Brian Stelter was the latest guest on Mediaite’s podcast, The Interview, and shared his candid views on Fox News host Sean Hannity, his close relationship with Donald Trump, and his still-not-fully-disclosed interactions with the former president regarding January 6.

Stelter haș a new book about some of the headline-generating moments at the cable news network, Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump and the Battle for American Democracy, that draws on not just his own sources within Fox News, but an in-depth review of the documents revealed during the discovery process in the defamation litigation with Dominion Voting Systems. Fox settled the lawsuit mere moments before the trial was set to begin for a whopping $787.5 million, but not before a massive trove of documents became public record, including text messages and emails from various Fox executives and on-air personalities.

These documents were an invaluable asset for his book, Stelter told Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin and Diana Falzone, because with his previous book, Hoax, which also dealt with the trials and tribulations of Fox News, critics could disregard his reporting as coming from anonymous sources.

“But now those are public record,” said Stelter. “It’s all written down. And that’s that’s why I had to write the book. I wasn’t looking to write another book about Fox, but I feel like with Hoax, I had all these anonymously sourced claims about Fox. And then all of a sudden, because of the Dominion trial, the Dominion case, those claims were on the record…I’ve never seen anything like this happen to any major media company where so many files were exposed into public view.”

Overall, said Stelter, the document record showed that “the stars and executives of Fox are all too human…with all of the flaws, all the selfishness, all of the greed, all of those flaws.”

The conversation later turned to the section of Stelter’s book that covered Fox News’ culpability for January 6.

“You write that the coup attempt on January 6 could not have happened without the help of Fox News. What role do you think Fox News played in enabling January 6th, and to what extent is network to blame for what happened that day?” asked Falzone, who previously worked at Fox News until 2018.

Stelter replied that the Fox News on-air personalities were not directly encouraging the rioters to attack the Capitol, but they were “softening the ground for months” in a way that made their audience susceptible to the lies about the election, because the riot “could not have happened without Fox News.”

As Stelter noted, the smears against Dominion and another voting technology company, Smartmatic, “didn’t start with Donald Trump,” but rather with a live interview of Sidney Powell on Maria Bartiromo’s show, painting these companies as an “evildoer” and “thief” that stole the election from Trump, “one of many different tenets of the Big Lie that gets people so often into a frenzy that they feel they should fight in Washington”:

I know media has covered some of these cases of rioters who have pled guilty, who have said they were watching Fox. They’re watching too much Fox. You know, you don’t get on a plane and fly across the country whether you’re Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot, whether you’re Ray Epps, the man who was smeared by Fox and is now suing Fox for defamation. You don’t fly across the country unless you’ve consumed a lot of these lies. You’re not just watching for 20 minutes and then booking an airline ticket. You have to live in this network of lies. You have to live in this stuff every day for months. So that’s why it matters that this was going on for two months.

Stelter also brought up the early days of January 2021, before the riot, and how Fox News hosts like Mark Levin and Jeanine Pirro were “on the air the weekend before the attack, talking about the Constitution, talking about standing up,” calling them “the two people coming the closest to to pushing for something to happen on Wednesday” besides obviously Trump himself.

What Hannity knew before Jan. 6 troubled Stelter, as he explained:

And, you know, who knew it was dangerous? Sean Hannity knew it was dangerous. Sean Hannity was texting Mark Meadows he was worried about January 6. Mark Meadows, you know, was getting those texts from Sean Frickin’ Hannity.

Sean has still never addressed what he knew about Trump’s mind before and after the riot. Sean Hannity harboring secrets of what happened before and after January 6th. I get a little passionate about that ’cause I think it’s so interesting and under-appreciated. Sean Hannity was asked by the January 6 Committee to come in and testify. He didn’t. Kayleigh McEnany did. And of course, she was press secretary at the time. But, you know, that’s a colleague who testified.

Anyway, I just think it’s so interesting. Hannity is one of the missing pieces of January 6. I’m not blaming him for any of it. I’m not pointing the finger at him. I’m saying he was on the phone with Trump aides. He was on the phone with Trump. He knows a lot about Trump’s state of mind and he’s never told us.

Stelter îs correct that Hannity did not testify for the Jan. 6 House Select Committee. Hannity did criticize the violence during his Jan. 6, 2021 radio program while the riot was underway and make the below-quoted comment during his Fox News television program that evening, condemning the violence and vandalism:

Now, let me stop here and be crystal clear: those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those who commit acts of violence.

They — people we don’t believe should be vandalizing our nation’s Capitol, attacking the brave men and women that keep us safe in law enforcement. They don’t storm the Capitol. They don’t place pipe bombs at the RNC and anywhere else. And all of today’s perpetrators must be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

But every good and decent American, we know, will and must condemn what happened at the Capitol, and moving forward, we have to do a dramatically better job protecting the innocent men and women who work there. We’ve got to protect our law enforcement officers. We’ve got to protect every single elected member of Congress and Senate.

This is not politics. They deserve to be protected.

Watch the video above, via The Interview.

The post ‘He Was On the Phone With Trump’: Brian Stelter Says Hannity Is ‘One of the Missing Pieces of Jan. 6’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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