Sean Hannity’s blatant attempt to turn the draft-dodging Donald Trump into a military hero has backfired. Instead, an investigation by The Washington Post has earned the myth (still on Hannity’s website), that Trump was instrumental in helping 200 stranded Marines get home, four Pinocchios.

If you haven’t visited Hannity.com lately, you might not know about a post titled, “200 Stranded Marines Needed A Plane Ride Home, Here’s How Donald Trump Responded.”

The short answer: Trump didn’t respond but pretended he had – and Hannity promoted the BS.

The Hannity article, written by “Lauren,” begins:

When Corporal Ryan Stickney and 200 of his fellow Marines prepared to return to their families after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, a logistics error forced them to turn to a surprising source for a ride home: Donald J. Trump.

In the Hannitized version of events, a logistics mistake was about to strand the Marines at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, when they were scheduled to return to Miami... until Trump came to the rescue.

The Trump campaign has confirmed to Hannity.com that Mr. Trump did indeed send his plane to make two trips from North Carolina to Miami, Florida to transport over 200 Gulf War Marines back home. No further details were provided.

But, as it turns out, Mr. Trump never sent his plane and had nothing whatsoever to do with the entire incident.

A reader noticed some fishy details and asked TheWashington Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, to check the story out. It didn’t.

Although the plane bore the name “Trump,” Kessler explains, it was not Trump’s private plane but “a Boeing 727 jet that was part of a Trump Shuttle fleet — an airline that Trump briefly owned before it was essentially seized by the banks because he failed to make payments on his loans.”

Kessler further explains:

Well, it turns out when Trump bought the shuttle from Eastern Airlines, he made a bad deal, accepting an additional five planes instead of a lower purchase price because the market had turned south. As the Daily Beast noted, in an entertaining account of Trump’s foray into the airline business, “the shuttle needed only 16 planes to operate a full hourly schedule at its three cities, with one or two jets as spares, and extra aircraft are anathema to an airline — they don’t make money sitting on the ground.”

So some of those extra planes were contracted out to the U.S. military to ferry personnel in the United States during Operations Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991.

[…]

More than likely, given the proximity of the Trump Shuttle to Camp Lejeune, a Trump Shuttle jet was dispatched from LaGuardia to pick up the troops and take them to Florida as part of the contract.

In other words, not only did Trump have nothing to do with helping out our brave heroes, it was thanks to his poor business judgment that the military was able to do so instead.

According to Kessler, whose article was posted online today at 3:00 AM, neither Hannity nor the Trump campaign have responded to requests for comment.

But as I write this, the article remains posted on Hannity’s website, without any correction.

Remember when Hannity complained “Journalism is dead” a few months ago? If that’s true, he is certainly one of its murderers. If not, he’s doing his darnedest to make it so.

Watch Hannity whine about the death of journalism again, below, from the May 31 Hannity.

(H/T reader Eric J.)