What Our Sources Tell Us About Jeff Zucker’s Ouster at CNN

BUCK: Jeff Zucker is out at CNN, and I can tell you… Maybe we’ll get into some of the specifics about my experience years ago at CNN, Clay. I don’t want to dive into that before we tell everybody what’s happened here. He had a relationship with a subordinate — a very senior executive, but still a subordinate — ’cause CNN was Zucker’s kingdom. People got paid what Zucker wanted them to get paid. They got the shows Zucker wanted them to get. He was… Could you say the “malevolent” tyrant, instead of “benevolent”?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: The malevolent tyrant of CNN. And now he’s gone because he didn’t disclose this relationship. A couple things, Clay, I just want to throw this to you ’cause, you know, you also know that there could be some big lawsuits that come out of all of this. The subordinate female is staying on at CNN. He is gone. He resigned effective today. Didn’t disclose the relationship. What I think’s so interesting is this: Chris Cuomo.

Chris Cuomo thought that he could get away with things that nobody reasonably could have imagined would anyhow. I mean, the helping with his brother, using his pulpit to do so, and behind-the-scenes comms assistant. I think it’s ’cause he knew about what was going on with Zucker and he felt like he was covered from on high. And for everyone listening to this, the head of CNN — so one of the most powerful lib media executives out there — is gone because of the investigation into Chris Cuomo which then led to this revelation. What do you make of it?

CLAY: So there are a bunch of different angles here. So we should say… I mean, this is all public now. Allison Gollust is, I believe — I mean, I might be pronouncing her name wrong. She is the woman that he was having a relationship with. She is the executive VP and the chief marketing officer at CNN. So what is interesting about this, Buck — and I think this adds more complexity to the overall situation surrounding Chris Cuomo but also Andrew Cuomo and the way that CNN covered this story.

Allison Gollust worked with Andrew Cuomo back in the day. In fact, she’s “a veteran PR expert.” I’m reading from RadarOnline. She was the communication director for Andrew Cuomo, and — this is according to go Radar — “there were many discussions that one reason why Zucker initially helped to protect Andrew Cuomo and Chris Cuomo was because of the fact…”

Remember CNN had the Bro Cuomos on together during covid. They were allowing Chris Cuomo to cover his brother, Andrew. They made Andrew a hero. They tried to brand him as the anti-Trump, right? There are all those Cuomosexual shirts. There was the argument that he was gonna run for president. Supposedly, one of the reasons why the Cuomos were protected is because of this woman, Allison Gollust.

And, by the way, it also supposedly this has been going on — their relationship — for a long time, that both of their marriages broke up over this affair. So to me what stands out here is the incredible belief by Zucker that when he fired Chris Cuomo that somehow this wasn’t going to come out, that he was going to emerge unscathed. And it seems what happened basically is Chris Cuomo said, “Hey, you owe me.”

This is me reading what’s going on here. “You’re gonna fire me? You better pay me out the $18 million that you owe me under my contract,” ’cause they tried to argue they fired him for cause. And when that battle and investigation into why he was being fired took place, my bet is Chris Cuomo said, “Hey, you’re firing me for inappropriate behavior? Do you know that Zucker has been engaged in a relationship with a subordinate for a long time?” Buck, I find it hard to believe there weren’t a lot of people inside CNN that didn’t know this was going on, this relationship, for a long time.

BUCK: I was, before CNN went completely insane… If 10 is the craziest a lib can be, before CNN went to 11, it was probably solidly at an eight, I would say, pre-Trump era, and I worked over there for a couple of years. You used to CNN until your… Clay is banned from the Republic of CNNistan. But, anyway, the reality here was that everyone knew that there was stuff going on in that building for years, that the media just wasn’t as interested in talking about, didn’t come out.

I was surprised that some of it took as long as it did to come out, and I think — I’ll tell you this right now, and of course can’t name names, but — there’s more stuff that will likely come out about CNN and the practices in that building. But the question I have here, ’cause I very much see the Cuomo thing — and isn’t it fascinating that Governor Andrew Cuomo, the hero of the pandemic for the libs, second only to Fauci in the entire nation…? You know, Gavin Newsom was having —

CLAY: They gave him an Emmy. They gave him a special Emmy, and they had to rescind it.

BUCK: Because, you know, he was the man during that. He was doing (impression), “Here I am. I want to talk today about the numbers. Let’s look at the numbers. The numbers say that I am the best. Why am I the best? Because…” You know, this was what Cuomo was doing day in and day out. I know. It was pretty good.

CLAY: Not bad.

BUCK: Thank you. And he would do this whole thing and the song and dance, and everybody’d say, “Oh, my gosh. He’s such a great leader,” and then it all started to fall apart. He lied about the numbers. He hid the number of deaths, by the way — the death numbers, lied about that — in nursing homes. He lied about what’s happening in the state, covered it up.

And then the stuff about the sexual harassment and then all of a sudden his brother was covering up for him and then the brother, you know, had the issue of harassment that came up too and then he got termed for helping his brother deal with his harassment — and now Jeff Zucker is gone. I think in part, you know, or rather, I think that this came out because of what happened with the Cuomo brothers.

So the dominoes falling here for the left-wing media is remarkable. But here’s the question I have for you, Clay. Disclosing a relationship with a subordinate is one of these things, you know, the way they’re framing this, clearly this was going on for years, clearly when both were probably still married which… By the way, families breaking up, it’s a sad thing. It always is a sad thing.

So whenever this happens, I never celebrate or say, “Yeah, look at this guy, or this woman, their life is in tatters.” I want all families staying together. But why not disclose this, right? There must be something that we don’t know about the situation, and I think there are things we haven’t heard yet that are actually worse, ’cause this is a very sudden resignation from a guy who’s making probable $15 million, $20 million a year to run CNN. Who is a more powerful news executive on the left than Jeff Zucker, than he was? It’s tough to name one.

CLAY: There’s not one.

BUCK: There isn’t.

CLAY: I mean, also he was running sports. So, I mean, Jeff Zucker was massively powerful, and so to me, I think you’re right. When these resignation letters pop out of nowhere, it usually means there’s a big investigative piece coming within a day or two somewhere down the line, right, and they know that that media source has got the goods on them and that they’re going to be sharing it.

My first thought is, failure to disclose a relationship… Let me just say this: If that relationship had just started six months ago, they wouldn’t be firing him over failing to disclose that relationship. I think what’s likely come into play here is he probably hired her while already being in a relationship with her, which is a big no-no, right?

BUCK: He said he’s worked with her for 20 years.

CLAY: Yeah, right. But he brought her from the Cuomo office to come work at CNN a few years ago, and so I think there are probably gonna be some details coming out about what he did or did not reveal. I also believe the big question here, Buck, and I’ll actually… When we come back, I’m curious what you would do.

Let’s presume that CNN suddenly came to Buck Sexton, and they said, “Buck, you were on air, and we went back and we looked at all the data, and we determine that, yes, we weren’t yet fully crazy yet when you were on the air, and we value your opinion for what to do at this network. What should we do to…?” I mean, this is a crazy stat, Buck. Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have more Democratic viewers in the evening on their shows than CNN or MSNBC do. They have lost all of their audience. What do they do to matter again, other than as a pathetic punching bag for left-wing lunacy?

BUCK: They would have to actually try to be a news network — and not a perfect one. They’re still gonna be liberal. But this is what they used to be. It used to be a liberal news network. Then it turned into Pravda for the DNC. It just went completely anti-Trump, ferociously insane. That’s what happened. Could they bring it back to…?

I always say this. I have more respect for MSNBC. As insane as the commie opinions over there are, they admit that they’re commies. I mean, they don’t use that term. But they admit that they’re left, they’re liberals, they’re Democrats. So there’s not this pretense. CNN lives in fantasyland, and the anchors over there live in fantasyland on this issue. And that’s why they would never debate it publicly, ’cause they’d look so stupid, but they like the pretense. They pretend.