CNN Political Commentator Van Jones (shown) admits in a video released Wednesday that “the Russia thing is just a big nothingburger.” The video is part of the American Pravda series by Project Veritas, which vowed last year to turn its attention to exposing “fake news.” If these two videos are any indication, that promise is being kept.
This most recent video comes on the heels of another Project Veritas video showing a CNN producer saying the Trump/Russia narrative is “bulls**t.” CNN also recently retracted a false story supporting that narrative with three employees responsible for the retracted story “resigning” as a result.
The hidden-camera video shows Van Jones, who is a CNN political commentator, social justice warrior, environmental activist, and former advisor to the Obama administration. He is also a self-avowed communist. With a résumé like that, it would be expected that Jones would not be a fan of President Trump. He would also fit in very nicely at CNN, which has been called — by its detractors — Clinton News Network and Communist News Network because of its Left-leaning reporting.
In the video, Jones is approached by a Project Veritas journalist with a hidden camera. The undercover reporter asked Jones, “What do you think is going to happen this week with the whole Russia thing?” Jones’ response was to shrug and say, “The Russia thing is just a big nothingburger.”
It is noteworthy that his remark was not restricted simply to the fallacious claim that Trump is colluding with Russia. He was asked, “What do you think is going to happen this week with the whole Russia thing?” His answer — in that broad context — was that the whole Russia thing amounts to “just a big nothingburger.”
This is the same Van Jones who famously called Trump’s electoral victory “a whitelash against a changing country” and “against a black president” and can be seen in the first part of the Project Veritas video saying in December 2016 that while other presidents have said “nice things about the Russians,” it should not be done (as President Trump has done it) “in the face of an active attack on the country.”
This is also the same Van Jones who told the East Bay Express in 2005 that the Rodney King verdict in April 1992 led — in part — to him becoming a communist. He told reporter Eliza Strickland, “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist.” Jones also told Strickland that he met some “really radical, communists and anarchists” while in jail, and that they went on to form “a socialist collective, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, which held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia.”
When a self-avowed communist says on television that Russia is conducting “an active attack on” the United States, it ought to stand out as something curious. After all, since when would a communist revolutionary who spent time leading study groups in Marxist and Leninist political theory view Russia as the enemy? When that same self-avowed communist then admits (when he doesn’t know that he will be on television) that the whole thing “is just a big nothingburger,” it starts to make sense.
CNN is deliberately creating and reporting fake news to boost ratings and deligitimize Trump’s presidency. Jones — an avowed communist from way back — fits right in with that agenda. Of course, with CNN’s exposure as a manufacturing plant for fake news, this hidden camera video of Jones may help cut the power to that factory.
Photo of Van Jones: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP