Recordings of CNN’s daily editorial meeting released by Project Veritas suggest the network avoided reporting the Hunter Biden/Ukraine controversy in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.
In leaked telephone conference calls of the news network’s 9am editorial meetings, senior staff tell CNN boss Jeff Zucker that the network should downplay the bombshell story.
Zucker also tells his staff that he doesn’t think ‘we should be repeating unsubstantiated smears just because the rightwing media suggests that we should.’
The story, which was first revealed in the New York Post, revealed emails that allegedly came from Hunter Biden’s laptop and shed light on questionable foreign business dealings he had both before and after his father was vice president.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe secretly recorded CNN President Jeff Zucker’s editorial meetings ‘for months’ and intends to release recordings every day until Christmas
CNN political director David Chalian can be heard telling Zucker that the news network would not be covering the story.
‘Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden,’ said Chalian.
Chalian, who is also CNN’s vice president went on: ‘Obviously, Hunter Biden’s lawyer is quoted in the New York Post piece and we’ll just continue to report out this is the very stuff that the president was impeached over, this is the stuff that Senate Committees looked at and found nothing wrong in Joe Biden’s interactions with Ukrainians and now having an email that perhaps there was a meeting with someone from Burisma it seems.
‘Rudy Giuliani’s sort of ‘dream-o-vision’ of how to throw stuff at the wall in these closing days of the campaign.’
Jeff Zucker could be heard on a CNN conference call justifying why the news network was not going to report in depth on the Hunter Biden / Ukraine scandal
CNN Political Director David Chalian told Zucker that he didn’t intend to report the story
Chalian can be heard dismissing the story as ‘the stuff Senate Committees look at and found nothing wrong’
The Post’s story told how Joe Biden met with an executive of the company which was paying his son, Hunter, left, up to $83,000 a month to sit on its board
The Post’s story told how Biden met with an executive of the company which was paying his son up to $83,000 a month to sit on its board.
At the same time, energy company Burisma, was hoping to receive favors from the American government at the same time Joe Biden was the vice president.
During that same conference call, CNN Executive Vice President and General Counsel David Vigilante can be heard telling Zucker that ‘we should be awfully careful’ regarding coverage of the Hunter Biden story.
At one point he questioned why some political reporters from other organizations had posted the story to their social media.
‘What in the world are Maggie Haberman and [Politico reporter] Jake Sherman doing retweeting that story?’ Vigilante asked with surprise.
In another portion of the call, CNN Executive VP David Vigilante questions why their own political reporter, Maggie Haberman, had tweeted the New York Post Hunter Biden story
The following week, the day after the last presidential debate in which President Trump went after Biden over the revelations regarding his son, Zucker once again could be heard brushing the story aside and referred to is as a ‘rabbit hole’ that ‘I don’t think anybody outside of that [rightwing media] world understood last night.’
‘The Trump media, you know, moves immediately from — OK, well, never mind — to the latest alleged scandal and expects everybody to just follow suit,’ Zucker said on the call. ‘So, I don’t think that we should be repeating unsubstantiated smears just because the rightwing media suggests that we should.’
In another call released by Project Veritas on Wednesday, the CNN president can be heard having a go at Trump over comments he made questioning the integrity of mail-in voting.
In another collection of called on Wednesday, O’Keefe released a discussion with CNN’s SVP who said that she was terrified Cubans in Florida would vote for Trump because they ‘liked bullies’
‘Trump’s continuing to undermine the election integrity with baseless claims of fraud, okay? And he’s continuing to do it,’ Zucker said. ‘And that leads to the question of whether or not Trump, in himself, is a national security threat in light of what he’s doing and in light of what he did at the debate.’
Also on Wednesday, in a third release from Project Veritas, CNN executive Cynthia Hudson could be heard expressing her opinion over President Trump’s influence over Cuban voters in Miami ahead of the election.
She surmises that the Cuban population in Florida would likely to vote for Trump because they are ‘attracted to bullies.’
The recording was from September 9 when there was just under two months to go until the election.
Cynthia Hudson, CNN’s SVP and Managing director noted in a September conference call that Cuban-American’s seemed to be attracted to President Trump and would vote Republican
Hudson declared the prospect of Cuban’s voting for Trump as ‘terrifying’
‘Trump has used the communism, socialism rhetoric as part of his hook for the Cubans in Miami, how that has resonated and how the Biden team has not done enough to counter that,’ Hudson says. ‘The only reason they are supporting Trump is because of that narrative. And that narrative and the fact that sadly, I have to say, there’s a population that’s very attracted to bullies.’
Hudson, who is the senior vice president and managing director of CNN en Español, went on to say that ‘no one is countering’ Trump’s effective messaging in Florida.
‘The Cubans are going to vote for Trump. And that’s terrifying, and so, I think there is a way to counter the narrative in Florida that is not being taken advantage of.’
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe (left) on Tuesday announced he had secretly recorded CNN President Jeff Zucker’s (right) conference calls ‘for months’
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe has said he secretly recorded network president Jeff Zucker’s morning conference calls ‘for months.’
O’Keefe, 36, on Tuesday said he would be releasing audio recordings of several network meetings which he claims will ‘expose’ Zucker and other CNN executives expressing their ‘political biases’.
The calls O’Keefe had been listening to over two months are the network’s daily 9am editorial meeting with senior staff from CNN’s main bureaus, which is run by Zucker.
The move by Project Veritas is the latest sting operation orchestrated against the news station by the conservative operative who has long-targeted CNN over claims of liberal and anti-Trump bias.
O’Keefe has accused the network of furthering their own political agenda when reporting the news.
‘CNN likes to call themselves ‘the most trusted name in news,’ but how can the public ever trust a network that routinely bashes people simply because those people hold certain political views that are not aligned with the mainstream media?’ he said.
O’Keefe said he plans to release ‘raw recordings’ of more than 50 conference calls every day until Christmas.
‘We’re going to release the full raw tapes, maybe even twice a day and show what really goes on in these phone calls and show them for how they make the sausage, how they manufacture consent at the ‘most trusted name in news,’ O’Keefe concluded.