If Sean Hannity could think of a single good reason for his beloved Donald Trump to have taken classified and other government material he had no right to, he would have mentioned it in his softball interview with Trump this week. Instead, we got a display of deflection, distraction and whataboutism that demonstrates Hannity’s willingness to throw his country under the bus for the sake of MAGA politics.
Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, has blasted Trump’s theft of classified and other material on Fox News. “I can’t think of a legitimate reason” for Trump to have taken classified documents, Barr said on the America Reports show, on September 2. He also called it “highly improbable” that Trump declassified all the documents and if he had, “that would be such an abuse, that shows such recklessness that it’s almost worse than taking the documents.”
Barr also called out Trump’s deceitful refusal to return the documents as justification for the search warrant: “The facts are starting to show that [the federal government was] being jerked around and so how long do they wait?” Barr asked rhetorically.
Hannity traveled to Mar-a-Lago for this brown-nosing attempt at treason rehab. He prefaced his softball interview with 10 minutes of defense-by-deflection, first by demonizing the FBI:
HANNITY: [R]oughly 30 federal agents, guns drawn, stormed through the doors right here in the president's own home, now, in what was obviously an unprecedented raid, historically.
But we begin with a few serious questions to everybody watching tonight. Do we have, in America today, equal justice under the law? Do we have equal application of our laws in this country? Do our local, state, and federal officials, do they investigate crimes or prosecute people?
If America's justice system is ever weaponized and politicized beyond repair, this country that we all love, we are in big trouble.
Never mind that Trump and Barr have been credibly accused of weaponizing and politicizing our justice system. I guarantee you, that will never get a Hannity diatribe.
Hannity moved on to attack New York Attorney General Letitia James who brought a massive fraud lawsuit against Trump that day. “It is nothing short of a very obvious political stunt. It is not a criminal case. It is a civil case,” Hannity said. As if that was proof that Trump did nothing wrong. He didn’t mention that James referred the case to the Southern District of New York and the IRS for criminal prosecution.
Then it was back to deflecting from Trump’s theft of classified material:
HANNITY: But [James is] not alone, you know, from the Trump haters on Capitol Hill, high-ranking deep state bureaucrats in the DOJ, the FBI. Now we have witnessed, going on many years, the 45th president has been the subject of what is non-stop, never-ending legal scrutiny focused not on a specific crime but on the man himself.
Now, this is an intense legal scrutiny that no Democrat has ever faced, no other president has ever faced. For example, for the first time in history, an American president's home was raided by the FBI.
Well, as Barr said, it’s “unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put ‘em in a country club,” a fact Hannity consistently ignored.
Hannity suggested Trump might have declassified the material, without saying that had actually happened and without mentioning that it doesn’t matter. As former senior legal advisor at the State Department, Scott Anderson, told Roll Call, “none of the criminal provisions listed in the search warrant hinge on whether the documents recovered at Mar-a-Lago are classified or not."
For extra deflection points, Hannity tried to make Trump’s possible treason about Hillary Clinton.
HANNITY: And, by the way, the president can declassify any of these documents -- unlike, for example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she cannot. We'll get to that in a minute.
Still, she stored 110 classified documents on unsecured private servers. Hillary Clinton was never forced to endure a federal raid. She was never charged with any crime.
Hannity left out the key differences between the two cases, especially the part where Clinton and her aides consented to let the FBI search her devices while Trump allegedly obstructed the recovery of the documents.
After a bit more on Clinton, Hannity moved on to deflect with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden:
HANNITY: Now we see the same thing, by the way, with the Bidens -- Joe Biden and his family. As President Trump was impeached over a routine phone call with Ukraine saying, I hope you're not going to be like your predecessors and abuse the money of my taxpaying fellow Americans.
Well, they accused President Trump at the time of a quid pro quo. They went to an impeachment over that.
Now that’s quite the lie. In his “routine phone call,” Trump tried to push Ukrainian President Zelensky into investigating then-likely presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son while Trump held up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine that Congress had appropriated.
Extorting an American ally for the sake of presidential politics? No problem for MAGA-Trumps-All Hannity. He went on and on about Biden’s supposed corruption when, in fact, Biden was fighting corruption in Ukraine.
And, of course, Hannity deflected to Hunter Biden:
HANNITY: And meanwhile, Hunter was on video with the laptop that everybody said three weeks before the 2020 election was Russian disinformation. It wasn't. But there he is smoking crack, soliciting foreign prostitutes and according -- and recording all of it on the laptop that the FBI has now had for years.
Oh, and he also lied on a gun application, lost track of that gun. It ended up in a dumpster near an elementary school. But Hunter's home? His home was never raided. Joe's home, it's never been raided.
Even if everything Hannity said was true, none of it justifies Trump’s likely criminal and treasonous behavior.
For a dose of irony, lying, Trump-propagandist Hannity pretended to care about bias in the media and justice for all:
HANNITY: Now the media mob -- I know you're watching tonight, welcome aboard. They won't even ask him about why he lied. All the evidence exists. He did meet many of Hunter Biden's business partners -- foreign business partners.
…
So, tonight, I ask the media mob, I know you're watching; I ask the attorney general, Merrick Garland, I know you're watching; I ask FBI Director Wray, I'm sure you're all watching, is this really the America you want? Is this the justice system that the American people deserve where political justice and vengeance is doled out by those in power while others are protected and shielded from prosecution?
Because the pendulum, by the way, I will remind you, it will swing. And right now we are headed down a very dark path.
And I want to be very clear, I'm very clear I'm a conservative. And I would never want in the United States of America, I believe the greatest country God gave man, any Democrat, any socialist to be treated unfairly, not to have equal justice or application of our laws. That would be unconstitutional.
The fact is, Hannity’s Bedtime BFF has been caught engaging in behavior much worse than what Trump and his cohorts demanded Hillary Clinton go to jail for. Even in this lengthy interview, Trump never came up with a single good explanation for his behavior. In fact, he may have incriminated himself further.
Not once in the interview did Hannity ask why Trump took the documents and why he never returned them. That’s undoubtedly because there is no good explanation for Trump’s behavior – which, by the way, may well have seriously harmed our national security.
Hannity knows all that and he doesn’t care.
You can watch Hannity’s Murdoch-funded complicity below, from the September 21, 2022 Hannity.