While he loves to say that he agrees with everything one-term, twice-impeached former president does and says, Fox News host Sean Hannity admits under oath that he actually thinks the ex-president is full of crap.
Under oath in a deposition, Hannity was asked about allegations made by attorney Sidney Powell, who said voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were susceptible to fraud, the New York Times reports. And his response was the direct opposite of what he said on his show when discussing the matter of the 2020 election.
At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used “to trash large batches of votes.”
Mr. Hannity interrupted her with a gentle question that had been circulating among election deniers, despite a lack of supporting proof: Why were Democrats silencing whistle blowers who could prove this fraud?
Did Mr. Hannity believe any of this?
“I did not believe it for one second.”
That was the answer Mr. Hannity gave, under oath, in a deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, according to information disclosed in a court hearing on Wednesday. The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April.
Yes, Fox is being sued for $1.6 billion thanks to people such as Sean Hannity, who parroted the lies from Trump and members of his campaign who tried to suggest the 2020 election had been stolen from the failed former president.
In other words, the Times notes, the testimony from Hannity “is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.”
And there’s also evidence that Fox tried to keep Powell from spreading her lies on their network, yet they continued to give her airtime.
Another previously unknown detail emerged on Wednesday about what was going on inside the Fox universe in those frantic weeks after the election. A second lawyer representing Dominion, Justin Nelson, told Judge Davis about evidence obtained by Dominion showing that an employee of the Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, had tried to intervene with the White House to stop Ms. Powell. According to Mr. Nelson, that employee called the fraud claims “outlandish” and pressed Mr. Trump’s staff to get rid of Ms. Powell, who was advising the president on filing legal challenges to the results.
All of this suggests that Fox knew they were broadcasting lies yet continued to do so, which is very bad news for the network because it shows a pattern of behavior that supports the assertion they deliberately tried to defame Dominion.
Oh, and it also suggests that Sean Hannity is a lying sack of shit. But then again, some of us have known that for years.