Tag: Sean Hannity

Dubious Fox News article appears to have sparked Trump attack on Obama

President Donald Trump appeared to rely on a dubious Fox News report Tuesday morning to unleash an attack on his predecessor, accusing President Barack Obama, without any real evidence, of granting citizenship to 2,500 Iranians as part of nuclear deal negotiations.

“Just out that Obama Administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians – including to government officials,” Trump tweeted. “How big (and bad) is that?”

Jeff Prescott, the former senior director on Obama’s National Security Council, called Trump’s allegation “absurd and entirely false.”

Prescott shared with CNN immigration data from the Department of Homeland Security which showed that the number of Iranians naturalized in the United States over the course of the Obama and Bush administrations was relatively consistent.

“There was no connection between the Iran nuclear deal and immigration policy,” Prescott added.

The unsubstantiated claim first gained attention with a Monday story on Fox News’ website that relied on the word of an Iranian cleric who is also a member of the country’s parliament.

The article, written by Chris Irvine, a Fox News senior editor, cited an Iranian news agency that cited an Iranian newspaper that quoted the single Iranian cleric, who said the Obama administration provided citizenship to 2,500 unidentified Iranians during nuclear deal negotiations.

The article itself quoted, toward the end of the story, the network’s own commentator, former Obama State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, saying, “This sounds like totally made up BS.” The story said the Department of Homeland Security and State Department declined to comment, and that a representative for former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson could not be reached.

Prior to the Fox News article, the claim had not received any noticeable attention from the US media.

But after Fox News published its story, other outlets, primarily in the conservative media space, published similar stories. Those outlets included The Daily Mail, The Gateway Pundit, and TownHall.

The claims were also shared on Twitter by Fox News host Sean Hannity and frequent Fox guests David Clarke and Charlie Kirk.

On Tuesday morning, just hours before Trump’s tweet, the story made its way to Fox News’ airwaves on “Fox & Friends First,” the network’s early morning show. It also later aired on “America’s Newsroom,” a late-morning news program on Fox News.

“It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that this is a case of Donald Trump parroting Fox News, which is peddling the claims of an Iranian hardliner,” Prescott told CNN.

Jake Sullivan, a former Obama official who was involved at the start of the Iran nuclear negotiations, also skewered Trump for relying on Fox News’ thin report to make what he called a “completely false” claim.

“What is interesting about this is that what happened is a hardline crank in Iran just randomly made this comment, Fox News writes a story on it, and then Trump tweets it,” Sullivan said on “The Situation Room.”

[CNN]

Trump touts Hannity’s show on ‘Deep State crime families’ led by Mueller, Comey and Clintons

On Wednesday night, like most other weeknights, it was to be expected that President Trump would be tuning into his favorite prime-time pundit. But as if his followers needed a reminder, the president tweeted about it.

“Big show tonight on @seanhannity!” Trump tweeted, promoting Sean Hannity’s 9 p.m. segment on Fox News. By early Thursday morning, Hannity was the No. 1 topic trending on Twitter, and scores of viewers watched as Hannity fired out his usual attacks on his favorite subjects: Hillary Clinton, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and former FBI director James B. Comey.

In a conspiratorial, long-winded monologue, Hannity charted connections he sees among all three of them. The pundit outlined what he described as “obvious Deep State crime families trying to take down the president,” consisting of the Clinton “family,” the Comey “family” and the Mueller “family.”

Hannity said he was inspired by Comey, who appeared in a video this week promoting an interview between Comey and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that will air Sunday. In the interview, Stephanopoulos suggests that Comey compared Trump to a “mob boss.”

“Mr. Comey, you’re really going to compare the sitting president of the United States to a mob boss so you can make money?” Hannity said of the former FBI director, who is currently promoting his soon-to-be-released book. “If he’s going to use a sweeping analogy, I’ve decided tonight we’re going to use the Comey standard … and make some comparisons of our own.”

He began with what he called “a family responsible for actual crimes … the head of the notorious political cabal, of course Bill and Hillary Clinton, the Clinton crime family.”

For the Clinton family, Hannity brought up allegations of sexual misconduct against President Bill Clinton and, of course, accused Hillary Clinton of committing crimes, obstructing justice and mishandling national secrets on a private server. Linked to the Clinton “crime family” were individuals such as Hillary Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, “sketchy” former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, former attorney general Loretta E. Lynch, and others, including Christopher Steele, the author of the “dossier” alleging ties between Trump and Russia.

Then there’s the “Mueller Crime Family,” Hannity said. The host drew connections between the special counsel and his “best friend” Comey, as well as notorious gangster and killer Whitey Bulger. Hannity accused Mueller of “looking the other way” at Bulger’s crimes while he was a federal prosecutor in Boston. Then, of course, Hannity mapped out the “Comey Crime Family,” linking the former FBI director to Lynch, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, Steele, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and “fellow Comey Deep State sycophant” former CIA director John Brennan.

Though Hannity retweeted Trump’s tweet promoting his Wednesday night show, he insisted that the president “was not given ANY heads up on my monologue using the ‘Comey’ standard!!!”

Regardless of what Trump knew before the show, the president is known to watch Hannity’s show regularly and look to it for guidance.

As CNN’s Brian Stelter tweeted, Wednesday night illustrated that “the line where Fox News ends and where Trump begins is getting blurrier by the day.”

Aides have said Trump regularly calls Hannity before or after the program to give feedback, The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey has reported. “Aides sometimes plot to have guests make points on Fox that they have been unable to get the president to agree to in person,” Dawsey wrote.

Hannity on Wednesday night once again called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt,” as does Trump, and brought on guests who attempted to discredit Justice Department officials and the special counsel.

[Washington Post]

Media

 

Trump asks why ‘deep state authorities’ aren’t investigating Clinton emails

President Trump on Tuesday asked why “deep state authorities” aren’t looking into the handling of the investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, referencing a guest who had just appeared on Fox News.

“Charles McCullough, the respected fmr Intel Comm Inspector General, said the public was misled on Crooked Hillary Emails,” Trump tweeted. “Why aren’t our deep State authorities looking at this? Rigged and corrupt?”

McCullough, who was appointed to his post by former President Obama, said in an interview on Monday with Fox News that he experienced pushback from Democrats when he tried to explain the seriousness of the investigation into Clinton’s emails.

“I’ve heard people say this is overblown, I’ve heard people say this is much ado about nothing. Had the information been released, there would have been harm to national security,” McCullough said in the interview.

“There was personal blowback. Personal blowback to me, to my family, to my office,” McCullough told Fox News.

McCullough appeared Tuesday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to reiterate his claims, roughly an hour before Trump’s tweet.

The FBI concluded last year that it would not pursue criminal charges against Clinton for her “extremely careless” handling of classified materials while she was secretary of State.

Trump throughout the 2016 presidential campaign said Clinton should be prosecuted for using a personal server to handle classified emails.

Republican lawmakers have in recent weeks pressed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint a special prosecutor to look into how the email case was handled.

[The Hill]

Trump Believes a Corporate Stock Market Rally Reduces Government National Debt

President Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that, “in one sense,” the stock market rally since his election reduces the $20 trillion national debt.

Let’s break down his astonishing claim.

“The country — we took it over, it owed $20 trillion,” Trump Sean Hannity of Fox News in Pennsylvania.

So far, so good. It’s correct that the U.S. owed nearly $20 trillion when Trump took office.

“As you know, the last eight years, they borrowed more than it did in the whole history of our country. So, they borrowed more than $10 trillion dollars, right?”

Also, more or less accurate — $9 trillion to be exact.

“And yet, we picked up $5.2 trillion just in the stock market. Possibly picked up the whole thing in terms of the first nine months in terms of value. So, you can say in one sense we’re really increasing values; and maybe in a sense we’re reducing debt.”

Huh? To say this is a head-scratcher is an understatement.

Trump is right that the stock market has added trillions in value since his election.

But higher stock prices reflect corporate profits. Shareholders and investors reap the rewards. When investors get richer, it does not reduce the amount of money Congress and the federal government has already spent and owes.

The national debt, which he correctly states is $20 trillion, is the result of the government spending more than it takes in. To cut the debt, Congress has to spend less or raise taxes. That would free up cash to pay down what the U.S. owes.

“The stock market’s gains have virtually nothing to do with the size of the national debt, which continues to rise because government spending far exceeds government receipts,” political economist Greg Valliere told CNNMoney.

“A higher stock market encourages consumers and companies to spend more, which helps the overall economy,” said Valliere of Horizon Investments. “But it’s absurd to contend that the national debt has fallen because of this.”

In fact, the president wants to cut taxes and potentially add to the debt if spending cuts cannot be found to offset those tax cuts.

The White House, in a statement, said Trump “was simply making the point that we’ve seen enormous growth in the stock market since his election, that means more money in the pocket of everyday citizens, and more circulating in our economy as a whole.”

As for that stock market rally, the Standard and Poor’s 500 is up nearly 20% since his election — an impressive rally. No question investors cheer this president’s pro-business, anti-regulation, lower taxes agenda. But under the Obama Administration that same index rose 235%. And no, that stock market rally did not reduce or offset the national debt either.

[CNN]

Media

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Eric Trump: Democrats Are ‘Not Even People’

President Trump’s son Eric Trump on Tuesday said Democrats are “not even people” to him after their obstruction of his father’s agenda.

“I’ve never seen hatred like this,” he said on Fox News’s “Hannity” Tuesday night. “To me, they’re not even people. It’s so, so sad. Morality’s just gone, morals have flown out the window and we deserve so much better than this as a country.”

“You see the Democratic Party, they’re imploding. They’re imploding. They became obstructionists because they have no message of their own.”

Trump additionally criticized the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) leadership without directly naming Chairman Tom Perez.

“You see the head of the DNC, who is a total whack job,” he told host Sean Hannity. “There’s no leadership there.”

“They lost the [2016 presidential] election that they should have won because they spent seven times the amount of money that my father spent.”

Democrats have tried capitalizing on liberal dissatisfaction with Trump’s administration and its agenda despite Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) has emerged as a vocal critic of Trump and is reportedly readying the articles of impeachment that mark the first official step of any congressional bid to remove a sitting president.

Green’s criticisms focus on Trump’s controversial firing of former FBI Director James Comey last month amid the bureau’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race.

Trump reportedly urged Comey to halt the investigation of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn ahead of his ouster.

The president’s decision roiled Washington as the FBI’s probe includes possible collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign.

[The Hill]

Media

Newt Gingrich: Trump Should Use The CNN Confrontation As An Excuse To Break The Press

Newt Gingrich, a prominent supporter of President-elect Donald Trump and a Fox News contributor, would like to shatter the influence of an “adversarial” press. And he thinks Trump’s press conference confrontation with CNN reporter Jim Acosta has given the incoming administration the opportunity to dramatically reshape White House press interactions to favor journalists who will treat the president-elect more favorably.

During Trump’s January 11 presser, he lashed out at CNN  and demanded the network apologize for a recent report on his alleged ties to Russia, and Acosta repeatedly called out, seeking to ask a question in response. Trump replied by calling CNN “terrible,” castigating Acosta for being “rude,” and declaring, “I’m not going to give you a question. You are fake news!” Sean Spicer, who will serve as Trump’s White House press secretary, subsequently told Acosta that he would be removed if he continued to press for a question, and Spicer later demanded that the reporter apologize to the president-elect.

Team Trump’s efforts seem intended to both damage the credibility of CNN and cow other networks into shying away from similarly critical journalism — as Gingrich put it, to “shrink and isolate” the network. But the Fox News contributor wants the incoming administration to go even further and use the incident as an excuse to “close down the elite press.”

Gingrich laid out this strategy during an interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, one of the most pro-Trump venues available. He urged Spicer to learn “a couple of big lessons” from the incident. First and foremost, he suggested that Acosta be banned from reporting on Trump events for 60 days “as a signal, frankly, to all the other reporters that there are going to be real limits” for proper behavior.

https://mediamatters.org/embed/clips/2017/01/13/51770/fnc-hannity-1132017-gingrich2

But Gingrich’s recommendations went far beyond chastising Acosta. He urged Trump to stop prioritizing questions from major news outlets due to their tough coverage and confrontational attitude. Instead, he suggested that he “extend the privileges to reporters from out of town, folks that fly in from all over the country to be allowed to be at a briefing.” Those reporters, Gingrich suggested, would be “a lot more courteous” and “responsible” rather than being “adversarial.”

Gingrich went on to explain his theory of the press under the Trump administration. “You don’t have to think of The New York Times or CNN or any of these people as news organizations,” he explained. “They’re mostly propaganda organizations. And they’re going to be after Trump every single day of his presidency.”

“And he needs to understand that that’s the case, and so does Sean Spicer in speaking for him. And they simply need to go out there and understand they have it in their power to set the terms of this dialogue.” He added, “They can close down the elite press.”

Trump has already started to take steps like those Gingrich describes. During the 2016 campaign, he reportedly made a deal with the right-wing Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns television stations across the country, to provide more access to its stations in exchange for a promise from Sinclair to broadcast his interviews without commentary.

He took questions from sycophantic pro-Trump outlets Breitbart.com and One America News Network during this week’s press conference. Right Side Broadcasting Network, which has been described as “the unofficial version of Trump TV,” claims it will be in the White House press briefing room under the new president. Other right-wing outlets like Laura Ingraham’s LifeZette and Alex Jones’ conspiracy website Infowars could be next.

Alexey Kovalev, a Russian journalist who has covered Vladimir Putin’s annual press conferences, warned of the use of such tactics in a searing “message to my doomed colleagues in the American media” that he authored following Trump’s press conference.

“A mainstay of Putin’s press conferences is, of course, softball questions,” Kovalev wrote. These include both “hyperlocal issues that a president isn’t even supposed to be dealing with,” which nonetheless provide “a real opportunity for him to shine.” Putin also benefits from “people from publications that exist for no other reason than heaping fawning praise on him and attacking his enemies.”

“But there will also be one token critic who will be allowed to ask a ‘sharp’ question,” Kovalev added, “only to be drowned in a copious amount of bullshit, and the man on the stage will always be the winner (‘See? I respect the media and free speech’).”

Of course we are not there yet, but the precedent is unnerving. Gingrich wants nothing more than a cowed, broken press that exists solely to promote the Republican Party’s message. We’ll see soon enough how much of his advice Trump takes.

Update

Gingrich is not alone in urging Trump to freeze out the press. Following Trump’s election, Hannity stated that “until members of the media come clean about colluding with the Clinton campaign and admit that they knowingly broke every ethical standard they are supposed to uphold, they should not have the privilege, they should not have the responsibility of covering the president on behalf of you, the American people.”

“In other words, the mainstream press should not be allowed to cover Trump,” New York University’s Jay Rosen wrote in response to Hannity’s comments. “A few years ago that was a bridge too far. Now it’s a plausible test of poisoned waters.” It looks like we’ll see more of those tests in the days to come.

(h/t Media Matters)

 

Trump Cites Hacked and Fake Online Polls to Prove He Won Debate

Part of Donald Trump’s persona is that he “wins all the time.” So what happens when he objectively loses in the first presidential debate in virtually every scientific poll by a far more prepared opponent? Apparently Trump goes into full denial and finds every online poll that supports the outcome he desired and it doesn’t help that pro-Trump media like Fox News joins him.

However there are a couple of problems with using online polls for gauging election results. First, they are not restricted to likely voters, so an 8-year old who is not of age can cast their vote. Scientific polls look for sample demographics that are in-line with the national population, online polls do not. Also, most online polls do little to prevent duplicate votes. For example, you can vote on a laptop, then a phone, then an iPad. You can also open the poll and vote in different browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. If you turn on a browser’s “privacy mode” then browser cookies are disabled, which are used to track your activity on a website, and this opens up to hacking using automated programs called “bots” which can continuously cast votes.

On top of the issues with online polling, each online poll Trump cited is either faked, didn’t exist, or was the victim of a coordinated hacking attack.

For example, the morning after the debate Trump called into Fox and Friends and claimed:

“I won Slate,” Trump insisted on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning. “I won Drudge in almost 90% of the vote in the poll, I won Time Magazine. I won CBS. I won every single poll other than CNN.”

Trump also made the same claim at his event in Miami, Florida the same day. The reason why this is so strange is that CBS never held an online poll, they did however conduct a focus group of undecided voters, and Clinton came out ahead.

Later, Trump tweeted out an image of 11 online surveys which he felt backed up his claims.

Again, outside of the inherent problems with online polling, some of the numbers did not even match up. The white supremacist site Breitbart.com held a more scientific poll which had Clinton winning at 48% to Trump’s 43%, a far cry from Trump winning at 75% as he claims.

But most important, every single one of these polls were the victim of a coordinated attack by hackers on 4chan, who used automated bots to vote multiple times and skew the results.

4chan-first-debate-online-poll-hack

In the end, even Fox News had to remind employees that unscientific online polls “do not meet our editorial standards,” and had to go so far as to reprimand Trump spokesperson Sean Hannity for continuously using online polls to justify his belief that Trump won.

Even so, Sean Hannity still continues to push these online polls on his show in defiance of ethics and standards.

On The Debate Stage, Trump Lies About His Iraq War Support

At the first Presidential debates, Donald Trump lost his temper and flew into a sharp defense of a question from moderator Lester Holt that he supported the Iraq War. Trump was defiant, calling it “main-stream media nonsense,” and that “the record shows that I am right!”

Trump gave his own timeline of events, saying he did an interview with Howard Stern in 2002 an when asked about the Iraq War he said “very lightly, I don’t know, who knows… essentially.”

Except that is not at all what Trump said. When asked by Stern about the war, Trump’s exact quote was, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

Trump then said he did an interview with Fox New’s Neil Cavuto after the war began where they talked about the economy, but Trump willfully neglected to mention that called the Iraq War a success when he said the invasion “looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint, and I think this is really nothing compared to what you’re going to see after the war is over.”

After more blustering Trump told the media to call Sean Hannity because they had private conversations where Trump opposed the war and Hannity didn’t. So the media did and Sean Hannity, the informal advisor and public supporter to Trump, said this was true.

However when asked for actual evidence, Hannity said it was no longer available because they switched syndication and stations.

Reality

Taking someone at their word alone is not strong evidence. It wouldn’t even be admissible in a court of law, they would have it dismissed as hearsay.

What is evidence is the audio recordings that exist of Donald Trump supporting the Iraq War before and after the beginning of the invasion.

We can lay out the timeline of events, and we can see that Trump is indeed lying when he said he was always against the Iraq War.

Media

Trump Promotes Unconstitutional and Failed Stop-And-Frisk Policing

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump praised the controversial “stop-and-frisk” police tactic Wednesday, saying it “worked incredibly well” when it was used in New York City.

Trump was speaking at a town hall moderated by Fox News’ Sean Hannity at a mostly black church in Cleveland, Ohio when he was asked how he would stop violence in black communities.

In response, Trump pointed to “stop-and-frisk”, which allows police to stop and search any person officers deem suspicious.

“I think you have to [do it],” Trump said. “We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive.”

“Now, we had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you could do.”

“Stop-and-frisk” drew complaints from New York City minorities, who claimed they were being disporportionately stopped for searches by officers. In 2013, a federal court ruled that the practice was unconstitutional and its use has since been scaled back.

(h/t Fox News)

Reality

Donald Trump isn’t the “law and order candidate,” but the “every failed police tactic that targeted minorities candidate.”

Trump failed to mention that in every city where stop-and-frisk was implemented, they have become case studies in the perils of such an approach. And it was quite brazen of Trump to promote it at an African American forum since it overwhelming targeted based om race, not reasonable suspicion, and caused African American, Latino, and other minority communities to distrust the police and avoid them when nearby.

Four of the five biggest American cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia — have all used stop-and-frisk tactics in an attempt to lower crime. Despite what Trump says, the results are mixed, and in each city the methods have been found unconstitutional for disproportionately targeting minorities.

For example, in Donald Trump’s hometown the NYPD’s practices were found to violate New Yorkers’ Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and also found that the practices were racially discriminatory in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Trump wants to take this nationally.

The most proven form of policing is when officers work with communities thereby gaining trust of a population. So when there is an issue in their neighborhood, residents are more likely to open up and offer evidence.

Trump Campaign “Confirm” a Gulf War Marine Rescue From Trump That Never Happened

In a May post on his website, Fox News personality Sean Hannity falsely claimed that in 1991 now-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump sent his private jet to retrieve 200 “stranded” Gulf War veterans from Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

According to the erroneous report — which the Trump campaign said they confirmed to be true — “Mr. Trump did indeed send his plane to make two trips from North Carolina to Miami, Florida to transport over 200 Gulf War Marines back home.”

The Hannity story mostly relied on the recollections of a single source, of Cpl. Ryan Stickney, who was a squad leader in a Marine Corps Reserve antitank (TOW) company that was called up for duty for the 1990-91 conflict that took place after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Cpl. Stickney told his story at a Trump rally in June.

Snopes.com and Washington Post looked deeper into the anecdote and found that the plane — though it bore Trump’s name, as does his private jet — was actually one of a Trump Shuttle fleet of planes from his short-lived airline and not his personal plane as the Trump campaign “confirmed.”

Trump Shuttle was an airline that Trump briefly owned before it was essentially seized by the banks because he failed to make payments on his loans.

But this is where Sean Hannity’s and the Trump campaign’s story starts to break down. Trump’s personal plane only holds 24 passengers, not anywhere near the space required for 200 Marines. Also the Boeing 727s, which do have the appropriate seating capacity, flown by Trump Airlines had a white fuselage while Trump’s personal plane from 1991 was blue and had different markings.

A picture of Trump’s plane from 1991

And finally, Donald Trump made a terrible deal when he purchased Eastern Air Shuttle and re-branded it as Trump Shuttle. Timing is everything in business, and unfortunately for Trump he entered the airline game at the wrong time. So in September 1990, Trump defaulted on the loan and the banks took over Trump Shuttle. The banks searched far and wide for a buyer before they reached a long-term agreement with US Air to manage the airline until 1996, and then to buy it.” So by April 1991, Donald Trump no longer even controlled the planes that flew with his name on them.

Even veterans who were there and in the know rebuked the Trump campaign’s claim.

Lt. Gen. Vernon J. Kondra, now retired, was in charge of all military airlift operations. He said that relying on commercial carriers freed up the military cargo aircraft for equipment transport. But Kondra said the notion that Trump personally arranged to help the stranded soldiers made little sense. “I certainly was not aware of that. It does not sound reasonable that it would happen like that. It would not fit in with how we did business,” he told The Washington Post. “I don’t even know of how he would have known there was a need.”

(h/t Salon, Washington Post, Snopes)

Reality

During this election cycle, Hannity has: peddled a moot voter fraud theory to support Trump’s claim that the election is rigged; launched an investigation into the Gold Star Khan parents, whose political agenda he said made them unfairly target Trump; and claimed “nothing” Trump’s “said is racist.”

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