A major scoop about President Trump and Stormy Daniels fell in Sean Hannity's lap on Wednesday night, and the Fox News Channel host didn't even realize it.
“I'm giving you a fact, now, that you don't know,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, the new lead on Trump's private legal team, told Hannity in an interview. It was the rhetorical equivalent of a flashing road sign, and Hannity missed it because he was, as usual, looking in the rearview mirror at Hillary Clinton.
The episode recalled last week's appearance by Trump on “Fox & Friends,” in which the hosts did not recognize the significance of the president's admission that “with this crazy Stormy Daniels deal, [Michael Cohen] represented me.”
In that interview, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade stared blankly as Trump suggested — contrary to a previous denial — that he may have known about his personal lawyer's $130,000 payment to silence the porn star, who claims to have had an affair with Trump more than a decade ago. Rather than press the president about his knowledge, the hosts changed the subject to Kanye West.
Hannity's sit-down with Giuliani on Wednesday yielded another moment of accidental journalism by Fox News commentators. They may not ask all the tough questions, but their easy rapport with members of Trump world can promote loose talk that breaks news.
Hannity was half an hour into a conversation with Giuliani and was trying to set up his guest for a shot at the special counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Coordination between the Trump team and Russia “never happened,” Hannity said, but “in the process of this, we did discover that a foreign national, Christopher Steele, was paid through Fusion GPS, used Russian sources.”
Hannity was referring to the former British spy who was hired by an opposition research firm working for Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Steele compiled a dossier of alleged activities by Trump and his associates in Russia.
“Isn't that closer to the [special counsel's] mandate than Michael Cohen … having something to do with paying some Stormy Daniels woman $130,000?” Giuliani replied, adding that the payment “is going to turn out to be perfectly legal.”
“That money was not campaign money, sorry,” he continued, countering speculation by a former Federal Election Commission chairman and others that Cohen's payment to Daniels could be considered an illegal in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. “I'm giving you a fact, now, that you don't know. It's not campaign money. No campaign finance violation.”
Hannity, with tunnel vision directed at Clinton, ignored Giuliani's tantalizing tease and said, “They funneled it through a law firm.”
By “they,” Hannity meant Clinton and the DNC, and by “it,” he meant money for the dossier.
Giuliani did his best to work with Hannity's non-sequitur. “They funneled it through a law firm, and the president repaid it,” he said.
By “they,” Giuliani meant Trump, and by “it,” he meant money for Daniels.
After a commercial break, Hannity said, “I think we were talking about two different things there.”
Indeed.
“I was talking about the $130,000 payment [to Daniels]," Giuliani said, “the settlement payment, which is a very regular thing for lawyers to do.”
“The president reimbursed that over the period of several months,” he added.
Feuding with Fox News colleague Shepard Smith in March, Hannity tweeted that “Hannity breaks news daily.” He certainly did on Wednesday; he just didn't know it, at first.