A clip from Vice President JD Vance stunned a CNN anchor so much she thought it was fake — and didn't even want to mention it on air.
Erin Burnett noted Vance's remarks about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to her guest, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Thursday evening. After their first "shameful" meeting, Burnett flagged Vance's remark about Zelenskyy on Fox News.
"President Zelenskyy walked into the Oval Office. I was chatting with him, with the president, with some of the senior Ukrainian delegation. I said, 'Mr. President, so long as you behave, I won't say anything.' And he just chuckled a little bit. It was a good little icebreaker."
"Good little icebreaker," Burnett said, turning to Blumenthal.
"You know, this is really more about the realities on the ground for Ukraine. People are bleeding and dying. Making jokes about icebreakers, it really is so deeply offensive," he said.
Blumenthal tore into the Trump administration's notions of a potential security guarantee for Ukraine that would include Russia.
"Putting the bank robber, in effect, in charge of the security at the bank? Taking that kind of guarantee as possibly the basis for peace is absolutely absurd. And I think that the president has around him people who simply are taking at face value the kind of delusion that the president and they are suffering," he said.
Burnett cracked a joke in response.
"Maybe Sergey Lavrov wearing his USSR T-shirt actually said it all," she said.
She said the clip of Vance's icebreaker left her astonished.
"I actually did not think — I had to go check that three times. I didn't even want to mention it on air because I thought it had to be AI. That an act of such silliness and such disrespect and such giving the middle finger wouldn't be real. But it was," she said.
She concluded: "It's really unbelievable that that was real."