The Glaring "Fraud" Lies of Sean Hannity

 

On Monday night, Sean Hannity admitted what we all knew already.

"I don't vet the information on this program that I give out," he said.

The complete quote was: "This show, we in this hour, I am not told what to say. I don’t vet the information on this program that I give out. We have always been independent, follow our own path on this show. That’s not going to change for me, ever."

Freudian slip, perhaps?

But that blunt admission is not what I want to talk about today, even though I'm going to be repeating and repeating it until the end of time. No, what I want to talk about is the podcast that followed the very next day, in which he spoke regarding election fraud.

For weeks, conservatives who have no evidence have been screaming "Affidavits! Affidavits! Affidavits!" Because that's all they have. But on Hannity's show on Tuesday, he dared to actually broadcast some of the testimony from some of those said affidavits. And he was so thick that he actually thought that they supported his argument. 

He titled his podcast, "Hear The Fraud First Hand." You can hear it yourself, here.

Big mistake. Never allow your lie to be recorded and analyzed!

Hannity speaks of people giving testimony regarding their witnessing of voter fraud. What he's referencing was the Senate hearing in the state of Michigan, in which people who had signed an affidavit were asked to come forward and testify in person as well. Many of these people did over the course of several hours, much to Hannity's delight. So he played some of what they were saying. Unfortunately, he didn't appear to be paying much attention to what they were actually saying, and simply concluded that this was somehow a "preponderance of evidence" regarding voter fraud.

Hannity begins by playing the testimony of a contract truck driver for the U.S. Postal Service (not an actual postal worker), who testified that his trailer contained a bin ("gaylord") filled with absentee mail-in ballots from Bethpage, NY to Harrisburg, PA. After arriving there, at the end of his usual route, he was delayed for six hours before finally being allowed to leave, with a chit guaranteeing him payment for his time. When he returned the following day to get his usual trailer, that trailer was gone. (He went on at length about how much he preferred that trailer, which was usually "his.") Other pro-Trumpers who repeated his story stated how this testimony showed that a truck full of ballots "disappeared." But, of course, it did not "disappear." Merely, this particular truck driver, who was merely a contractor, didn't know who it had been reassigned to. Nor is it clear whether these ballots were largely for Trump or for Biden. Trailer reassignments happen all the time. Big. Fucking. Deal.

Observation: A guy's usual truck-trailer, which contained one bin of mail-in ballots, was not there the following day.

Conclusion: Voter fraud?

Nonsense, of course. This is nothing more than a single person's perspective about how one day's postal routine got disrupted, and about how his favorite trailer got hitched to some other contractor's rig. How is this evidence of voter fraud? It isn't!

Hannity interrupts the truck driver's testimony to play that of a woman who claims that she saw dozens of mail-in military ballots, all of which had the date of "January 1, 1900" as the birth date. When she called this into question, she was rebuffed.

Now, had I been present in that Senate hearing, I would have written out some block letters and asked the woman to read them. Because her eyesight must be in question. I mean, seriously? She expects anyone to believe that she saw a bunch of ballots which had a birth date of "January 1st, 1900" all in a row? Does she really think that anyone who was trying to commit voter fraud would do something that unbelievably stupid? Or obvious?

Undoubtedly, someone in the Senate must have asked her this, because Hannity cut away from that woman, and went to a different witness. This time, it was another contractor with something called United Mailing Service, contracted to deliver US Mail in the state of Wisconsin. (Hannity does not bother to clarify if this Wisconsin driver was testifying in Michigan, or as part of a different case.) He, too, had a testimony of ballots he'd carried which he said had gone "missing" after someone else picked them up. Again, ballots are not "missing" just because some other delivery person got them. But this man testified that US Postal workers were back-dating ballots. Now, whether this was Michigan or Wisconsin, wouldn't matter, because ballots were not allowed to be received after the deadline, regardless of the date on the post-mark. So even if this person's testimony were 100% accurate, it would also be 100% irrelevant, because none of those back-dated ballots would have been counted.

Hannity knows this. But deliberately failed to either inform or remind his listeners about it!

That's called lying.

"Whistleblower," Hannity says instead. "What are your thoughts on this whistleblower? Where's the media on this whistleblower? Media covering this? Most of them are not. Unbelievable."

Hannity, you see, was earlier drawing comparisons between these "whistleblowers" who are testifying regarding "voter fraud" to the whistleblower who informed Congress regarding Donald Trump's attempt to engage in election interference by soliciting the help of the Ukranian government. Hannity does not even consider that individual a real "whistleblower," even referring to him as a "non-whistleblower," and believes that these people, testifying in Michigan, are far more credible.

At this point, he finally goes back to the aforementioned truck driver whose trailer had gone missing, and completes that recorded testimony.

And after that?

He makes an interesting claim. "And as I pointed out yesterday, the numbers... Biden under-performs minorities in every big city, except for Atlanta (Fulton County), Wayne County (Detroit, Michigan), Milwaukee, and Philly, Pennsylvania. Now you got this guy saying what he's saying. This truck driver. 'Well, I just, yeah, I shipped ballots.' *Scoffs.* Unbelievable. Anyone care what he has to say? Media care? Democrats care? No. 'Cause they got the result they wanted. They just want anybody that wants to get to the bottom of it to shut up. And not raise the question. Meanwhile, for four years they never accepted the results of the last election. I love getting lectured by those hypocrites."

Well, Sean, that's because Trump lost the 2016 election too - according to the popular vote!

But wait! Is he right about Biden under-performing with minorities except for the cities he listed? 

As it turns out, no. Biden under-performed Hillary's percentages in Philadelphia. In Milwaukee, according to Politico, Black voter turnout was flat in comparison to 2016. That same article points out that it was the suburbs which really killed Trump. In Milwaukee County, the suburbs of Wauwatosa, Shorewood, Whitefish Bay, Fox Point, West Allis, Greenfield and Greendale all went for Biden. The northeast suburbs used to be reliably Red! Same thing for Greenfield and Greendale. Not anymore! This time, they went Blue. Only Hales Corners, Franklin and Caledonia went for Trump. Same thing goes for Wayne, County. Biden didn't gain ground with black voters in Detroit. But the Bolton County suburbs went for Biden! Dearborn, Livonia and Canton flipped Blue.

So again, Hannity is proven wrong.

The one city which did improve for the Democrats was Atlanta. And there, the key influence was not Joe Biden, but rather Stacy Abrams. And again, the margin was not much more in Fulton, County. But it was much higher in neighboring DeKalb.

Biden won these thanks to the white, college-educated vote. Not the black vote.

But Hannity is not deterred by serial failures and bone-headed lies such as these. He continues to spew bullshit on his podcast, particularly towards the final 14 minutes of it, in which he brings some of his "whistleblowers" onto his show.

He plays the testimony of Christina Caromo, playing a segment of her testimony. She tells of a single ballot which had a straight-line party vote for both the Democrat and Republican party-line. Under normal rules, this would be thrown out. But according to the poll worker, this was debatable, and after getting the attention of a few supervisors, they seemed inclined to think that it wasn't clearly a double-party-line vote. They kept asking themselves "what do you think?" This incensed the poll watcher, who challenged it. "What do you THINK?! It doesn't matter what you think, it's the law!" she said. Eventually, they were inclined to give it to the Democrats. When she suggested that it should go to the Republicans instead, she was scolded off. Rightly so! Because as an observer, she can call for the ballot to be excluded, but she cannot advocate for it to be given to the party of her choice! That's illegal too! Perhaps just despite the observer, the supervisor on site told the poll worker to push the ballot through.

Hannity does not bother to point out that, as an observer, she cannot advocate for her side. She can only advocate fairness. She could call for the ballot to be thrown out. She could NOT call for the ballot to go Republican.

That omission is what's known as a LIE.

Oh, and, did she get the ballot number? No? Too bad.

Because of this, we don't have the benefit of seeing the ballot in question, and we never will. We can't see if it really was marked for both parties clearly. It's a filled-in oval, rather than a dot, dash, or check-mark. But this was clearly a case where three poll workers (at least) looked at the ballot, weren't sure, and thought it was probably a Democrat straight-line vote. We'll never know. But even if we give this particular poll-watcher 100% of the benefit of the doubt (and we shouldn't), we would still only have testimony, not outright evidence, of ONE VOTE gone awry.

One! Only twenty or thirty thousand to go!

He then brought three guests on his show. Patrick Colback, Phil O'Holloran, Melissa Carone. He asked them all to verify if they'd signed the affidavit "under threat of perjury?"

In fact, several times during the show, Hannity emphasizes that those who signed these affidavits did so "under threat of perjury." While technically that's right, to show perjury on an affidavit, one has to establish that the testimony is clearly and unambiguously deceitful in some way, and that's tricky to do with eyewitness accounts. So the "threat of perjury" doesn't really mean much on an affidavit. Hannity emphasizing this is just showmanship. But even taking the honesty of the signatories for granted, nothing they say proves a damned thing!

And what do these witnesses have to say? Phil O'Holloran testifies as to a lack of security present with regard to the process of collecting and tallying the ballots. He outright admits that he had an image in  his mind that the process would involve something like Brinks trucks and files kept under guard. When he saw the real on-the-ground process, which involved officials merely walking back and forth with the ballots or the vote totals, he was disappointed, and counts this as "evidence" of election fraud.

Jesus H. Christ! And this was done, not only on the AIR, but on a PODCAST, where such obvious logical flaws should have been edited right out!

Melissa Carone testified as a Dominion contract worker. She said her experience working for them was awful. She said her coworkers made rude comments about republicans. She said it was "not a mistake in their software to drop votes. The software was created for that purpose."

Hannity actually committed an act of journalism by asking, "How do you know that? Did you watch votes get changed? Did you see it with your own eyes?"

Her answer was telling. "I did not see that with my own eyes. That's from research that other people have done..."

Well, now how about that!

"Dominion supplied me with a binder that, uh, really states that, um, that their hardware is online. It was connected to the Internet. Uh, which it's not supposed to be. Um, I also stated that I was initially, uh..."

Hannity: "It stays it in the - in the materials they gave you?"

Melissa: "Yes, sir. Yes."

Hannity: "And did you hand it over to the investigators, here?"

Melissa: "Yes, I absolutely did. Yes."

Hannity: "Do you have a copy of it, still?"

Melissa: "I do."

Hannity: "I'd like to see it."

If she gave Hannity her copy, he has yet to say so. 

And in case you're wondering, this is exactly the same Melissa Carone who, the following day, testified in front of the Michigan House Panel, visibly drunk, and spouting off conspiracy-laden crap! At one point, even Rudy Giuliani tried to get her to shut up! Now that's some serious-level crazy when even Rudy Giuliani thinks you should zip it! You can see the video of it yourself, here. It's hilarious!

In her drunken testimony, she repeats Hannity's line about perjury. "Did you sign a piece of paper saying you would go to JAIL if you were lying? I did!"

Yeah, except that's completely unlikely, even if you happen to lie, because proving said lie is next to impossible.

Bye, Felicia.

If she had any credibility at all, she blew it with that drunken performance. And while being visibly intoxicated isn't an indication by itself of her testimony being false, it is at least an indication that she doesn't take her role as a witness seriously enough.

As to Melissa's claim regarding Dominion machines being connected to the Internet, Michigan rules state that such machines can only be networked after votes have been counted and a paper ballot trail  has been established. If that's what her manual says, then her testimony is deliberately misleading.

Hannity: "I was told, people testifying today, that they were, there was, the process the law allows, Patrick, for partisan observers to watch the vote counting from beginning to end. And that the chain of custody obviously should be watched as well. None of that happened, did it?

Patrick: "No, it didn't. It's particularly around military ballots. This is - you've probably seen the cardboard covering up the windows, um, where Republican poll challengers were prohibited from re-entering, the TCF hall to observe the military ballots. The reason that's so concerning is because military ballots come in a format that has to be duplicated on another ballot that's compatible with the format that the, uh, scanners can read. So if you don't have a Republican there, you're re-creating a whole bunch of votes and a whole bunch of ballots without any Republican oversight. They chose that time to do that for a reason. All night long we had Republican poll challengers in there till the wee hours of the morning. I was pulling 24 hour-plus shifts. (unintelligible) was going on at night. They had zero activity pretty much between midnight and about 5 a.m. in the morning where there's no counting, but they had the military ballots available to go off and count then. They chose not to count them until after they locked down the facility and kept the - additional Republican poll challengers from attending. So..."

Hannity: "So how many Republican poll challengers were in there at a time when they were allowed to be there the whole time?"

Patrick: "We estimate about a dozen or so. Yeah."

Aha! So there were at least some Republican observers present! This was not done in complete seclusion!

Hannity: "A dozen - with how many people counting ballots?"

Patrick: "A hundred and thirty-four separate counting boards inside of there, representing five hundred and three precincts."

Hannity: "And what was the distance between the observers and the counting?"

That question never did get answered. Instead, Phil went off on a tangent.

Phil: "This... observers... in the county... the observers... were uh, for the Republican party or the Democrat party, the counters and the poll workers... uh, one thing that's really important to point out here is that the Democrats allowed in very large numbers of un-credentialed people. And what that allowed them to do was not only to harass us, which was incessant, but it also boosted the numbers in the counting port so that they could then say, 'Well, we've got too many people in here. Better close it down.' Then, once they'd closed it down, then, Republicans who'd went out just to go to the bathroom or something, or went out to the hallway to take a break, found that they couldn't get back in. So it was selective re-entry. And when I was also reporting the Penske truck to the Sergeant [What Penske truck? That never got explained on the podcast.], uh, he, he was part of a SWAT team, an 8 or 9 man SWAT team, that was not letting us in. And at this point, I said, no - one of the, uh, one of the, I think it was, Trump Republican officials - he said, "Sir, there are only ten Republicans inside there," and I looked on, and there were, prob - it was just, uh - too numerous to count the Democrats. I mean, it was like one, obviously, one for every, uh, one of a hundred and thirty-four counting boards, plus numerous private and non-credentialed people who weren't even supposed to be in there."

USA Today and the Detroit Free Press both disputed this long, long ago. At one point in the day, there were 268 Democratic Challengers, 227 Republican Challengers, and 75 non-partisan challengers on the floor. But only 134 challengers were supposed to be inside! Per state rules! Eventually, people had to be dis-allowed back in after leaving, because officials were concerned about the spread of Covid-19, as well as general fire hazards.

So are they right about only 10 or 12 Republicans being in there at one point? Probably not. Because how do you do a head-count in a room filled with people, who are all required to be unmarked (no MAGA hats, or the like), when the windows were covered, and only the area directly in front of the glass door was visible? It's far more likely that 12 is an extreme exaggeration regarding the actual number of Republicans inside. Keep in mind that Phil O'Holloran claimed that there was an 8 or 9 man SWAT team blocking them from getting back in! That's a HUGE exaggeration, too! Oh, I'll grant that fewer Republicans than Democrats may have been in there, because I'm convinced, by experience, that Trump supporters are far more capable of harassment than Democrats, but there's just no way that I buy that there were only 12! That's the exaggeration of a very bad liar!

Both sides contend harassment. I believe it. Tensions were high and emotions ran hot. But none of that establishes that only 12 Republicans were inside, and even if it were true that Republicans had been winnowed down to 12, none of them witnessed any fraud.

The ballot counters had it hard enough without people violating the 6-feet rule, leering over their shoulders, and barking at them at every little thing! The MAGA people are upset that the windows were boarded over. Had I been in charge, I would have been tempted to turn the fire hoses on them!

And what was missing from this whole, big tirade that Hannity had on his show? EVIDENCE OF ANY FRAUD! We heard evidence that fewer Republicans were ballot-checking than Democrats. So what? We heard evidence that the Dominion computer may have gotten hooked up to the Internet at one point. That's not allowed, but IS allowed after the vote counting is complete. Again, so what? We heard evidence that one driver's trailer got reassigned to someone else without his knowledge. So what? We heard from a woman who had either poor eyesight or a remarkable inability to lie, telling an impossible whopper of a story. So what? We heard testimony regarding the back-dating of ballots, which wouldn't have affected the count anyway. SO FUCKING WHAT? Does any of this prove fraud? HELL NO! Hell, it's hearsay! It's anecdote! It doesn't even count as EVIDENCE of fraud! Not one ballot was clearly witnessed as fraudulent! With as many as 227 Republicans pacing the room like lions, not one! (Or, maybe just one if you count Christina Caromo's testimony, and I, for one, am not willing to grant that kind of latitude.)

Not one "witness" ever said something like, "ballot #2247 was fraudulent! I saw it!" Not one witness could! Because they couldn't find one! These people are all witnesses, not to facts, but to their impressions, their feelings, and their biased perceptions.

Sean, at long last, it's time to ask, in the words of the little, old granny from the old Burger King commercials, "Where's the beef?"

Eric

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