Hours before interviewing Patel and Bondi, Hannity bragged he wouldn’t ask about Epstein. He stayed true to his word
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Ahead of his dual interviews with Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, Fox News star Sean Hannity boasted that he would not ask them about their botched handling of the files related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which has sparked a national uproar.
“If I hear that name one more time, my head’s going to explode,” Hannity exclaimed on his radio show Thursday afternoon.
Indeed, when he got the chance to speak to both Patel and Bondi hours later, Hannity completely sidestepped any questions related to the Epstein case, instead focusing most of his attention on the administration’s claims that former President Barack Obama directed a “treasonous conspiracy” against Donald Trump with the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election meddling.
Hannity, a Trump confidant who has been dubbed the White House “shadow chief of staff,” has led the Fox News charge in trumpeting the Trump administration’s attempts to distract from the Epstein saga.
In a two-page memo last month, the Justice Department concluded that Epstein died by suicide and did not maintain a “client list” to blackmail prominent figures in his sex crimes, despite Bondi saying months earlier that he had the supposed list on her desk. The memo also found there was “no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials.”
Amid the furor from the president’s MAGA base over the memo, which contradicted many of the conspiracy theories that Patel and other Trump officials had helped stoke for years, Trump ordered his supporters to stop paying attention to Epstein because the files were a Democratic “hoax.”
Fox News would immediately fall in line, largely ignoring the story while devoting much of its on-air coverage to the Trump administration’s distraction efforts. This included Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassifying documents related to the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and accusing Obama and other intelligence officials of orchestrating a coup.
Following Gabbard’s initial claims on July 18, which fact checkers have called misleading, revisionist and false, the network aired 168 segments over the next 10 days centered on her accusations about an Obama-led criminal conspiracy. Since then, the right-wing network has continued to heavily invest in the story, even after Gabbard crashed and burned last week during a softball Fox News interview.
During his afternoon radio show on Thursday, Hannity spoke to a caller who wanted to know if Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) would face any repercussions over allegations made by a “whistleblower” that he leaked classified documents in 2017 to embarrass Trump. The story about Schiff, a vocal Trump critic, has received a lot of play on Fox News – especially after Trump called for right-wing media to cover it during a press conference this week.
“That evidence seems rather incontrovertible to me. But, of course, everyone’s innocent until proven guilty,” Hannity said before pivoting to his upcoming interviews with Patel and Bondi.
“You know, the main focus of me having Kash Patel and Pam Bondi on tonight is all of this new information,” Hannity said. “Now, I know if, you know, the liberal media, etcetera, etcetera, you would probably, you know, ‘Oh, tell us about, you know, Jeffrey Epstein.’”
Saying he “head’s going to explode” if he hears Epstein’s name again, he then pointed to a CNN poll that found Americans don’t feel the Epstein case is the top issue in the country before asserting that there isn’t anything damning about Trump in the files.
“This was Joe Biden’s Justice Department. If there was anything in there, it would have been released. I can promise you that,” he declared, adding that the DOJ has also met with Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell and has asked for grand jury testimony to be released. “So, let’s see what happens.”
Late last month, the Wall Street Journal – which is owned by Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch – reported that Trump wrote a “bawdy” birthday letter to Epstein in 2003 that featured the president allegedly drawing a figure of a naked woman alongside suggestive phrases about his relationship with the disgraced financier. Trump vehemently denied the story as a “fake thing” and promptly sued the WSJ and Murdoch for $10 billion.
