Project Veritas has released recordings that reveal CNN was aware of the Hunter Biden controversy but neglected to cover it weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

In leaked telephone conference calls of the news network’s 9am editorial meetings, a senior staff member is heard telling CNN President Jeff Zucker that the network should downplay the story.

“We should be repeating unsubstantiated smears just because the right wing media suggests that we should,” Zucker tells his staff.

The story, which was first published in the New York Post, revealed emails that allegedly came from Hunter Biden’s laptop that exposed questionable foreign business deals Hunter Biden was involved in that potentially benefited the Biden family.

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CNN’s Vice President of Political Coverage and Political Director, David Chalian, can be heard on the recording telling Zucker that the news network would “obviously” not be covering the story.

“Obviously, we’re not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden,” Chalian said.

Instead, Chalian encouraged his reporters to repeat the statement from Hunter Biden’s lawyer.

“Hunter Biden’s lawyer is quoted in the New York Post piece and we’ll just continue to report out this is the very stuff that the president was impeached over, this is the stuff that Senate Committees looked at and found nothing wrong in Joe Biden’s interactions with Ukrainians and now having an email that perhaps there was a meeting with someone from Burisma it seems,” Chalian said.

“Rudy Giuliani’s sort of ‘dream-o-vision’ of how to throw stuff at the wall in these closing days of the campaign,” he added.

David Vigilante, CNN’s Executive Vice President, can also be heard on the call saying the network “should be awfully careful” about covering the story and questioning why some political reporters had posted the story to their social media.

“Hey Jeff, it’s just David on the Burisma story and we should be awfully careful about that obviously, but I do think there’s a media story. What in the world are Maggie Haberman and Jake Sherman doing retweeting that story?”

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said he secretly recorded network president Jeff Zucker’s morning conference calls for months.

O’Keefe on “Hannity” Wednesday night said he would be releasing audio recordings of the meetings which he claims will expose Zucker and other CNN executives for their “political biases.”

“CNN likes to call themselves ‘the most trusted name in news,’ but how can the public ever trust a network that routinely bashes people simply because those people hold certain political views that are not aligned with the mainstream media?” he asked on “Hannity.”

O’Keefe said he plans to release recordings of more than 50 conference calls every day until Christmas.

‘We’re going to release the full raw tapes, maybe even twice a day and show what really goes on in these phone calls and show them for how they make the sausage, how they manufacture consent at the ‘most trusted name in news,” O’Keefe concluded.

You can follow Annaliese Levy on Twitter @AnnalieseLevy