Fox News host Sean Hannity said sources familiar with the Intelligence Community whistleblower complaint told him nothing illegal happened during a phone call President Trump had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I know people familiar with this matter. Familiar with this so-called whistleblower,” Hannity said on his radio program on Friday. “I have been told in no uncertain terms nothing illegal happened on any telephone call.”
Hannity quoted his notes from his conversations with these sources, reading, “No quid pro quo what so ever.”
A vocal supporter of the president, Hannity has gone into full attack mode against the reports about how the whistleblower complaint relates to Trump pressuring Zelensky to open an investigation into possible corrupt actions by Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden and his Hunter Biden. The offensive by Hannity, calling the reports “breathless” and “hysterical,” marks a sea change for the host who in recent months has leveraged his top-rated cable news program to tell a large nightly audience that “corrupt” officials in the FBI tried to undermine Trump and “justice” will come for them due to a not-yet-released watchdog report on alleged government surveillance abuses.
Although some of the sources in the reports about the whistleblower complaint have cast doubt on whether Trump threatened to withhold military aid unless Ukraine agreed to open an investigation into the Biden family, three Democrat-led committees are in the middle of investigating whether Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani attempted to boost the president’s reelection campaign.
Democrats have demanded access to the complaint, but Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, so far has refused to release it, citing jurisdictional issues. Trump told reporters on Friday that his conversation was “totally appropriate” and condemned the whistleblower as “partisan,” although he acknowledged he does not know the identity of the individual.
Hannity said the “only thing you might glean” from Trump’s phone call with Zelensky is that the president was telling Ukraine, in response to stories “reported widely on this program” and by journalists in conservative media who publish bombshell reports in opinion sections, that “this whole issue with Joe Biden, yea, is true” and the issue of whether Ukraine has evidence that Ukrainians worked with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to influence the 2016 election “that they want to provide to us, but so far have not given us.”
“I would think we have a right to ask for that, considering it’s our elections and everybody in the election is so concerned about Russian interference, right? You’d think they’d care about Ukrainian interference with evidence from Ukraine that they would give us. No, they don’t care,” Hannity said.
