Giddy Sean Hannity Goads Hillary Clinton to Sue Fox News for Defamation Over Durham Report Stories
Sean Hannity on Thursday said he welcomes a defamation lawsuit from Hillary Clinton after the former secretary of state defamed Fox News for its haunting — and often inaccurate — coverage of her.
Earlier in the day, Clinton announced that the network’s presentation of the findings in Durham’s Report bordering on unconstitutional.
“So funny [how] more trouble [Donald] The more Trump gets involved, the more accusations and conspiracy theories about me seem to get picked up,” Clinton told a meeting of Democrats in New York. “Fox is leading the charge with accusations against me, looking to their audience to love it again. And on the margins, they’re getting close to true malice in their attacks. “
Durham’s Report Allegations that former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann obtained White House data through a technology executive who had legitimate access to it. Although Durham is not accusing anyone of being “spy” or “hacking”, many are on the right blew the report out of proportionstart with a misleading article on FoxNews.com. Durham discovered the headline “Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia,” blaming special counsel John Durham, in when in fact it’s Trump’s ally, Kash Patel. In addition, White House data was collected during the administration of Barack Obama, according to lawyers for a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist involved in the data analysis.
In the days since, several Fox News hosts and guests have been very liberal with the story, sometimes making statements that are completely untrue. One commonality that emerges is that the report is more consequential than Watergate. An image on Jesse Watters’ 7PM ET on Monday went as far as to state that “HILLARY IS A REAL EDITOR.”
It was in that context that Clinton voiced his comments about Fox News’ access to legal territory. A few hours later, Hannity naturally had a hard time using the former Democratic presidential candidate to lead her program.
“It’s called discovery and it’s called deposit. Bring it in. Evil, really? It’s called news,” Hannity sighed. “It was from a legal file. We have correctly quoted from the filings that were filed in federal court. ”
A Fox News representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In order for public figures to prevail in defamation lawsuits, they have to show that the statement in question was made with “genuine malice,” meaning “with the knowledge that it is false or with a lack of care as to whether it is false.” This standard, established by the Supreme Court in 1964, is the subject of a unsuccessful lawsuit by Sarah Palin against New York Times.
Notably, attorney for Fox News successfully defended Hannity’s colleague Tucker Carlson in a slander lawsuit essentially argued that primetime presenters should not be taken seriously.
