Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday tried to extract some good news from the acquittal of Igor Danchenko in what was Special Counsel John Durham’s final case, in part by minimizing his own past focus on the Steele dossier researcher.
“A lot of people think this was a loss for Durham,” Hannity said after a judge found Danchenko not guilty on four counts of lying to the FBI. The work by Durham, the Trump-era prosecutor tasked with probing the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, resulted in zero convictions. In May, Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also acquitted of lying to the FBI.
“I never really cared that much about Igor Danchenko,” Hannity claimed. “What we learned in the trial is what matters to me more.”
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Hannity, who in May 2020 fretted that “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes” if Durham’s team didn’t bring “justice,” brought attention to Danchenko several times, for instance in August 2020 and in November 2021 on Twitter.
On Tuesday, the Fox host insisted that there were still unanswered questions.
“Will we ever get to the bottom of any of this?” he asked Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) as a chyron labeled Danchenko a “deep state bad actor.” “Are all of these people that signed those FISA warrants filled with information that they know was not verified—are they ever going to be held accountable, or do we have the two tiered justice system in perpetuity?”
Johnson responded with the wild claim that Danchenko and Sussman were acquitted “because the jury found the FBI was the more corrupt actor in what they did.”
“We need to get to the bottom of this,” demanded Johnson, who alleged during a Senate debate against Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes last week that the FBI set him up in a 2020 meeting.
