The following article by Tina Nguyen was posted on the Vanity Fair website February 2, 2018:
Sean Hannity’s first act as “senior counselor to the president” may have been a grave error.
The feedback loop between Fox News and Donald Trump is no secret: the president regularly starts his mornings with several hours of tweets responding to Fox & Friends, and ends his days with online musings about the latest talking points in primetime. In the span of a year, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity have become, unexpectedly, some of the most powerful people on the planet. Behind the scenes, however, the relationship is even more symbiotic. As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported last month, Trump has lately evolved into a sort of de facto head of programming at Fox, calling hosts to praise their analysis or to suggest new messaging. “What he usually does is he’ll call after a show and say, ‘I really enjoyed that,’” one former Fox anchor said. “The highest compliment is, ‘I really learned something.’ Then you know he got a new policy idea.”
That feedback loop has spun faster in recent weeks, as Fox—and then the White House—seized on a memo, compiled by staffers of Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, that purports to show FISA warrant abuses by the F.B.I. White House aides reportedly worried that the document—declassified and released to the public on Friday—would be a dud, and according to The Washington Post, Chief of Staff John Kelly had cautioned the president that the memo might not live up to the hype. But Hannity, who had called the memo “the biggest political scandal in American history,” was adamant that it be released. And, according to the Daily Beast, he had Trump’s ear:
According to three sources with knowledge of their conversations, Trump has been in regular contact with Hannity over the phone in recent weeks, as the Fox News primetime star and Trump ally has encouraged the prompt release of a controversial four-page memo crafted by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Hannity has gone to the wall to push for the public release of the memo, which the intelligence panel and its chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), authorized this week in a party-line vote despite the classified information therein.
Sources say Hannity’s persistent advocacy reinforced Trump’s already-growing determination to get that memo into the public realm—despite huge potential fallout within the law-enforcement and intelligence arms of his own administration. In their conversations, Trump and Hannity discussed the Nunes memo’s supposed bombshell-level significance, and how it could shed light on the alleged anti-Trump bias and “corruption” at the F.B.I. On these calls, Trump has directly referenced specific recent Hannity segments related to #ReleaseTheMemo, according to one of three sources with knowledge of their conversations.
In his role as Trump-whisperer, Hannity was part of a larger group of “friends and advisers” who, according to the Post, convinced the president—in spite of warnings from Democratic lawmakers and intelligence agencies—that the document had to be published. “There was never any hesitation,” one presidential adviser said. “The president was resolved on this. He was not going to be persuaded [otherwise]. He wanted it out.” The fact that Hannity had predicted the memo would “shock the conscience,” and that its revelations would make “Watergate [look] like stealing a Snickers bar from a drugstore,” appeared to have more currency than Kelly’s notes of caution.
Trump got his wish on Friday afternoon, when the unredacted document was published on the House Intelligence Committee’s Web site, despite an F.B.I. statement citing “grave concerns” as to its accuracy. A cursory analysis of the document revealed it to be more or less a nothingburger, containing no significant new details and certainly nothing to warrant “jail time.” Hannity, however, was ecstatic, calling the document “explosive” on his Web site, tweeting that it represented “an unprecedented Government abuse of power,” and promising followers that he would discuss it “at length” on his radio show.
Within the Trump-Hannity feedback loop, Hannity’s power in Washington may have increased at Trump’s expense. One senior adviser joked to the Daily Beast that Hannity has essentially become a “senior counselor to the president.” But Hannity’s political calculus and incentives differ from those of the White House, which must now contend with a compromised relationship with the intelligence community, not to mention the increased scrutiny of special counsel Robert Mueller. Hannity closed the circle, but he may also have done irreparable harm to its most crucial link.
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