Angelo Carusone: Sean Hannity’s text messages expose his role as an adviser and “obliterates this idea that somehow he was engaging in journalism”
Carusone: “This is exactly the kind of information that a chief of staff would hold close to their chest”
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From the January 4, 2022, edition of MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes
CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Angelo, I want to start on just the theme here, which I think is really sort of, I think, unintentionally funny. Which is the big, sort of embarrassing revelation for Hannity and Ingraham is that they were correctly opposed to the coup, and tried to do what they could behind the scenes to make it not happen. They were prematurely anti-coup, because being anti-coup is no longer an ideologically acceptable position. So the reason this causes them embarrassment is precisely because they were behind the scenes in private correct on one of the key moral ethical questions in American democracy. Oh, sorry. I think we're -- there you go.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Sorry. They immediately -- they simultaneously were facilitating the coup and then immediately afterwards started to basically retcon all of the circumstances around it. And I mean, on the same day, it was the 5th for example, on his radio show Peter Navarro called in to Hannity's radio show, so Hannity had him on, and Navarro was talking about how the 6th was going to be one of the biggest days in history, and he likened it to Washington crossing the Delaware, which if you remember, was a surprise attack. I mean so, there was lot of context for what Hannity may have been hearing in, you know, off air that would have given some alarm, and why he, you know, why we're seeing these text messages sort of leak out now.
HAYES: Yeah I mean, it's a good point, the amount of playing with fire that is happening during this period is off the charts, right? And then, oh gosh, it looks like stuff is burning, like desperate texts behind the scenes and then that night lighting off the fireworks.
...
Yeah, the call on the 5th, and the mention of the White House counsel is really interesting to me, Angelo, because we didn't know about that at the time, right? So we've subsequently learned that there was this huge showdown, that is essentially this -- a coup within the coup at the Department of Justice. And with Jeffrey Clark is going to basically team up with Donald Trump to decapitate leadership at DOJ, install himself, to send out these letters at least to Georgia basically saying the election is tainted. If you guys want to send Trump electors, have at it. And that the only thing that stops that is the threat of that resignation. No one knew that at the time, except apparently it had gotten out to Sean.
CARUSONE: That's right. And this is where it's really significant. Aside from the substantive part of this, it also totally obliterates this idea that somehow he was engaging in journalism or was part of his job. It absolutely exposes him as essentially part of the team, as an operative, as the type of adviser people used to tongue-in-cheek refer to him as Donald Trump's chief of staff. But, this is exactly the kind of information that a chief of staff would hold close to their chest while a person in the media would absolutely put out there, because it's such a big and explosive story. I think that's, to me, the real big part about this it just obliterates this claim that somehow this undermines his job or, you know, his role as say an investigative journalist.