New CNN chief welcomes back conservative commentator pushed out by Jeff Zucker

A conservative CNN contributor says she was quietly kept off air by former network head Jeff Zucker after she publicly raised concerns that the network was handling of the suspensions and Chris Cuomo and Jeffrey Toobin.

Mary Katharine Ham, a well-known conservative journalist who has written for The Federalist and Townhall Magazine, made the revelation Thursday on her Substack blog, saying she pieced the puzzle together in January after engaging in an argument with CNN political reporter Andrew Kaczynski.

She says Zucker “quiet suspended” in hopes of avoiding the optics of a termination.

The feud with Kaczynski erupted when Ham responded to a tweet by New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman who criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for calling out the media for its low coverage of the 2017 mass shooting aimed at Republican Congressional leaders. Ham struck back, saying that the media would have given a similar shooting significantly more coverage if the victims were Democratic leaders.

Kaczynski disagreed, and Ham fired back that her colleague “got jack to say about Cuomo and Toobin, but gotta fact-check me when he’s got nothing.” Ham then criticized CNN’s handling of legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s misstep in which he “jacked off in front of female colleagues” and that Cuomo “violated every conflict of interest rule in journalism, lied about it, and got fired.”

Ham suspected that her little spat with Kaczynski may have raised some red flags back at the network because it violates network policy against “shooting inside the tent’ among colleagues,” Ham wrote on Thursday, but instead she learned that “when it got to the comments about Jeffrey Toobin… everyone wanted a bit of a breather.”

Ham said what surprised her the most is that her seven-month forced hiatus off the air was almost as long as the time Toobin was banned.

“One month was the difference between punishment for jacking off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of jacking off at work,” Ham commented in her blog.

She said no one even told her she was in trouble until she met with Zucker’s new replacement Chris Licht, who said she was welcome to come back.

“I was never informed of my punishment until it was rescinded recently by new management,” Ham wrote.

“No one called me or my representation about it. There was no announcement of a suspension, or notification of in-house disciplinary action, which I would have preferred, even welcomed by comparison to serving a secret sentence,” she wrote.

Jeffrey Toobin, a prominent legal analyst who was a writer for the New Yorker was suspended from CNN in October 2020 after he masturbated during a Zoom meeting with senior magazine editors. He was terminated from the New Yorker and suspended for eight months from CNN. He later apologized for his sexual misadventure in an interview with anchor Alisyn Camerota, and announced in August he was leaving the network.

Chris Cuomo, who previously hosted the popular show, “Cuomo Prime Time,” was pushed out after it was learned he was helping develop political strategy for his brother, Andrew who was New York’s governor at the time. He was also accused of engaging in improper relationships at the network.

Cuomo recently made a comeback on NewsNation with a new show called, ‘Cuomo.’

In a strange twist of irony, after Zucker pushed out both Cuomo and Toobin, he was also accused of improperly carrying on a lengthy consensual relationship with CNN marketing official, Allison Gollust, both of whom promptly resigned.