Fox News host Sean Hannity blasted the judge in the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, accusing Emmet Sullivan of being ignorant and clearly holding a “political bias” after Sullivan appointed a retired judge to argue against the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against Flynn.
On Wednesday, after the DOJ filed a motion to dismiss charges against Flynn despite his twice pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, Sullivan tasked former district court judge John Gleeson to look into whether there’s any reason the Trump ally shouldn’t be held in contempt of court for perjury.
The latest developments in the Flynn case clearly set Hannity, one of President Donald Trump’s closest confidants, off on Wednesday night. After kicking off his broadcast by celebrating Team Trump’s latest effort to undermine the Russia probe—a list of Obama administration officials who sought to legally “unmask” names in intelligence reports—the Fox star then took aim at Sullivan.
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“Mr. Sullivan, what part of General Flynn being ambushed and set up by [Andrew] McCabe and [James] Comey don’t you understand?!” Hannity bellowed after claiming the judge had taken a “clearly political stand.”
“You botched this from day one and you had a bias from day one,” he seethed. “You reek of ignorance, you reek of political bias!”
“So Judge Sullivan, you and you alone from this day forward are responsible for continuing what has been a travesty of justice that destroyed four years of an American hero’s life, and it’s time for a new venue and a new judge, and someone unlike you that doesn’t have political bias,” Hannity concluded.
Hannity wasn’t the only pro-Trump Fox News personality to go after Sullivan on Wednesday night. An hour earlier, during an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Judge Jeanine Pirro called on the judge to “recuse himself” from the case, adding that “he should be embarrassed to put a robe on.”
“And now what he’s doing is he’s poisoning the 2020 election by trying to make it look like Bill Barr,” she said. “He’s trying to destroy the whole thing so that Barr looks like the villain here.”
It wasn’t that long ago, however, that Pirro was praising Sullivan.
In December 2018, when Pirro was openly speculating that the judge might throw out the Flynn case even though the ex-Trump adviser had pleaded guilty, she lauded Sullivan as “a jurist unafraid of the swamp, a judge who has a track record of calling out prosecutorial misconduct, a man who does not tolerate injustice or abuse of power.”
