It’s tempting to laugh off Sean Hannity’s Fox News rants that are so similar to each other that it feels like “Groundhog Day” every night on his show. But it’s no joke how this prime time host works to undermine an important democratic process, the Russia investigation, in service to Dearly Beloved Donald Trump.
Underneath Hannity’s nightly histrionics is an effort to destroy the credibility of former FBI Director James Comey, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and any reporter not denouncing them like Hannity does and to throw up smoke screens of conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and Obama administration officials.
Media Matters has kept count of all the ways Hannity is doing this (so we don’t have to). So far, they have come up with “22 examples of Hannity ignoring facts, promoting falsehoods and conspiracies, and attempting to cast blame on others in order to defend, deflect, and downplay accusations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the U.S election.”
Not surprisingly, the first item on the list is Hannity’s promotion of the fake Seth Rich murder conspiracy even after the Rich family asked him to stop.
Here are some more of the worst from the worst:
In March, Hannity suggested that the CIA framed Russia for 2016 election interference, a conspiracy theory pushed by Breitbart.
When Trump issued a threat on Twitter suggesting that he may have recorded tapes of his conversations with Comey, Hannity called it one of the “most brilliant … tweets in the history of mankind.”
After the revelations that Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting during the presidential campaign with Russians to get supposedly damaging information on Clinton, Hannity pushed a false claim originating from pro-Trump fringe media (and which Trump’s legal team encouraged) saying the meeting was some kind of a Democratic set-up against the Trumps and that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was somehow involved in the plot.
As the meeting between Trump Jr. and Russian officials was under scrutiny, Hannity asked Vice President Mike Pence on his radio show to get Clinton investigated rather than “Russia, Russia, Russia.”
On July 24, Hannity urged his viewers to harass journalists who had been reporting Trump-Russia stories, saying to “write a message to their bosses” and “take to the social media.”
Two days after pro-Trump website The Gateway Pundit and multiple fake news purveyors claimed in July that a “mysterious IT specialist” published a report proving Russia did not hack the DNC, Hannity said on his radio show that “there are reports out there that” the hacking of the DNC emails “was all done domestically.”
Read the entire list on Media Matters.
These individual examples are heinous enough. But the bigger picture is that "great American" Hannity can't tolerate anyone or anything that doesn't slavishly support Trump. And Hannity is willing to throw democracy, American freedoms, truth, ethics and basic human decency out the window in order to shove his views down everyone else's throat.
Listen to Hannity smear the CIA as he suggests that agency framed Russia over interference in the 2016 presidential election below, from the March 8, 2017 The Sean Hannity Show, via Media Matters.
(Hannity image via screen grab.)
The gem in all this is what Pie told Assange before and after their interviews. Pie’s private conversations with Assange are more important than the interviews.
If federal investigators were smart they would have Pie testify under oath. Pie would pass out cold in his office if he was summoned to testify.
#Hanniepiemusttestify
This is part of the reason why Hannity, Carlson and others are so frantically trying to scream “Nothing over here! Nothing over here!” when more details of the Russia probe come out. All this story does is drum up more ominous clouds for a presidency that is lining up to be one of the most unfortunate ones of our history – if not the single worst one ever.
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised when very little comes from the full investigation. My instincts say that the Pence DOJ will simply smack Trump and his kids on the paws, in the same way that James Comey handled Hillary Clinton – they’ll say that these guys acted irresponsibly but not in a criminal manner, and they’ll let it go at that. Same thing will go with the Congressional inquiries. If anyone complains about it, they’ll be screamed at about how the Clintons got off easy. And we shouldn’t be surprised when the Pence DOJ actually does proceed against the Clintons – I’ve been waiting for them to actively play that card for six months now. Trump is only recently starting to foment the “Lock Her Up!” ideas again, and hard line Right Wingers in Congress are just now trying to gin up new investigations of Hillary Clinton. I’m anticipating that in the event of anything more serious happening with Mueller, the Pence DOJ will announce either a grand jury or indictments on the Clintons, as a way to draw the focus away from themselves.
There’s another area that is also becoming clear as a Right Wing talking point feast. Which is that the Right has always stated that if the economy were to really improve, Donald Trump would be assured of re-election, regardless of scandals. So it should be no surprise that the Right is trying to push the new meme of “record high stock market!” and “record low unemployment!” and any new jobs projects it can pretend were the result of the Pence White House’s machinations. Of course, the improved numbers that happened under President Obama were regularly dismissed by the same cheerleaders, as they always wanted to act like the economy was tanked throughout the Obama presidency, without taking any ownership for the behavior of W and the GOP congresspeople who triggered the last recession. But what’s interesting is that Trump’s approval rating continues to plunge, most recently hitting 33%, even while the Right keeps trying to cheerlead the same economic numbers they dismissed one year ago.
The only other step these guys could take to try to bolster the Pence White House would be to get involved somewhere in a military fashion – and let’s hope they’re not foolish enough to make that mistake.
According to CNN, the Wikileaks release was July 22.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/03/world/wikileaks-fast-facts/index.html
Jr. met with the russians on June 9.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/us/politics/trump-russia-kushner-manafort.html?_r=0
So your theory is possible. I have heard that same speculation before, too.
The reason I’m asking is Junior claimed to not receive any helpful information but Daddy Don said he would have a press conference the week after the scheduled meeting that would incriminate Hillary. That conference just ended up with nothing new, and I wonder if what the Trump campaign received was the information that Russia had the emails and would release them to Wikileaks to avoid the obvious of who it was really coming from.