Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe secretly recorded CNN’s morning conference calls for two months, and vowed to release raw audio every day until Christmas. On Wednesday, he exposed how CNN strategized after the New York Post’s bombshell story on Hunter Biden's emails in the weeks leading up to the election.
While big tech companies censored the story, mainstream media outlets like CNN went along by simply ignoring it altogether.
"Obviously, we're not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden," CNN Political Director David Chalian advised during the Oct. 14 conference call, which is when the Post released its first story on Hunter’s emails. He later said the report was "giving its marching orders" to what the "rightwing echo chamber” should discuss that day.
"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,” Chalian continued. “Rudy Giuliani's sort of 'dream-o-vision' of how to throw stuff at the wall in these closing days of the campaign."
In the same call, CNN Executive Vice President and General Counsel David Vigilante acknowledged that there is one media angle to the story that was of interest, though he said the network “should be awfully careful” in its coverage.
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"What in the world are [New York Times reporter and CNN analyst] Maggie Haberman and [Politico reporter] Jake Sherman doing retweeting that story?" he wondered.
BREAKING: @CNN Execs Jeff Zucker, David Chalian, and David Vigilante SPIKE COVERAGE Of @NYPost Hunter Biden Laptop Bombshell
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) December 2, 2020
“OBVIOUSLY we’re not going with the New York Post story on Hunter Biden right now.”
“Perhaps there was a meeting with someone from Burisma…"#CNNTapes pic.twitter.com/Rh334srRz3
In discussing the latest release with O'Keefe, Fox News' Sean Hannity pointed out that CNN claims to be "just news" but "that's the big lie" Project Veritas is exposing. "They're not. They're lying."
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) December 3, 2020