Fox News host Sean Hannity slammed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and dared her to sue after she blasted the network amid its coverage of special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the FBI probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, with Hannity telling Clinton to “bring it on.”
Clinton, speaking at the New York Democratic State Convention on Thursday, pushed back at “conspiracy theories about me” while going after recent coverage of the Durham probe, stating, “Fox leads the charge with accusations against me, counting on their audience to fall for it again.”
The 2016 Democratic presidential nominee then invoked language on the legal standard for libel: actual malice. “They’re getting awfully close to actual malice in their attacks,” she said.
Hannity blasted the remarks during his show Thursday night.
“Malice? Really? It’s called news. Hillary, we invite you to bring it on,” Hannity stated. “It’s from a legal filing. We quoted exactly from the filing that was put in federal court.”
Durham recently alleged that Michael Sussmann — an attorney for Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign who has been charged with lying to the FBI — and his allies exploited government databases in an effort to gather information on former President Trump.
Sussmann’s lawyers this week have asked a federal judge to throw out Durham’s prosecution, calling it an extreme case of “prosecutorial overreach” and accusing the special counsel of filling the court record with vague insinuations of a political conspiracy in order to inflame media coverage and politicize the case.
Conservatives and other Trump allies have been criticizing the media for not providing more coverage on the latest developments in Durham’s investigation. Right-wing media outlets, including Fox News, have covered the story extensively.
Tucker Carlson opened his top-rated show on Fox News on Monday with the Durham story. Similarly, the New York Post ran a headline on its cover Tuesday that read “Hillary the Spy,” while The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board penned an editorial titled “Trump really was spied on.”
Clinton in her remarks in New York on Thursday warned Democrats not to pay attention to “extremes” on both sides of the political aisle and knocked those “coming after me again lately.”
“It’s funny, the more trouble Trump gets into, the wilder the charges and conspiracy theories about me seem to get,” Clinton said.
Harper Neidig contributed.