Sean Hannity panics, begins deleting incriminating tweets
Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison today, after he provided significant cooperation to Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation into Donald Trump, but declined to fully cooperate with unspecified SDNY investigations. We don’t know who all Cohen has given up, but Cohen’s supposed legal client, Fox News host Sean Hannity, immediately hit the panic button.
Sean Hannity has suddenly deleted more than two hundred tweets today, some of them fairly old. The Daily Beast dug in and determined that some of the deleted tweets referenced Michael Cohen. We all recall that earlier this year, Cohen went into court and told a judge that he had provided formal legal counsel to Hannity, who then tried to minimize it by insisting it was merely informal advice about real estate. Specifically, Hannity deleted the tweet in which he claimed that Cohen wasn’t really his lawyer. So what gives?
People will sometimes delete a recent tweet because they made a typo, or because they received negative feedback about it. But this logic doesn’t apply to months-old tweets, because no one is looking at those old tweets anyway. Hannity doesn’t appear to be trying to hide these older tweets from the public, and instead is presumably trying to hide them from prosecutors.
This is a rather naive strategy, as various third-party websites automatically archive older versions of web pages, including Twitter pages. Sean Hannity hasn’t done anything to protect himself legally by deleting these tweets, and he has unwittingly brought a significant amount of public focus on his suspicious behavior. Hannity is panicking, and he’s being characteristically stupid about it.
