Sean Hannity, with a popular drive-time radio show and highly rated prime-time television broadcast, is one of the two or three most important voices in conservative America. Love him or hate him, what he says matters to millions of Americans. What he says over and over again, particularly to an audience that often sees him as a primary source of news, actually matters a great deal. While he may not shape culture for you, he shapes and informs culture for millions of Americans.
This is why, among many reasons, it is so troubling that he regularly quotes and leans on one particular "witness" in the August 9 shooting death of Ferguson teenager Mike Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. This so-called witness, a middle-aged white woman, known only to us as "Witness #40," openly stated to FBI investigators a litany of bizarre and disturbing facts about herself, including that she regularly calls African Americans "niggers and apes," helped start a support group for Darren Wilson encouraging kids to make him Christmas cards, and that she only happened to be on Canfield Drive—which is not even in the town she lives in—the exact moment Darren Wilson killed Mike Brown, on a whim "to understand the black race better so I can stop calling Blacks niggers and start calling them people."
In her testimony, she stated that Mike Brown charged at Darren Wilson like a "football player." It's quite the mental image and Hannity regularly quotes her testimony nearly any time he mentions the case—conveniently leaving out any mention of how she also calls African Americans apes and niggers and wanted school kids to send Darren Wilson cards for Christmas.
Below, watch MSNBC's Chris Hayes in a must-see video as he expertly shows just how often Hannity relies on this particular witness in his commentary against Mike Brown and how truly troubling her character and her testimony are from top to bottom.
Weeks after Mike Brown was killed by Darren Wilson, and after she admits she studied websites giving what was thought to be Darren Wilson's side of the story, Witness #40 claimed that she kept this journal detailing the events from August 9—including her statement that she was going to try to use that weekend to help her "stop calling Blacks niggers." Here's a link to the entire "journal" with a screenshot below from what she says she wrote just hours before she ended up on Canfield Drive.
Witness #40 was interviewed for the first time by FBI for an hour and 38 minutes on October 22—over two months after Mike Brown was killed. In spite of how absolutely ridiculous the testimony is from start to finish, the grand jury listened to audio of the entire interview. The transcript of the interview begins on Page 86 here. Feel free to study it for yourself and see just how hard it is to locate even one true statement in the entire testimony.
Mind you, this is the witness most often quoted and relied on by Sean Hannity.
PAGE 88: In an absolutely strange way to begin the interrogation, we see what already appears to be real skepticism from the FBI when the FBI agent tells Witness #40, "If you lie to a federal agent, it is a crime. You are better off not saying a word and just not talking to us if you plan on lying and sitting in here and telling us lies."
PAGE 94: The FBI begins to destroy this testimony with basic questions. Witness #40 claims to have ended up in the Canfield Apartments after poorly following directions from the local QT. When she gets to them, she says they look like the apartments she actually intended to visit of a friend of hers from high school in the '80s.
The FBI asks how she knew what they looked like and she said her friend sent her pictures of the apartments, but not the actual address of them for her to visit. Who does this?
PAGE 105: The witness said she pulled over inside of the Canfield Apartments because she's lost. She stops and smokes a cigarette and ask for directions again and immediately sees Darren Wilson's SUV pull up on Mike Brown and Dorian Johnson.
The witness then strangely states that she didn't know Darren Wilson was a police officer, but that she saw the SUV said "Ferguson Police" on it.
PAGE 108: She says Mike Brown lunges into the SUV through the window and is inside of the SUV from his waist up.
PAGE 118: She describes Darren Wilson stumbling out of the SUV and being "wobbly" like he just got hit.
Here, her testimony goes completely to trash. We now know, based on all of the evidence, that Mike Brown died 160 feet, 4 inches, away from Darren Wilson's SUV.
Wilson claims that Mike Brown actually ran even longer than that and that they ended up less than 30 feet away from each other when Brown was killed—meaning that Darren Wilson had to have run at least 130 feet himself.
Witness #40, having not actually witnessed the shooting herself and having only read conservative accounts of the encounter, didn't know that Darren Wilson chased Mike Brown for over 50 yards away from the SUV. So, on PAGE 119, she claims that Darren Wilson never left the side of the SUV.
PAGE 124: Witness states that Mike Brown gets in a full football stance and begins charging right at Darren Wilson, who, she says, was right next to the SUV.
PAGE 124: In spite of now being at least 170 feet away from Mike Brown, the witness, echoing the caller, Josie, who said Mike Brown was "on something," says Brown's face looked like he was "on something."
PAGE 132: The witness says she got in her car and left as soon as the shooting happened and then locked herself in her house for two weeks.
PAGE 134: She says the only person she told about what happened was her ex-husband but he swears he doesn't remember anything about the conversation because he's a heavily medicated person.
PAGE 146: The witness says she emailed the so-called friend she thought maybe lived in the Canfield Apartments in Ferguson the same day to tell her she got lost. When asked if they could see the email, she says she "deleted it."
PAGES 148-152 : Now the witness is in a terrible place in her interrogation. She just can't explain how she drove off of Canfield Drive from the parking lot she said she was parked in. Mike Brown is dead in the middle of the street on one side. Darren Wilson's SUV and growing volume of police cars are at the other. The FBI agent basically destroys her entire story here because she says she somehow "zig-zagged" out of Canfield Drive in a way that was physically impossible on that day.
PAGE 154: FBI agent flat out tells Witness #40 that her story of exiting Canfield in her car is impossible.
PAGE 157: The witness now states the person she hoped to visit on August 9 hasn't seen her since 1987 and may not remember that they were going to meet that day.
PAGE 158 : Witness admits to regularly searching the internet for facts about the case.
PAGE 160: Witness states, "Reading is not the easiest thing. And then when I start to read the words get jumbled and I get bored."
PAGE 161: Witness states she had a head-on car collision with a traumatic brain injury and it impacts her short-term memory.
PAGE 170: Witness admits to commenting on articles about the cases for weeks before she ever claimed to be a witness.
PAGE 170: Witness admits to "using the N-Word half a dozen times" in her comments about the case.
PAGE 175: FBI agents show her pictures of every car that came in and out of Canfield on August 9 and ask her to identify which one is hers. She cannot find it. They then inform her that her car was never seen by anyone or any photos that day.
PAGE 177: FBI agent asks her to explain some of her comments about the case. Witness #40 admits to saying, "they need to kill the fucking niggers" and the protests are "an ape-fest."
PAGE 177: Witness states that she and other Darren Wilson supporters have been making him homemade Christmas cards.
Witness #40 was then called to actually testify before the grand jury. Her account gets worse.
PAGE 194: The witness states that she actually used Google Maps to get to her friends house that day, but must've put in the wrong address. She then states that although she used Google Maps for the directions that she didn't actually print them or use them on a phone but just on her computer.
The grand jury actually took a recess in the middle of Witness #40's testimony. The transcript of that is in a different PDF found here starting on Page 97.
PAGE 98: The witness, for the first time, admits to being bipolar and taking medication for it.
PAGE 99: Witness states that she was diagnosed as being bipolar in 1985.
PAGE 103: Witness now admits getting some of the details of her prior testimony off of the internet.
PAGE 104 : Witness now admits that she did not go to the neighborhood to meet the friend that she previously testified she was going to go meet.
PAGE 115: Prosecutors ask the witness if she could've dreamed she was there or if her medication could make her think she was there if she really wasn't and she could've had a psychotic break.
PAGE 129: Witness continues to insist she was on Canfield Drive, but now admits to lying to the FBI about first seeing Darren Wilson pull up next to Mike Brown and Dorian Johnson. She admits she just read that part online.
CONCLUSION
Why does Sean Hannity quote this witness so frequently?
Was Hannity aware of her racist statements and her complete lack of credibility? If not, has he studied her testimony even a little bit? Her racism is obvious. Did her racist statements make her more credible in his eyes? Whatever the case, Hannity has chosen to bank his narrative view of what happened on August 9 between Mike Brown and Darren Wilson greatly on her completely unreliable testimony.
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UPDATE @ 11:19PST on 12/12/14
Although the witness in this story declared before the grand jury "I'm bipolar" and was questioned about possibly having some type of manic delusion which caused her to believe she was at the scene when the evidence suggests she wasn't, many found my inclusion of her bipolar disorder diagnosis in the original title as distasteful and irrelevant. I appreciated the sensitivity and learned a lot in the process.
Ultimately, while I believe the mental health of this witness, including her claim to have had a traumatic brain injury and chronic memory loss, is actually very relevant, I'd never want to belittle people facing mental illness in general.
Thanks for the response.
