A manic Sean Hannity portrayed himself as a martyr of "liberal fascism" Wednesday morning, hours after the Fox News host addressed the debunked conspiracy theory surrounding the murder of Seth Rich on his nightly program.
For over a week, Hannity had been trying to deflect from the Russian hacking investigations by peddling the conspiracy theory that Rich was the source of the leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee. The story came to its head Tuesday night when the right-wing news host devoted time on his show, "Hannity," to the Rich family's request for his silence on the issue.
[salon_video id="14770945"]"The unsolved murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich continues to get a huge amount of attention," Hannity said on his program, seemingly ignoring the fact that he was responsible for mainstreaming the conspiracy theory in the first place. "I totally and completely understand how upset, how hard this is on this family — especially over the recent coverage of Seth's death."
"Out of the respect for the family's wishes, for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time," he added.
But Hannity did not exactly throw cold water on the story. Near the end of his show Tuesday night, Hannity suggested that he was still pursuing the Rich story in a tweet.
On Wednesday morning, as Hannity was alerting his followers to the Media Matters campaign that's trying to strip the host of his advertisers, The Washington Post reported that Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who told Hannity that he had super-secret inside information, had tried to hack Rich's Gmail account last week, around the time he claimed to have the evidence. The Post reported that Rich's email account, which his father still maintains, received an invitation from welcome@mega.nz in an apparent attempt to gain access to emails.
Meanwhile, Hannity has adopted a hashtag for himself to help save his endangered program.
On Tuesday night's "Hannity," the news host basically admitted that he was using the Rich story to run interference for President Donald Trump.
"There are so many issues here," he said about Rich's conspiracy theory. "Not the least of which is the Democratic push of their Russia narrative."
"The destroy-Trump media, the Democrats, they have been pushing that Russian tinfoil hat conspiracy with zero evidence," he added, without a hint of irony.
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