Mother Jones reports that Donald Trump’s go-to-pundit is also the favorite source for that group of adamant Trump supporters—Russian social media trolls.
On Jan. 18, Hannity inveighed against Mueller specifically: “I have a message tonight for the special counsel, Robert Mueller,” he said at the outset of his Fox News prime time report on the memo. “Your witch hunt is now over. Time to close the doors.”
Within a day, that message had been repeated 3,700 times by over 600 accounts connected to Russian sources. And it wasn’t the first time. Just before Christmas, Hannity launched a show about a “federal conspiracy” against Trump.
That day, Hannity’s website ranked among the top 10 shared by the network of Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns and tracked by the nonpartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy on its national-security project, the Hamilton 68 dashboard.
Since that date, Hannity has been in the top shared domains for the Russian bots. Considering how often Trump cites Hannity—and Hannity cites Trump—bringing all this together represents a closing of the loop. Information cycles from Fox, to Trump, to Russian sources … or Trump to Fox to Russia … or Russia to Fox to Trump. All of it serves to diminish the value of legitimate media sources and demean the justice.
But there is a winner.
Former senior CIA official John Sipher says the smear campaign by Fox News and Trump’s allies in the House plays directly into Kremlin hands. “A weak FBI is in the Russian interest.”
The #ReleaseTheMemo memo, authored by Devin Nunes and staff, represents a kind of scandal ex nihilo, in which Republicans have created the damning letter, classified it, complained that it needed to be “released” and created a supposed controversy about the content they drafted for the sole purpose of creating a controversy.
Previous attempts by Nunes to generate Trump-supporting, FBI-attacking issues crashed and burned over Nunes’s own car-hopping, nutty news conference antics. But the “memo” represents an all-in effort for Republicans, Fox and their pals in Russia in a joint effort at moving public opinion.