“I am glad there is a Russia investigation and I hope they get to the bottom of it,” Jones said on June 23 video posted on his Twitter. “I think Democrats are fooling ourselves if we think that something is going to come out of this investigation that is somehow going to end the Trump Presidency and make everything better. Unless there is a real smoking gun which there is probably not, it’s just going to be a big old mess. Meanwhile, we are not talking about jobs, not talking about poverty, not talking about solutions, not talking about the addiction crisis. Let’s talk about our stuff.”
After President Trump was elected, CNN’s Trump-Russia narrative dominated their coverage. Other news outlets, including The Washington Post, the New York Times, and a number of other mainstream news outlets have continued to push a similar narrative even after now-fired FBI director James Comey stated under oath that President Trump was not under investigation.
The Project Veritas video on Bonifield reached the No. 1 slot of the YouTube trending list on Tuesday. President Trump sent a Twitter message containing the video that day and later commented on the story.
“Fake News CNN is looking at big management changes now that they got caught falsely pushing their phony Russian stories. Ratings way down!” he wrote. “So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also admonished the outlet in a press briefing that day.
“I think it’s a disgrace to all of media, to all of journalism,” Sanders said. “I think we have gone to a place where if the media can’t be trusted to report the news, then that’s a dangerous place for America. And I think if that is the place that certain outlets are going, particularly for the purpose of spiking ratings, and if that’s coming directly from the top, I think that’s even more scary, and certainly more disgraceful.”
The three videos come at an ominous time for CNN, having just retracted a story about the Trump-Russia collusion theory. Three journalists who worked on the story resigned in the aftermath. The story claimed that President Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci is linked with a $10 billion Russian investment firm. CNN has since issued an apology to Scaramucci.
The retraction and the resignations came about after the network was threatened with a $100 million libel suit, according to a Tuesday story based on anonymous sources published by the New York Post.
Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this article.
