Billion, trillion -- it's all the same to Sean Hannity

ABC Radio host and FOX News Channel host Sean Hannity -- who has regularly advanced the misleading claim that Senator John Kerry “wanted $7 billion” (or, occasionally, "$6 billion") in intelligence cuts following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- once again dramatically exaggerated that estimation on the August 17 edition of the nationally syndicated Sean Hannity Show, where he referred to “the John Kerry Amendment that would have gut $6 trillion from the intelligence community.”

This is not the first time Hannity has made this mistake; on the July 30 edition of FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Hannity asserted that Kerry “voted to cut our intelligence by $7 trillion.” After Media Matters for America pointed out this gross overstatement of an already distorted GOP talking point on August 2, Hannity admitted that he had “made a mistake” and credited “some liberal hate-conservative groups” for pointing it out.

Regardless of the size of the claim -- whether 6 billion or 7 billion (or trillion) dollars -- both Hannity and the GOP have taken Kerry's proposals on the issue of intelligence funding out of context, as Annenberg Political Fact Check has documented and as MMFA has repeatedly noted.