CNN star Van Jones has a habit of upsetting his fellow Black activists, progressive policy advocates, and liberal Democrats by cozying up to the Trump White House.
He did it again late last month, during the flap over a Black bird watcher in Central Park and a white Hillary Clinton voter who dialed 911 after refusing his pleas to leash her dog. Jones enraged Hillary loyalists—already exasperated by his willingness to concede her flaws as a 2016 presidential candidate in televised food fights with Trump acolyte Kayleigh McEnany—when he compared Clinton supporters unfavorably to the Klan.
“It’s not the racist white person who’s in the Ku Klux Klan that we have to worry about,” Jones said on CNN’s New Day. “It’s the white liberal Hillary Clinton supporter walking her dog in Central Park… But 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.”
More recently, on June 16, the 51-year-old Jones—a Yale Law School-trained attorney and former green energy jobs adviser in the Obama administration—provoked even more liberal distress and anger when he ladled praise on a so-called police reform initiative by President Donald Trump.
In this instance, however, he was slyly applauding himself.
Jones 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 by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and “delusional” by the Color of Change, an influential racial justice organization that Jones himself co-founded in 2005.
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.
According to a knowledgeable White House source, who expressed satisfaction that there were zero leaks, Jones and California human rights attorney Jessica Jackson, who runs #cut50, a prison-reform group that Jones also founded, actively participated with law enforcement officials and White House staffers to help fashion the order and guide the politics of the discussion to what they considered “the sweet spot” between law enforcement and “the reasonable middle” and “the reasonable left.”
Skyping from his Los Angeles home, with a biography of Nelson Mandela and a Black Panther graphic novel visible on the bookshelf behind him, Jones 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... 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… The chokeholds, that’s common ground now between Nancy Pelosi and Trump. Good stuff there.”
Hours later, Jones doubled down on Anderson Cooper 360—again without disclosing his role advising the Trump White House. “What do you make of this executive order?” Cooper asked him.
“I think it’s pushing in the right direction,” Jones told the CNN anchor. “What you got today is, I think, a sign that we are winning,” he added. “Donald Trump has put himself on record saying we need to reform the police department… We are winning! Donald Trump had no plan a month ago to work on this issue at all. The fact that we are now in the direction of moving forward, I think, is good.”
During a Rose Garden ceremony that was actually a Trump campaign event—at which the president defended the police, touted his commitment to “law and order,” boasted about the stock market and the pre-coronavirus economy, and attacked Joe Biden—Trump was flanked by uniformed officers and police union officials as he signed the executive order in response to the pandemic of unjustified killings of unarmed Black Americans by white cops.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was quick to call the event “a photo op” and the executive order “seriously short of what is required”; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer panned it as “weak tea” and the Rev. Al Sharpton—a longtime ally of Jones going back to the 1990s, when Jones was a self-avowed “radical” and social justice activist in Oakland—derided it as “toothless and meaningless” because it gives lip service, but no legal mandate, to banning chokeholds (unless officers decide their lives are at risk), improving police training, making use of mental health professionals, and keeping a national registry of bad cops.
“I did not think the executive order was worth the paper it was written on,” Sharpton told The Daily Beast. “Van’s experiment with Trump is a case of him having more faith than I have, but I’m not going to attack him for doing it…I think he’s well-intentioned, but I think he totally underestimates the kind of guy he’s dealing with. I just disagree that the people he’s dealing with have a sincere bone in their body. But I can’t fault him for trying.”
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Among Jones’ many critics on the left, actor Jeffrey Wright was at once harsh and perceptive as he watched Jones compliment Trump’s policing initiative: “Smells like Van Jones helped Kushner craft this exec order, so he touts it. ‘You can't polish this turd,’ he said of Trump’s delinquency, yet here he is with boot black & rag,” Wright tweeted.
“Jones’ job appears to be making Republican policy palatable to black people. So expect him to call this new proposal progress,” wrote Jones detractor Stephen A. Crockett Jr., a columnist for The Root. Quoting Malcom X, Crockett added sarcastically: “‘Hey look, the knife went from being 9 inches in your back to being only 6 inches in your back,’ (Van Jones’ voice).”
Neither Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, nor Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, responded to interview requests. Jones, meanwhile, declined to speak to The Daily Beast for this story. A member of his public relations staff explained that “due to his contractual obligations with CNN/Turner, he’s limited in what press he can do outside of their network.”
CNN, meanwhile, wouldn’t comment on the network’s failure to disclose Jones’s behind-the-scenes advisory role in shaping Trump’s executive order while offering accolades for an initiative he helped create.
The circumstance was similar in kind, if not in degree, to an infamous incident 40 years ago in which Washington Post columnist George F. Will praised Ronald Reagan’s debate performance against President Jimmy Carter without disclosing that Will had helped coach the then-Republican nominee in debate practice sessions.
“I find that in politics, people get in uncomfortable situations, and that’s when you get to see what a person’s character really is,” Kushner told The Daily Beast during a brief phone conversation. “And in a tough situation Van has shown me that he’s got true character. He’s focused on the right things.”
By one knowledgeable account, it was CNN’s politics czar, Sam Feist, the network’s Washington bureau chief and senior vice president, who introduced Kushner to Jones; at the time Jones was oscillating between making positive noises about Trump, who happens to be Kushner’s father-in-law, and trashing the new president.
“Donald Trump is a horrific jackass,” Jones said during a February 2017 speech at John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice. “He’s one of the worst people ever born. He is. You can’t be any worse than him, unless you like chopping the heads off of small kittens every day. I don’t know what you could do to be worse.”
Barely a week later, Jones effusively praised a moment in Trump’s first State of the Union address when he led a lengthy standing ovation for the widow of Navy SEAL Ryan Owens—who was killed in a botched and ill-planned military adventure in Yemen (a failure for which Trump had typically blamed Barack Obama).
“He became president of the United States in that moment. Period,” Jones claimed. “[T]hat was one of the most extraordinary moments you have ever seen in American politics. Period…For people who had been hoping that he would become unifying, hoping that he might find some way to become presidential, they should be happy with that moment.” (In an interview last year with The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern, Jones declared defiantly that he remains “proud” of that wildly hyperbolic and hardly prophetic assessment.)
Kushner—who became interested in criminal justice and prison reform after his father, New Jersey real estate magnate Charles Kushner, was sent to the federal pen in 2005 for campaign finance violations, tax evasion, and witness tampering—told CNN’s Feist that the White House was planning to roll out a criminal justice reform policy initiative and pleaded for fair coverage from CNN.
Feist recommended that he speak to Jones, telling Kushner that the CNN personality was passionate about the issue.
“He was someone I’d seen on television, so I was deeply skeptical,” Kushner told The Daily Beast. “But I said I’d be happy to speak to him, and we had a good chat. And then we just started working together. And what I saw, with him, was that he had a lot of courage, when other people play politics.”