Leaked CNN Audio Shows How a Trump Voter’s Fraud Account Got Cut and Labeled ‘Unproven’

A clip of leaked CNN audio is making the rounds again, and it still raises an uncomfortable question about how cable news decides what viewers get to hear. The recording, released by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas in June 2017, shows that CNN’s New Day aired a Trump voter’s claim about voter fraud, labeled it “unproven,” and cut away just as he began to explain what he had seen for himself.

This is not new footage, whatever the posts recirculating it this week suggest, and it has nothing to do with the 2020 election. It comes from a 2017 panel taped during President Trump’s first months in office. But it is worth revisiting, because the technique it exposes is one viewers have seen many times since.

The segment CNN aired

According to Project Veritas and contemporary reports, New Day anchor Alisyn Camerota sat down with a group of Trump supporters to grade the new administration around its 60-day mark. The conversation ran roughly an hour and a half. What made air was about eight minutes.

One of the panelists was William “Billy” Baer. In the broadcast, he is shown talking about voter fraud under an on-screen banner that read “Real Voters, Real Choices” above a chyron that said “Trump voters on his unproven voter fraud claims.” When Camerota pressed him for proof, the aired version left the impression that he had none.

Project Veritas then played the raw audio from the moment the edit cut away.

What the raw audio shows

Baer’s answer, as heard in the leaked recording, was not polished, and fairness requires quoting all of it. He began by conceding a point: “I have seen busloads, I guess I can’t cite the busloads that I’ve seen, and where I’ve seen them and stuff. But on television I’ve seen it.”

Then he kept going. He asked whether anybody had looked into what James O’Keefe found when he went undercover to polling places, and said O’Keefe “basically was ready to vote as somebody else” and that “nobody asked for ID.”

And then came the part that mattered most, because it was firsthand: “I was actually a poll watcher in New Jersey and I saw what was going on there.” He described college students voting and said that when a provisional ballot was used, “it’s never challenged, they just put it right through,” adding, “this is common.”

That is where the broadcast had already moved on. As the Project Veritas narration puts it: “At the moment, Baer is about to cite the evidence to support his claim, CNN ends the clip.” The video called it “a textbook lie of omission.”

Evidence, or an eyewitness account?

Honesty cuts both ways here. What Baer offered was not a forensic audit. It was an eyewitness account from a poll watcher plus a reference to undercover video, and he himself acknowledged he could not document the busloads. Reasonable people can argue about how much weight that deserves.

But that is exactly the argument CNN chose not to let its viewers have. A network that wanted to test Baer’s claim could have aired his poll-watcher account and then challenged it, or fact-checked it on air. Instead, the chyron did the work. “Unproven” was printed on the screen, and the part of his answer that came closest to evidence never reached the audience. You do not have to agree with Baer to see the problem: viewers were told what to think about his claim without being allowed to hear it.

The rest of the tape

The panel edit was one piece of a larger release. Project Veritas’s “American Pravda: CNN Part 3,” published June 30, 2017, also featured hidden-camera footage of New Day associate producer Jimmy Carr. Asked whether CNN is impartial, Carr answered, “In theory.” He called President Trump “a clown,” and, asked about American voters, said they were “stupid as shit.” According to the conservative outlet Conservative Review, he also claimed that 90 percent of his CNN colleagues shared his views.

CNN’s response, as quoted by Project Veritas, did not address the editing at all: “Diversity of personal opinion is what makes CNN strong, we welcome it and embrace it.”

It is fair to note that Project Veritas has its own critics, who accuse it of selective editing. That is part of why this particular exhibit is so striking. Here, it is CNN’s own raw audio, played back in sequence, and the cut is visible to anyone who watches. The response at the time was a statement about diversity of opinion, not an explanation of why a guest’s firsthand account was trimmed and replaced with a one-word verdict.

Nine years later, the clip keeps resurfacing for a reason. The editing choices that shape a segment are invisible to the people watching it at home, and the chyron is often the only thing they remember. This is one of the rare cases where the public got to see the full tape.

CNN didn’t fact-check Billy Baer; it stopped the tape before he could finish and let the chyron do the talking.

Editor’s note: This article covers a 2017 CNN segment and the Project Veritas recording released in June 2017, which drew renewed attention in September 2026.

More from The Rothman Report

Paralympian Veteran Waited 5 Years for a Wheelchair Lift. She Says Canada Offered Her Assisted Death.Glenview Teen Shot Dead at Home: Sheriff Says Evidence Is There, Cook County Still Won’t ChargeRhode Island Ruled Him Incompetent for 23 Years and Let Him Walk. Now a Toddler Was Stabbed in Her Stroller.