According to journalist James O’Keefe, a video released Wednesday appears to show CNN commentator Van Jones calling the controversy surrounding alleged connections between Russia and the Trump campaign a “big nothing burger”–a day after another video was released showing a CNN producer calling the Russia controversy “mostly bullshit.”
The video, released by O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, titled “American Pravda: CNN Part 2,” shows an unidentified journalist greeting Jones and saying they had met before. The video then skips to a part of the conversation where the journalist asks, “What do you think is going to happen this week with the whole Russia thing?”:
“The Russia thing is just a big nothing burger,” Jones, who served as a green jobs czar to the Obama administration, replies. The video appears to have been taken on June 26 outside CNN’s offices on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
When the journalist follows up, Jones says, “There’s nothing there you can do.”
It is not clear if Jones is referring to the Russia controversy itself being a “nothing burger” or the congressional or FBI investigations into alleged ties between Russia and Trump officials. Project Veritas does not give any further context to Van Jones’s remarks.
As O’Keefe points out in the video, Jones and CNN have pushed the Russia-Trump narrative in recent months. This latest Project Veritas CNN-targeted video shows a clip from December in which Van Jones refers to an “active attack of the country” by Russia.
The latest video comes after another video showed a senior CNN producer suggesting the Russia controversy is “mostly bullshit.”
In “American Pravda: CNN Part 1,” the Project Veritas video released the previous day, CNN producer John Bonifield is shown saying it “could be bullshit. I mean, it’s mostly bullshit right now” when asked about his thoughts on the Russia investigation. “Like, we don’t have any giant proof. Then they say, well there’s still an investigation going on. And you’re like, yeah, I don’t know. If they were finding something, we would know about it.”
Bonifield also was caught on camera saying the reason CNN leadership and management is so focused on the Russia scandal is “because it’s ratings.”
“Our ratings are incredible right now,” the video from Project Veritas shows Bonifield saying.
CNN later issued a statement in support of Bonifield, saying, “Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome it and embrace it.”
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
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