As we get ready for the impeachment hearings set to begin Wednesday morning, a subset issue I'll be keeping in mind is the role of Sean Hannity in Trump’s bribery/extortion scheme with Ukraine. As CNN host Brian Stelter put it yesterday, the testimony we have seen so far has highlighted Hannity’s role as one of Trump’s “shadow foreign policy advisers.”
On yesterday’s Reliable Sources, Stelter and his panel discussed how the impeachment hearings may play in the right-wing media. Guest Tara Dowdell, a Democratic political and business strategist, predicted that the right-wing media will “ramp up” its aggression and become “more robust, more comprehensive” in its coverage.
In other words, we can expect more attacks, more deflections and more whining – especially from Hannity. “Sean Hannity is functioning as a de facto advisor, but he's also functioning as a chief spokesperson for the Trump administration,” Dowdell continued. “Anytime Trump has an issue with something, Sean Hannity goes on the attack.” She noted that Hannity even attacked Fox News’ own polling after its results were unfavorable to Trump.
But Hannity has already been implicated as a player in the scandal, as we noted last week. According to Stelter, Hannity has been named “more than a dozen times” in just one transcript.
Shareblue editor and SiriusXM radio host Jess McIntosh highlighted what’s so problematic about that.
MCINTOSH: We’re seeing really disturbing things coming out of the transcripts that have been released over the last week. The most disturbing, I thought, aside from the open extortion of a foreign government, was the fact that the secretary of state had to call Sean Hannity to find out how the president was feeling about an ambassador. That was so shocking. And it just threw into really high relief that Hannity and [Rudy] Giuliani have been operating as unelected, un-appointed foreign policy executors for our country, which is deeply disturbing.
I hope more will come out about this during the hearings.
Watch the discussion from CNN’s November 10, 2019 Reliable Sources below.
I know I sound like a broken record on the subject of Helmet Head Hannity, but my hatred for him is a visceral thing, He and Carlson are the biggest propagandists on FOX, and their insidious reach into the minds of gullible simple Americans is palpable. IMO he is the most dangerous person in media today, and we should attack and destroy him without mercy.