Hours after the House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection revealed that a number of Fox News stars—including Sean Hannity—begged former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to call on then-President Donald Trump to halt the Capitol riot, Meadows showed up on Hannity’s show to rail against the committee’s contempt recommendation.
And yet, somehow, the subject of the bombshell text messages never once came up on Monday night.
Hannity, a Trump confidant who amplified the ex-president’s “stolen” election lies ahead of the Jan. 6 violence, texted Meadows while a MAGA mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s electoral victory. “Can he make a statement. Ask people to leave the Capitol,” Hannity pleaded with the Trump aide as the riots raged.
It wasn’t just Hannity that was texting Meadows that day. The ex-president’s son asked Meadows to get his father to “condemn this shit ASAP” and deliver an “Oval Office address,” while Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade demanded that Trump get on TV and “tell the people in the Capitol to go home.”
In their eight-minute friendly chat on Thursday night, though, Hannity did not mention the texts at all. In fact, the majority of the conversation revolved around the ex-Trump aide blasting the House committee’s recommendation that the Department of Justice charge him with criminal contempt of Congress.
While they never got around to discussing the bombshell texts, Hannity did find time to take a shot at Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), who revealed the messages prior to the committee’s vote on Meadows’ contempt charge.
"I love how Liz is now partnered with the people that called her father a war criminal, a murderer, and a crook,” Hannity huffed. “Pretty amazing!"
The Fox News host, meanwhile, was delivering a different message to his viewers and listeners the same day he was imploring Meadows to get Trump to stop the MAGA mob. During his afternoon radio show, Hannity suggested that left-wing activists were responsible for the chaos, saing he had “heard these reports” that antifa “might even wear MAGA gear” at the event.
On his primetime Fox News show that evening, Hannity said it was possible that “bad actors” from the “radical left” had infiltrated the crowd to spark violence.
Since then, the pro-Trump primetime host has actively opposed an independent bipartisan commission to look into the Capitol riots, claiming it would be a “smear campaign against Donald Trump, all Republicans, and Trump supporters everywhere.” Furthermore, he’s also repeatedly insisted—as he did Monday night—that Congress should instead investigate the racial justice protests that were sparked by the George Floyd murder rather than the insurrection.
This also isn’t the first time that Hannity’s text messages with subjects of an investigation related to Trump have come to light. In June 2019, it was revealed that the Fox News star had texted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort hundreds of times throughout the course of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Manafort. At one point, Hannity offered Manafort “anything I can do to help.”
