An item in the indictment of Roger Stone states that in August, 2016, Jerome Corsi urged Stone to “start suggesting” Hillary Clinton was feeble and had had a stroke. It just so happens that’s exactly what Sean Hannity did shortly thereafter. Was Hannity caught up in the Russia conspiracy to win the election for Trump? We don’t know yet.
Item 13 c., beginning on Page 4 of the indictment states (with my emphases added):
On or about August 2, 2016, Person 1 emailed STONE. Person 1 wrote that he was currently in Europe and planned to return in or around mid-August. Person 1 stated in part, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” The phrase “friend in embassy” referred to the head of Organization 1. Person 1 added in the same email, “Time to let more than [the Clinton Campaign chairman] to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC. That appears to be the game hackers are now about. Would not hurt to start suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke – neither he nor she well. I expect that much of next dump focus, setting stage for Foundation debacle.”
Person 1 is believed to be Corsi; Organization 1 is obviously Wikileaks.
Coincidentally, Hannity began baselessly suggesting Clinton had suffered a stroke and was suffering from seizures less than a week later.
My earliest indication is on August 8, 2016, when Hannity cited a Drudge Report headline, “detailing Hillary Clinton's history with falls and speculating that the former Secretary of State could be experiencing a serious undisclosed medical condition.”
Two nights later, on August 10, Hannity unsuccessfully pressed two medical doctors to diagnose Clinton as having suffered seizures, based on her behavior with a group of reporters in a video. “This looks like violent, out of control movements on her part,” Hannity insisted. One of those reporters in the video, AP’s Lisa Lerer, later came forward to say that she thought Clinton was deliberately exaggerating her response for comic effect, not having any kind of health problem. She also noted that nobody from Fox had ever asked for her eyewitness account.
On September 7, 2016, Hannity had better luck getting Herman Cain to diagnose Clinton. “This shows that [Clinton’s] staff is pushing her out there despite her physical condition. She needs to get medical help,” “Dr.” Cain asserted.
On September 14, 2016, Hannity sought medical diagnoses from two anti-Clinton authors. One, a former Secret Service agent who wrote a discredited anti-Clinton book, said he’s an “expert on observation” and on “Secret Service procedures” and, therefore, a video clip of Clinton stumbling into a van “disturbs me greatly.” “You’re saying there’s something seriously wrong with her,” Hannity said eagerly. The other guest, discredited Hillary-hater Ed Klein, claimed “friends and associates” had told him that Clinton “frequently faints or swoons” and that is “just the tip of the iceberg of something that’s been going on for a long time.”
On September 23, 2016, Hannity played some of his favorite video clips and said to his political panel, “She seems unhinged! … What is that? … “I think there’s something wrong here … Watch all of a sudden her head twitching and twitching and twitching.”
On September 25, 2016, Hannity fruitlessly prodded Newt Gingrich to diagnose Clinton: “Watch this twitching that she does! One, four, five, six and does it again! ….Boom, boom, boom! … Add that to the deep-vein thrombosis, the cerebral venal thrombosis. Add that to her collapse and all the other health issues she’s had. What do you think’s going on here?”
On August 15, 2016, Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald condemned Hannity’s behavior in a column titled, “SEAN HANNITY: APOLOGIZE TO THOSE WITH EPILEPSY, OR BURN IN HELL.” Eichenwald, an epileptic himself, noted that Clinton’s behavior in no way resembled a seizure and condemned Hannity for promoting falsehoods about what a seizure might look like. Even worse was Hannity’s suggestion that someone with epilepsy was unfit for the presidency.
So it was no surprise that the passage about Clinton’s health in the Stone indictment also caught Eichenwald’s attention. In a series of tweets yesterday, he argued that, whether wittingly or unwittingly, Hannity became part of the Russian conspiracy to elect Trump.
Eichenwald highlighted how that August email, in which Corsi urged Stone to start “suggesting HRC old, memory bad, has stroke” was in preparation for a damaging October document dump that was expected to focus on Clinton’s health. However, it’s not at all clear that Hannity knew what Wikileaks was up to, much less the machinations of Russia.
It seems quite possible to me that someone on the Trump team merely told Hannity they wanted to target Hillary about her health and he happily complied or that he merely adopted the strategy as his own, after seeing it on Drudge first.
However, it’s also quite possible that Hannity knew what was going on, at least to some extent, and was a willing participant.
In any event, if Fox didn’t see a need to provide a full explanation of Hannity’s relationship with Trump and the Trump campaign previously, the Stone indictment ought to be a wake up call that the network better get to it now.
Republished with permission from Newshounds.us
