One of the people with the lengthiest records as an anchor and an analyst for the CNN cable channel is the liberal Van Jones, who has hosted several programs focused on politics and environmental issues over the past several years.
However, according to the left-leaning Daily Beast, Jones working behind the scenes to prepare legislation ahead of passage through Congress. (The CNN analyst has denied the claim on Twitter.)
According to an article posted on June 28 by Lloyd Grove, editor at large of the Daily Beast website, the former green energy jobs adviser in the Obama Administration “provoked distress and anger” when he praised a “so-called police reform initiative by President Donald Trump.”
Grove quoted Jones:
It’s not the racist white person who’s in the Ku Klux Klan that we have to worry about. … It’s the white liberal Hillary Clinton supporter walking her dog in Central Park.
[The] minute she sees a black man, who she does not respect, or has a slight thought against, she weaponized race like she had been trained by the Aryan Nation.
Jones later went on CNN’s Inside Politics with John King and Anderson Cooper 360 to enthusiastically commend Trump’s executive order -- even as it was being criticized as “cynical and unproductive.” Those accusations were made by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the order was being called “delusional” by the Color of Change, “an influential racial justice organization that Jones himself co-founded in 2005.”
Grove added: “CNN viewers weren’t informed that he had actually attended secret White House meetings with his new friend Jared Kushner, discussing ways to frame the presidential project.” Jones also told viewers of CNN’s noon show Inside Politics: “The executive order is a good thing, mainly because you saw the support of law enforcement there.”
The CNN analyst next stated: “There is movement in the direction of a database for bad cops. We have never had a federal database for bad cops; that’s why all these cops go all over the place doing bad stuff” like choke holds.
“Among Jones’ many critics on the left” was actor Jeffrey Wright, who “was at once harsh and perceptive as he watched Jones compliment Trump’s policing initiative,” Grove stated. “Smells like Van Jones helped Kushner craft this exec order, so he touts it. You can't polish this turd,” Wright asserted.
Jones responded on Twitter:
