, Officer Eugene Goodman staved off rioters led by a man in a Q shirt. Ashley Babbitt, killed at the Capitol, had previously tweeted a picture of herself in a Q tank top. And then there's the now-famous Q shaman. Freedom! Nearly one in ten of those arrested had a QAnon connection. Stop the steal! Stop the steal! Nearly one in ten of those arrested had a QAnon connection. And like the movement overall, they were men and women, often older.

There was a federal employee, a business owner who covered his store in a QAnon mural, and a real estate agent who arrived by private plane. We come before you, Father, and we pray, Lord God. Some of the attraction of QAnon is their use of Christian symbolism and apocalyptic prophecies. A lot of people doubted a lot of prophets, saints, and sages. A lot of people doubted Christ. A new survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute found more than a quarter of white evangelical Protestants and nearly one in five white Catholics believe the QAnon conspiracy. To see Christ used as propaganda for an insurrection, it drives a stake into my heart. Derek Kabilis, pastor of a small Methodist church in Northeast Ohio, has seen QAnon tear

through his community. You have said that QAnon is a heresy. A heresy is something that is corrosive to the human soul. When you see the obsession and the paranoia that it inspires, it's hard to call it anything else. Well, thank you guys for coming out. For nearly a year now due to COVID, he's had to hold Sunday services in his church's parking lot. In this hour of worship. Preaching from a makeshift hut into parishioners' car radios.

Terrible rabbit holes of conspiracy. He says most of them appreciate his speaking up, but not all. I think we may have had a couple folks that have probably left the congregation. Because of that? Yeah, there are churches in the area that won't challenge conspiratorial thinking. Is the church helping to spread QAnon's ideas? Unfortunately, in some places, yeah. Unbelievably, I think there are some pastors that promote QAnon. The numbers of QAnon followers swell during the pandemic, when people were isolated at home.

The pandemic was creating this angst, and it was driving people to extremist ideas. Did DHS drop the ball on QAnon? It's a tough question. I think we really just didn't understand what was happening as it was happening. QAnon was spreading under their noses in posts, memes, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. A lot of women were roped in by appeals to rescue supposedly cannibalized children and through unexpected ways, like popular yoga accounts on Instagram. The spread was also aided by then-President Trump.

Well, I don't know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much. Actually, he shared content from QAnon Twitter accounts over 300 times. It wasn't until October that several social media sites began aggressively banning or deplatforming QAnon content. If your motive is to sort of lure these people away from QAnon, does deplatforming help? It does help. And that's part of the big lessons out of 2020. The deplatforming didn't happen soon enough. It came too late in the game. And in part because we, quite frankly, we've never seen anything like this. We've never seen what is largely just almost like a game, this fantasy-like game of what-ifs. And, you know, literally it's like people deducing clues and like, oh, the president said these two words in his speech today,

and I think he's referring to this conspiracy theory. It feels very much like a game for most participants. For example, on a QAnon forum, the president was asked to work in the phrase tip-top, and lo and behold... Tip-top shape. Well, they had a messianic figure in a place of power that was responding to their cues.

At least that's what QAnon supporters believed, says Joel Finkelstein, director of NCRI, an organization at Rutgers University monitoring online misinformation. Is QAnon based on a game? Is it a game? QAnon doesn't describe itself as a game, but it has all the hallmarks of being an alternative reality game. They're solving riddles.

Exactly. The problem is that over time, they started calling themselves QArmy. So we saw a growth in militarization in the organization. Revolutionary ideas started taking over QAnon. The ideas of political revolt started growing within the organization. And that became a part of the game. What's happening now? The storm didn't happen. Where is QAnon today? Now they've been rebranded. It's morphing and doubling down on conspiracies.

It can cause things like autism. About COVID vaccines and masks. Finkelstein says it makes sense for them to be anti-vax. If the pandemic ends, and if enough people get vaccinated, Finkelstein says it makes sense for them to be anti-vax. If the pandemic ends and if enough people get vaccinated and we have herd immunity, will this thing begin to shrivel? Well, it's funny you mention that. Doesn't that make sense for why the new target of the conspiracies is the vaccine? Because that's exactly what gives the extremist powers, Leslie.

You're saying they need the pandemic. They need the eyeballs spending 12 and more hours a day. And if we can get rid of this pandemic and isolation and quarantine, then are you suggesting the oxygen is depleted? That is the oxygen. But the end of the pandemic is far off. And in the meantime, families are being torn apart by QAnon. On Reddit, we found a group of over 100,000 friends and family sharing horror stories of losing loved ones. While on another site, we saw believers posting that their severed family ties because of QAnon is proof of their moral superiority.

Nate, a school psychologist in Minnesota, watched in pain as QAnon gripped his 70-year-old mother. Would you go so far as to say that your mother's detached from reality? As of late, I would. She's not a crazy person. She's a very bright person. But these things happen in a million little paper cuts. Was she a political person before this? Was she a big Trump fan in 2016? No. In fact, we were Hillary supporters then, and my mom was even a Bernie Sanders canvasser

in the primary in 2020. You're kidding. Yeah. Well, how do you explain the journey from Bernie Sanders to QAnon? I attribute it more to my mom having a slow decline in trust for media, trust for news, and then many threads of disinformation and ideas and conspiracy theories slowly started taking hold of her overall worldview. Do you feel you're losing your mother? I sometimes feel like I know to bear on how to reconnect with her, and I don't know what could bring her back, and it's devastating.

We can show them that there's a whole world of purpose and meaning outside of those lies. You know what all that's really about, don't you? In Ohio, Pastor Kabilis started a podcast to reach out to those impacted by QAnon after discovering adherence in his own family. When I first found out how deep they were into it, my initial emotion was one of anger. How could you believe this? Why would you think this? This is crazy, you know? Well, we're past that now. These folks are in it, and it is reality to them. And now we have to do the very difficult work of untying this knot.

Now an update on a story we called the Lincoln Project. Last October, we reported how veteran Republican strategists and ad makers, outraged with then President Trump, trained their skills against the incumbent president and his Senate supporters. Now the Lincoln Project has been beset with scandal and controversy. John Weaver, one of the project's founders who appeared in our story, has been accused of sending unwanted, inappropriate sexual texts to more than 20 men, some of them on the Lincoln Project staff. John Weaver has left the organization. Several other founders have left as well,

amid accusations that they knew about Weaver's harassment. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.