Sean Hannity Dismisses Report About Julian Assange Offering Information On Mark Warner

Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on Monday dismissed reports of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange offering damaging information on a Democratic senator investigating Russia’s election meddling, calling it “epitome of fake news.”

Reacting to the muddle, Hannity, in a tweet, said that someone using his identity to create a fake persona and a fake account is something that the “destroy Trump media” should focus on.

Hannity, quoting a Daily Beast article also said that he would reveal all the facts regarding the story on Fox News.

According to a report in the Daily Beast, Assange was supposedly duped by a fake account named “@SeanHannity__” which was created by a Texas-based technical writer, Dell Gilliam where he reportedly asked "fake Hannity" to set up “other channels” to exchange information on the Democratic senator, Mark Warner.

Warner recently came into the limelight when he told reporters that the Senate Intelligence Committee (one of several panels investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election along with the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee) discovered a trove of documents in December 2017 which opened a whole new set of questions in regard to the investigation into Russian meddling during the 2016 presidential elections.

“I wish some of this information should have come earlier to us, but we’ve had new information that raises more questions,” Warner said, the Washington Examiner reported.

When asked about Assange’s conversation with Gilliam who was posing as Hannity, Warner’s spokesperson pointed to WikiLeaks’ own ties to the documents reportedly dropped by Russian entities like Kremlin cutout Guccifer 2.0 that were obtained by Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2017.

“Give me a break. WikiLeaks is a non-state hostile intelligence service with longstanding ties to the Russian government and Russian intelligence,” the spokesperson said.

Texas-based Gilliam was reportedly very happy to keep up the act of impersonating Hannity but panicked when she directly received a message from Assange regarding the Democratic senator. “I felt bad. He really thought he was talking to Sean Hannity,” Gilliam said.

“It kind of started on a whim. I was going to tweet at one of the fake Sean Hannity accounts that were up to tell them not to be me. …I don’t even really know how [Hannity] sounds, so I started by copying the tone of the first fake one,” she said.

The Fox News host’s official account was compromised on Jan. 27 after it posted a cryptic message saying “Form Submission 1649”. As soon as the message was posted, visitors observed that they were getting a "Sorry, that page doesn't exist" error message.

Twitter, too, had confirmed the same in a statement.

“While we normally do not discuss individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons, we have permission from the account owner to confirm that account was briefly compromised,” Twitter's official statement read.

Hannity’s account was, however, back up again Sunday morning.