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Van Jones: Trump's defense of O'Reilly throws conservative women who supported him under the bus. #TheMessyTruth https://t.co/d9rshTSEqO
— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) April 6, 2017
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President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he believes former National Security Advisor Susan Rice committed a crime. CNN political analyst Van Jones took issue with that statement, and contended on his show that the president should award Rice the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Jones delivered a rant that lasted more than two minutes about why Republicans should be praising Rice instead of vilifying her.
He started off his “The Messy Truth With Van Jones” program like this: “Now with his usual zero facts, and no evidence, President Trump today declared that Susan Rice is guilty of a crime. What crime? Didn’t say. And with the same zero facts he says that Bill O’Reilly is innocent.”
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Then he said he wanted to say a few things about Susan Rice. Here is the transcript of Jones’ rant:
The right-wing media wants to burn Susan Rice at the stake for doing her job. Susan Rice was our national security advisor. To give good advice, you gotta ask good questions! Especially when fishy looking stuff lands on your desk, OK? Now finding out for yourself the names of sketchy people, doing possibly sketchy things is called unmasking. OK? Now that doesn’t mean revealing it to the whole world, that would be illegal.
It does mean revealing those names to yourself at your desk, so you can do a better job advising the president. As best we can tell, that’s all she did. Her job.
Now if she were a terrible person, up to no good, trying to ruin Donald Trump, you know what she would’ve done, what she could’ve done? She could have called a press conference in the middle of the election, like James Comey did from the FBI, OK? She could have run around screaming bloody murder, ‘look what I found, look what I found.’ She didn’t do that. She got very disturbing information, and she looked into it. And as best we can tell, she did her job inside the proper channels.
For doing this, Donald Trump should give Susan Rice the Presidential Medal of Freedom, OK?
Jones wasn’t done yet:
Somebody like Comey would have run to the cameras, created a huge firestorm and possibly wrecked his campaign. So Republicans should love Susan Rice. They should thank Susan Rice.
Thank you for being a professional. Instead they’re throwing fits. Why? Maybe they don’t want you to think about what Susan Rice unmasked: People on Trump’s team possibly playing footsy with bad guys from Russia. Let’s not get distracted.
Republicans have been lining up to suggest Rice should be investigated by Congress. Democrats are saying she did nothing wrong and, like Jones, that she was doing exactly what she should have done in her position.
RELATED: Tucker Carlson sounds off on Don Lemon for not covering the Susan Rice report
Rice has had to defend her actions, saying that she did not commit the act of “unmasking” for the sake of political retribution.
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