CNN President Jeff Zucker and other senior executives were caught on tape appearing to deliberately hide the Hunter Biden laptop story from viewers just a few weeks before the election. The tape, recorded by Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe with help from an anonymous CNN insider, is the fourth in a series of explosive tapes that show CNN executives covering for Democrat Presidential nominee Joe Biden by hiding unfavorable stories from their viewers. Other tapes of CNN’s morning conference calls, released yesterday, show Zucker and other CNN executives attempting to hurt President Trump’s reelection chances by comparing Trump’s transition efforts to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, claiming Trump is “sick,” “erratic,” and “on steroids,” and saying that Fox News has a “white supremacy hour” and “naked racism.”
In a recording from October 14th, CNN Vice President and Political Director David Chalian stated, “Obviously we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden and, which seems to be giving its marching order to Fox News and the right wing echo chamber about what to talk about today. Obviously Hunter Biden’s lawyer is quoted in that New York Post piece, and we’ll just continue to report out this is the very stuff that the President was impeached over.
Chalian continued, “This is the stuff that the Senate Committees looked at and found nothing wrong in, Joe Biden’s interactions with Ukrainians and, now having and email that, perhaps there was a meeting with someone from Burisma is, is seems, Rudy Giuliani’s sort of “dream-a-vision” of how to throw stuff at the wall in these closing days of the campaign.”
CNN Executive Vice-President and General Counsel David Vigilante called out reporters at the New York Times and Politico on the same call for daring to tweet about the Hunter Biden story. He stated, “Hey Jeff [Zucker], its just David on the Burisma story and we should be awfully careful about that obviously, but I do think there’s a media story. What in the world are Maggie Haberman and Jake Sherman doing retweeting that story?”
On October 23rd, just 11 days before the Presidential election, CNN President Jeff Zucker tried to deflect external criticism of CNN’s lack of coverage on the Hunter Biden story, stating, “I do think, on the Breitbart, New York Post, Fox News rabbit hole of Hunter Biden, which I don’t think anybody outside of that world understood last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that their review of all corporate records, showed no role for Joe Biden on the Chinese deal. And yes, I do put more credibility in the Wall Street Journal than I do in the New York Post.”
After CNN’s PR division claimed their legal experts though Project Veritas’ actions were “a felony” and that they “referred it to law enforcement,” O’Keefe appeared unafraid and undeterred in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show last night. He hit back by saying that “we have legal experts at Project Veritas and we think Jeff Zucker is just very mad and embarrassed here for what we have exposed. We’ve won every single lawsuit at Project Veritas.”
O’Keefe stated on Twitter that the calls Project Veritas released today are just the tip of the iceberg, and has promised to release more internal CNN staff calls every day this month “like a December advent calendar.”
Yesterday morning, O’Keefe called into the morning CNN editorial conference call and confronted Zucker on the recorded phone calls.
“Hey Jeff Zucker, you there?” O’Keefe asked. “Hey, this is James O’Keefe, we’ve been listening to your CNN calls for basically two months and recording everything. Just wanted to ask you some questions if you have a minute. Do you still feel you’re the most trusted name in news, because I have to say, from what I’ve been hearing on these phone calls I don’t know about that. We got a lot of recordings that indicate you’re not really that independent of a journalist.”
Zucker, who sounded surprised by O’Keefe’s presence in CNN’s internal staff call, retorted, “Ok. Um. Thank you for uh, thank you for uh, your comments, um. So everybody in light of that, I think what we’ll do is we’ll, we’ll set up uh, a new system, and we’ll uh, we’ll be back with you. We’ll do the rest of the call uh, a little bit later.”
O’Keefe responded, “We’re going to release those recordings today at 7:00, so stay tuned, it’s gonna be fun.”
Zucker quickly added, “Thank you everybody, have a good day, buh-bye,” before hanging up the call.
In a response to O’Keefe’s livestream, CNN’s PR divison added that legal experts say Project Veritas’ actions may be a felony, and that they referred him to law enforcement for further investigation.
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