CNN Staffer Claims Network Pushed ‘Propaganda’ to ‘Get Trump Out of Office’: Undercover Video

CNN Staffer Claims Network Pushed ‘Propaganda’ to ‘Get Trump Out of Office’: Undercover Video
A general view shows the stage during a walk-through before a Democratic presidential debate sponsored by CNN and Facebook at Wynn Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev., on Oct. 13, 2015. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Isabel van Brugen
4/14/2021
Updated:
4/14/2021

A CNN staffer was caught on hidden camera saying that the network worked during the 2020 presidential election to produce content that would help lead President Joe Biden to victory.

The first of three recordings were published on April 13 by investigative journalism nonprofit Project Veritas as part of an expose on CNN.

Charlie Chester, a technical Director at CNN, was secretly filmed by Project Veritas during a number of fake Tinder dates set up over the past month. He suggested that if it weren’t for the network’s “propaganda,” former President Donald Trump would have won the presidential election.

“Look at what we did, we got Trump out,” Chester said. “I am 100 percent going to say it. And I 100 percent believe it that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out.”

He told the undercover reporter, who pretended to be a nurse during the fake dates, that he decided to work at the network because he ”wanted to be a part of that.”

“Our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that’s what it was,” Chester said.

The CNN staffer claimed that his network produced “propaganda” that sought to help defeat Trump in the 2020 election by, for example, “creating a story“ that questioned the former president’s health that ”we didn’t know anything about.”

“Trump was, I don’t know, like shaking his hand or whatever ... we brought in like so many medical people to like all tell a story that, like, it was all speculation that he was like neurologically damaged, that he was losing it, he’s unfit to, you know, whatever,” Chester said. “We were creating a story that we didn’t know anything about.”

When asked by the undercover Project Veritas journalist about whether the network had any concerns about Biden’s health during the election period, Chester said that CNN often showed clips of Biden jogging and wearing items such as aviator shades, to “paint him as a young geriatric” and to show that he’s “healthy.”

CNN wouldn’t make news of the incident where Biden was filmed tripping up stairs “a huge story.”

“You talk about that briefly,” Chester told his “date.”

CNN didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.

Project Veritas in October 2019 conducted an undercover investigation on CNN which showed staff members saying that all the cable news network covered was left-leaning bias, sensationalism, with an incessant focus on Trump.

Like Chester, they largely blamed their issues with the network on its top leadership, particularly CNN President Jeff Zucker.

In one video released by Project Veritas, a CNN staffer said that Zucker “has a personal vendetta against Trump,” at least partly going back to when Trump worked with Zucker on “The Apprentice” reality TV show.
Petr Svab contributed to this report.