A member of the House select committee explained why Fox News host Sean Hannity has landed in the Jan. 6 investigation’s crosshairs.
Congressional investigators have obtained text messages suggesting that Hannity was aware of and deeply concerned about Donald Trump’s plans for the day Joe Biden would be certified as the 2020 election winner, and Rep. Jamie Raskin told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” why the panel has asked for the conservative broadcaster’s voluntary cooperation in their probe.
“Sean Hannity is being, has become a figure of interest because he’s a fact witness, obviously, to the planning that preceded both the attempt at a political coup on Jan. 6 and also, apparently, organizing for the insurrection,” Raskin said. “Based on the evidence of the texts we’ve seen, it looks like he was very concerned about what was going to happen, and we just want to try to reconstruct the chronology of his involvement.”
Raskin dismissed First Amendment concerns about Hannity’s broadcast statements, saying investigators were only interested in his private communications with White House officials before and during the insurrection.
“Obviously, he is not a figure of interest because of whatever he may have said publicly, and we were clear it has nothing to do with any of his public pronouncements,” Raskin said. “It all has to do with his role as a fact witness and player in these events.”
The texts show Hannity was extremely concerned about the violence playing out at the U.S. Capitol and tried to urge Trump to call off his supporters, and they also show that he had advance knowledge of what might unfold on that day.
“That’s why we want to bring him in, in order to get a statement in his own voice, but those are the bread crumbs we received, that he was concerned about where things were going,” Raskin said. “Obviously, the president and his team were escalating their attacks on Mike Pence, their attacks on the election and the propagation of the ‘Big Lie’ in the days in advance. so anybody on the inside who was privy to their conversations, obviously, would have known about where they were headed in terms of both the inside attack on Pence, the attempt to destroy Joe Biden’s majority in the Electoral College vote, but also the eliciting of violence and insurrectionary movement in the streets.”
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license