Fox News host Sean Hannity denied on Monday night that he spoke to the State Department about former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, calling the allegations “fake news.” During her testimony before Congress that was publicly released on Monday, Yovanovitch claimed that she was told that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or someone in State would “place a call to Mr. Hannity” to find out “what is going on” with media attacks against her last spring.
“No, that never happened. That’d be fake news,” Hannity exclaimed. “The ambassador was barely ever mentioned on our show, we went back and looked. I don’t know anything about this woman, to be honest. Her name came up a few times on the show, she was an Obama holdover, I did ask one question about a news report if she was involved in something. It was a question, we do news here.”
In March, conservative journalist John Solomon—a frequent guest on Hannity’s show—reported that Yovanovitch gave Ukraine a “do-not-prosecute” list, a claim the Ukrainian prosecutor general would later recant. Days later, Hannity interviewed Joseph DiGenova—a Trump-linked lawyer entangled in the Ukraine scandal—who said the then-ambassador “has bad-mouthed the president.”
