Hannity and Manafort, sittin’ in a tree
Buzzfeed received the latest batch of documents from the Mueller Investigation and while I haven’t had a chance to go through them thoroughly, I did find this little tid-bit to be quite interesting. Paul Manafort told investigators that Fox News host Sean Hannity sent backchannel messages from President Donald Trump while he was under federal investigation. Oopsie:
Among the several hundred pages of memos published by BuzzFeed News on Thursday, which contain summaries of FBI interviews with key Trump administration and campaign officials, the Fox News anchor’s alleged role as an unofficial messenger between the president and his former campaign chairman comes into sharp focus.
According to the release, Manafort did not speak to Trump or anyone closely associated with the president or his legal team besides Hannity around the time that The New York Times and other outlets reported on a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner and a lawyer linked to the Kremlin. Manafort described Hannity as a close friend and “certainly a backchannel” to Trump, saying that he understood Hannity was in communication with the president.
It’s pretty obvious that he was right. Hannity was a go-between between the president and his criminal former campaign chairman and he apparently carried messages that sound a lot like pardon dangles. The memos say that “Manafort knew Hannity was speaking to Trump because Hannity would tell Manafort to hang in there, that he had been talking to Trump, that Trump had his back, and things like that.”
We knew that Hannity and Manafort were tight. Last year, a federal judge released dozens of pages of private text messages between them. They were quite the mutual admiration society:
In one instance, Hannity insisted to Manafort that the host was “NOT a fair weather friend,” and declared that they were “all on the same team.” Manafort returned the favor, telling Hannity that “in a fair world, you would get a Pulitzer prize for your incredible reporting.”
What we didn’t know was that Hannity was also sending messages to the prisoner from the president telling him he had his back.
Hannity sure is a player in the Trump sagas, isn’t he? He was Michael Cohen’s other client as well, remember? He’s deep inside Trumpworld.
What’s he going to do if Trump is defeated?
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