Joseph Burkett flew home to Texas in January 2008 and told a divorce court that he was involved with Lara Logan, the CBS News correspondent who would become his second wife within the year.
That admission is one of the only things about him that has ever gone on the public record in his own words. Nearly two decades later, despite Logan’s career as a CBS News and then Fox Nation correspondent, almost nothing else about Joseph Burkett, including what he actually does for work, has ever been confirmed.
What’s confirmed about him:
- Full legal name: Joseph W. Burkett IV
- Home: Fredericksburg, Texas
- Married Lara Logan in 2008
- Three children, one from his first marriage
Table of Contents
Where Burkett Comes From
Burkett grew up in the Texas Hill Country, in a family that held local office in nearby Kerrville for two generations before him. Joseph Washington Burkett Sr. served in the Texas Senate in the 1920s. His son, Joseph Washington Burkett Jr., represented the area in the Texas House of Representatives after returning from World War Two.
Burkett served in the U.S. Army and retired as a Master Sergeant, according to a 2016 People interview with Logan. Before that, in 2005, he worked in Baghdad for the Lincoln Group, a Pentagon-funded public relations firm that placed pro-American articles in Iraqi newspapers without disclosing where the material actually came from, part of a broader pattern of Pentagon-funded information operations in Iraq at the time. Newsweek confirmed the job in 2013 through internal company documents, not through anything Burkett or Logan had said publicly.
The Baghdad Years
Burkett and Logan first crossed paths around 2002, while both were covering the war in Afghanistan. Logan later told the New York Times that she had known him for about six years before anything happened between them, which puts the start of their relationship close to 2007, when both were working out of Baghdad. Burkett was still married to his first wife, Kimberly, at the time, and Logan had already separated from her first husband, former professional basketball player Jason Siemon.
By the time Burkett told a Texas court about the relationship, the story was already headed for the tabloids. The New York Post ran it on the front page under the headline “Sexty Minutes.” The National Enquirer quoted Kimberly Burkett’s divorce attorney saying her client believed Logan had broken up the marriage. Logan addressed the coverage herself that year, telling the Washington Post, “I hated it. But I’m just going to rise above it and keep going.”
Both divorces were finalized later in 2008. Burkett and Logan married soon after, and their son was born that December.
A Marriage Built on Not Asking
Logan has said the marriage worked because neither of them asked about the other’s job. “He never crossed my boundaries. I never crossed his,” she told New York Times Magazine writer Sally Singer in 2012.
That arrangement was tested in February 2011, when Logan was sexually assaulted while covering the celebrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. In the same profile, Logan said Burkett later told her how frightened he had been by what happened to her.
The Career That Was Never Explained
Logan described her husband to the Times as a work-from-home congressional liaison. When Newsweek reporter Jeff Stein tried to verify that title in 2013, he found no public record of it. Stein’s piece also tied Burkett’s Lincoln Group history to new questions surrounding a retracted 60 Minutes report on the 2012 Benghazi attack, a story Logan had reported and that CBS later pulled after admitting it relied on an unreliable source. Stein did not establish that Burkett had any role in that report. He noted only that nobody, including Newsweek itself, could say with certainty what Burkett was doing for work at the time.
One family source was more direct about it: “He’s what we call a puffer. He puffs himself up.”
Texas business filings reviewed by Newsweek listed Burkett, around that same period, as the managing member of an Austin ammunition dealer and separately as the governing person of a security firm with an office in the United Arab Emirates. Neither title matches the congressional liaison description Logan gave the Times.
Family Life in the Texas Hill Country
Burkett has a daughter, Ashley, from his first marriage. He and Logan had two children together, a son born in December 2008 and a daughter, Lola, born in March 2010.
By 2015, the family had left Washington for Fredericksburg, Burkett’s hometown. Logan told People the following year that their son had been diagnosed with dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and that the move gave her more time to be involved at home. “I needed to be a mom,” she said. She scaled back her workload at 60 Minutes not long afterward.
Where Things Stand Now
Burkett has not spoken to a reporter since the Newsweek piece ran in 2013. Property records still list a Fredericksburg address in his name, and there is no record of a divorce filing since 2008.
Logan’s own media career has shifted considerably since then, from CBS to Fox Nation to her current position outside any major network. Burkett’s has not been reported on at all.
What he actually does for work today has never been confirmed, and no public filing since 2013 answers the question either.
