The CNN commentator tells how, too tearful to read his notes, he spoke from the heart – and for millions of Americans – after Biden’s win

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When the US presidential election was finally called for Joe Biden on 7 November, the CNN commentator Van Jones made a tearful speech live on air that captured in two minutes the frayed emotions of a contest that had dragged on for days. A regular on CNN over the past decade, Jones trained as a lawyer at Yale and has spent more than 25 years fighting for criminal justice reform. A special adviser for green jobs in the early days of the Obama administration, he crossed party lines to work with the Trump administration in 2018, helping to draft the First Step Act and drawing criticism from fellow progressives in the process. Jones, who is 52 and was born in Tennessee, lives in Los Angeles and has two sons with his ex-wife Jana Carter.

Tell me about the lead-up to that CNN speech and the state of your nerves.
We were all just exhausted. We had been doing 17-hour days, for five days. We knew that it was going to be a long, slow count, but that doesn’t mean that your body and heart and soul can endure it with perfect equipoise. When it was finally called, my phone started blowing up with text messages from Muslim friends, friends from immigrant communities. One guy said, “I’m not crying, you’re crying,” just as a little a joke about how emotional everybody was. And it just hit me what a burden we’ve all been carrying, especially people who are in harm’s way of the president’s rhetoric. When they switched over to our panel, and Anderson [Cooper] asked me how I was doing, I couldn’t see my notes – you see me looking down trying to read them but my eyes are full of tears. So I just started free associating. I just had to speak from the heart.