Objective observers should have dismissed the credibility of attorney Sidney Powell within moments of her taking the microphone at a news conference held shortly after the 2020 election.
This was the news conference centered on President Donald Trump’s crumbling effort to retain power at which Rudy Giuliani’s hair leaked, a cramped, bizarre affair held at the national headquarters of the Republican Party in D.C. And despite the stratospheric bizarreness of Giuliani’s unstable claims about the security of the presidential election two weeks before, Powell managed to rocket right past him.
What had happened, see, was that voting machines were corrupted by [insert a mishmash of claims looping in the internet, dead Venezuelan dictators, various other communists, “algorithms” and a cabal of Democratic actors]. It was so ludicrous that when someone in the audience asked Powell if a server had been seized in Germany — a newly emergent claim based on one tweet and picked up by One America News — Powell sagely confirmed the report, adding that she didn’t know “whether good guys got it or bad guys got it.” Sure.
That was on Nov. 19, 2020. By the end of the day, Powell was entirely discredited.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reached out to Powell to invite her on his show. Sure, he told viewers, he was skeptical, but “we don’t dismiss anything anymore, particularly when it’s related to technology.” He noted that his show had covered UFOs, mostly because other shows wouldn’t. “There’s evidence that a lot of things that responsible people use to dismiss out of hand as ridiculous are in fact real,” he said.
So he offered an interview to Powell, asking that she provide evidence of her claims. Which, of course, she didn’t. Carlson and his team pressed — politely, he said — leading Powell to eventually end the conversation in a snit. So Carlson called her out: they asked for evidence; she didn’t have any.
“Why are we telling you this?” he concluded. “We’re telling you this because it’s true. And in the end, that’s all that matters. The truth. It’s our only hope. It’s our best defense. And it’s how we’re different from them.”
The extent to which Carlson himself cares about the accuracy of his claims is certainly debatable. But here he was clearly right: Powell had nothing and her claims weren’t worth treating seriously. Within days, the Trump campaign publicly disowned her.
But a week later, Powell got a Fox News interview anyway. The host wasn’t Carlson but Sean Hannity, whose obsequious treatment of his pal Trump was only amplified by Trump’s reelection loss.
The ostensible predicate for Powell’s appearance was that she was acting as lawyer for Mike Flynn, Trump’s one-time national security adviser who had pleaded guilty to misleading federal investigators. Halfway through the interview, though, Hannity turned the discussion to Powell’s claims about voting machines.
He noted that he’d discussed the issue with her on his radio show, asking her why the people she claimed had observed the election being stolen hadn’t signed affidavits to that effect. She indicated that some were government employees worried about repercussions. One of Powell’s sources, we later learned, was a guy she’d presented as having served in military intelligence but who, instead, had been a trainee in one program, dropping out before it was completed.
But Hannity was apparently satisfied with that answer. He asked if anyone had examined the machines for evidence of this activity; Powell promised that such analysis was imminent. Hannity, realizing he’d left a rhetorical slam-dunk on the table, jumped back in: wait, didn’t Democrats like whistleblowers? Why weren’t they pushing to hear from these witnesses? Powell offered that “they only like liars who claim to be whistleblowers.”
Hannity wrapped up. Everyone thinks these machines are bad, he said, and when the whistleblowers were safe, he welcomed them onto his show. He then changed subjects — suggesting that voting in Georgia was compromised and calling for that state’s governor, Brian Kemp, to step in.
None of this is particularly surprising, of course. Fox News is explicit that Hannity’s is an opinion show, arguing that viewers understand he’s merely offering his take on things. That despite the program having all of the trappings of a news program, down to the omnipresent “Fox News” logo in the corner.
But it is consequential. Dominion Voting Systems, the company whose machines were identified by Powell as facilitating massive fraud in the presidential election, sued her and Fox News (and others) for defamation. In a deposition taken as part of the suit, Hannity reportedly admitted that he offered Powell a platform despite her lack of credibility.
“I did not believe it for one second,” he said, according to an attorney for Dominion.
Perhaps the Fox News host thinks this makes him look better; he wasn’t hoodwinked by this obvious nonsense! But, of course, he put Powell on the air anyway. He broached the subject of voting machines. He failed to push on her claims of secret evidence, treating them as though he believed them, even if he more recently claims he didn’t.
In 2020, Hannity’s show was the most watched on cable news, as it had been the previous three years. Millions tuned in every night, including on Nov. 30, 2020, when Hannity allowed Powell to make baseless claims that Tucker Carlson had debunked more than a week earlier because those claims boosted Trump’s political efforts.
Hannity has long been and continues to be the most explicitly partisan host on Fox News, if not on cable news broadly. Over the course of the midterms, he spent hours interviewing Republican Senate candidates, including multiple Nerf-ball hour-long “town hall” meetings with candidates in close races. He endorsed Trump before 2016. It’s all unsubtle.
But that is different than promoting baseless nonsense about the election being stolen. Fox News’s audience is disproportionately partisan, with Republicans relying on it for information far more than Democrats or independents rely on any individual channel or outlet. That’s part of the reason Hannity kept winning in the ratings: the network has far less competition for its core audience than other traditional media outlets.
In the weeks after the election — and in the weeks before the violent attack at the Capitol by people convinced the election was stolen — Hannity was offering a platform to a conspiracy theorist who his own network and Trump himself had dismissed as unreliable.
Hannity’s assertion that he didn’t believe Powell won’t help Fox win that defamation lawsuit. Neither will Carlson’s dismissal of her claims. Earlier this year, a judge used Carlson’s debunking against Fox News’s efforts to dismiss the suit.
But we also can’t lose sight of the fact that Hannity prioritized carrying Trump’s water over informing his audience. That, apparently by his own admission, he offered up an opinion on his opinion show in which he had no confidence. That the most-watched show on cable was actively misinforming its heavily partisan viewers.
We can’t draw a line from Hannity’s interview of Powell directly to Jan. 6. There’s no way, though, in which elevating her claims helped. Except, of course, in boosting Hannity’s ratings.