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On Tuesday, Project Veritas continued its video series on the workings inside “news” network CNN. Last week’s videos shed light on the obvious leftist bias the network shows and their anti-Trump propaganda. Tuesday’s video exposed goings on at the company that are even darker, as Steve Brusk, a senior politics supervising producer, was accused by some at the network of sexual harassment against young female co-workers.
Rick Saleeby, a senior producer of The Lead with Jake Tapper, told an undercover journalist with Project Veritas that Brusk was often observed acting inappropriately with young females. “He would make advances if there was a social gathering and they were drunk … put his arms around them, try to touch their leg. Try to build up e-mails to the level where he would get flirty and inappropriate.”
Saleeby then recalled a specific incident at the going-away party of co-worker when a drunken Brusk actively pursued a 21-year-old co-worker.
“So, like, there is this girl that was twenty-one. She’s actually a good friend of mine. She had just gotten hired after being an intern… and she was getting… there was a going away party for a co-worker. We were all having a really good time. She was very well liked. We were getting drunk. [Brusk] started staying close to her… arm around her.”
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Saleeby went into more detail about the incident and his efforts to defend the young woman. “She had a skirt on. I could see the hand. I like grab her. It looked like I was being the assaulter because I grabbed her so aggressive… to keep her from him. Like go around her and go ‘come over here’ and looked at him because I could flatten him… it was like… I wouldn’t do it because then I was the one who got fired. He would have absolutely been like ‘get in a cab with me later.’”
According to Saleeby, Brusk is well-known for this type of behavior. “He had already been accused of the things prior… which I found out later.”
But in the current age of the #MeToo movement, it’s hard to believe that someone such as Brusk could exist for long in any business, let alone the news business, with so many reporters who are so willing to report on such incidents. But Saleeby contends that Brusk is being protected by “higher-ups” at the network.
“He is protected by certain people there [who] value him or like him, I don’t even know,” Saleeby said.
Unusual incidents seem to follow Brusk everywhere. In a separate incident, Nick Neville, a CNN media coordinator who featured prominently in last week’s Project Veritas videos, told a tale of a female whom he believed received preferential treatment due to being friendly with Brusk:
I will just say this, because this is open knowledge, it’s not like a Me Too thing, but there was this other girl who was like an NA (News Assistant), I feel like we basically had the same level of experience… And a job just kind of like appeared out of nowhere… And it was never posted online, and this girl always worked pretty closely with Steve (Brusk), like all of us on the desk would help Steve out with stuff… But this other girl works pretty closely with him and he would email her, I mean, he emails all of us, but he would email and was very friendly to her. And then she just got a job like working on his team and she was like, ‘oh it’s hush-hush.’ The job was never posted anywhere.
Because the charges are so serious, Project Veritas repeatedly reached out to CNN for comments on the Brusk situation. Journalists from Project Veritas asked Jake Tapper, Saleeby, and Brusk himself for comments on what they had uncovered. Tapper and Saleeby declined to comment and when asked if he had a comment outside of CNN headquarters, a clearly nervous Brusk would only say, “I,I,I don’t. But um, uh, I’ll let our PR people talk to you about that.”
An attempt to reach CNN President Jeff Zucker yielded only an administrative assistant’s terse, “We don’t have any comment, thanks for calling.”
Except for Saleeby’s first-hand account of Brusk’s behavior, much of this, admittedly, sounds like office gossip. But that account at the very least paints Brusk as someone who becomes sexually aggressive when he drinks. When paired with the other information, that information becomes very worrisome. One has to wonder, just who at the network is protecting Brusk and why.
It’s tempting to feel bad for CNN for this undercover sting perpetrated on them by Project Veritas. It’s tempting until you realize that CNN routinely rushes to air with left-leaning and salacious stories with far less evidence than Project Veritas has. Not only do they rush to air such stories, they routinely sculpt their news narrative so that their product no longer has anything to do with news. It’s all propaganda.
CNN deserves this.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
