Sean Hannity exposed
We get it. Fox News is the most explicitly partisan news show on mainstream television. Much of what is said, compliments of the Fox airwaves, is heavily slanted in favour of Republican apologetics. In a free society the other side of every issue has a right, perhaps even a duty, to be heard.
I will even go so far as to acknowledge, though not an inch farther, that Sean Hannity is a right wing commentator in the same spirit that I am a left wing commentator. But that’s where Hannity and I part company. I believe what I write. I have never once written a line for Palmer Report that I claimed to be true that I knew was not. If placed under oath I will happily affirm — without fear of perjury — that every word I have ever written for Palmer Report I fervently believed to be the truth at the time I wrote it.
It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that I also acknowledge that I may have been wrong about something I wrote. I’m always willing to admit that, because sometimes it turns out to be the case. But I sincerely believed it to be true at the time. The point remains, I’ve never written a single word to you, brothers and sisters, that I thought was a lie.
Not so Sean Hannity. And he has said so — under oath. In a deposition for a $1.6 billion lawsuit brought against discredited attorney Sidney Powell and Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems (DVS), Hannity admitted he lied. As you may recall, Sidney Powell claimed without evidence that DVS machines were rigged to perpetrate a massive fraud against the American people and steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump. According to an attorney for DVS, Hannity said of Powell’s claim that he “did not believe it for one second.”
But Hannity’s under oath statement runs contrary to what he has said for years on Fox News. He even lent credibility to Powell’s claims at a time when all the other Republican MAGA wingnuts were distancing themselves from Powell and her idiotic claims. (I also wouldn’t be surprised if, when Hannity said that he didn’t believe it, he said so with his usual arrogance, as if he was proud of the fact that he wasn’t ever taken in by the likes of Sidney Powell.)
Hannity had Sidney Powell on his show. After she made her outrageous claims about DVS, instead of telling her he didn’t believe her for one minute, Hannity instead asked her, “Why were Democrats silencing whistleblowers who could prove the fraud?”
In other words, instead of calling out Powell as an obvious liar, Hannity went back to attacking Democrats about whistleblowers. Recall that during the first impeachment of Donald Trump, Republicans wanted to expose the whistleblower who first reported Trump’s improper phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Mentioning whistleblowers during the interview was Hannity returning to the topic and wondering aloud, disingenuously, why suddenly Democrats suddenly weren’t interested in whistleblowers any more. The answer, of course, is we are interested in them only when the whistleblowers have actual evidence.
Hannity is nothing more than a propaganda spewing money whore who will do or say anything for ratings — and the truth be damned. He should never be allowed to forget his under oath statement proving that he tells lies in the name of profit and ratings, even when those lies are severely damaging to democracy.
There are eight million stories of Republican money whores in the naked city of hypocrisy. Sean Hannity’s story has been one of them. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.