After urgently imploring Trump chief-of-staff Mark Meadows to get his boss to call off the January 6th insurrectionists, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham lied and covered up for Donald Trump on the air that night. Receipts from CNN.
As previously reported, Rep. Liz Cheney dropped a bombshell during a January 6th committee meeting Monday night when she read texts from Fox News hosts Hannity, Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade begging Meadows to intervene with Trump:
CHENEY: Indeed, according to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately. They texted Mr. Meadows. And he has turned over those texts. Quote “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy," Laura Ingraham wrote.
“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” Brian Kilmeade texted.
“Can he make a statement, ask people to leave the Capitol?” Sean Hannity urged.
It’s proof that the three Fox stars knew from the get-go – and were willing to admit among friends – that the insurrectionists were violent Trump supporters, not leftist extremists, not the Deep State, not peaceful patriots “hugging and kissing” the police and guards which the network has been telling its viewers, with the explicit permission of Lachlan Murdoch, about January 6th.
But as CNN proved during yesterday's New Day show, Hannity and Ingraham came up with a different story that same day.
As you can see below, Hannity and Ingraham went on the air hours after they sent those texts to Meadows, spinning the January 6th violence on behalf of their beloved President P***y Grabber.
First, we saw Hannity suggest on Fox News that night that bad actors, at least partly from the left, had infiltrated the crowd:
HANNITY: We also knew that there’s always bad actors that will infiltrate large crowds. I don’t care if they’re radical left, radical right. I don’t know who they are.
Ingraham more explicitly suggested the insurrectionists were not Trump supporters:
INGRAHAM: I’ve never seen Trump rally attendees wearing helmets, black helmets, brown helmets, black backpacks.
On his radio show, Hannity suggested antifa and “other radical groups” were “there to cause trouble” while Trump supporters were there to “peacefully protest.”
HANNITY: They knew they could just easily find out and determine hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people are going to show up because they did. They were descending onto the town. There they go. They're going to peacefully protest. And we had reports that groups like Antifa, other radical groups, I don't know the names of all of them, that they were there to cause trouble.
I want to explain in detail, if I can, what today is about and why people are feeling the way they're feeling, to the extent that I think I can. And this is not something that is -- has happened here in a vacuum.
Last night on MSNBC, Eric Boehlert made the point that you can be certain the Foxies contacted plenty of other Trump administration insiders besides Mark Meadows on January 6th. I’m sure he’s right.
Fox News is a cancer on this country, part infinity. @allinwithchris pic.twitter.com/cgF7L51G5Z
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) December 15, 2021