We see you, Hannity. Fox News' chief blowhard correspondent is not known for his subtlety, and no one on television is more transparently in the tank for the president than ol' Sean. But the titan of primetime white resentment programming thought he did a clever troll last night when he jokingly suggested the motley crew of international grifters and fiends caught up in the Trump-Russia probe should mimic Hillary Clinton and destroy potential electronic evidence.

This included "acid wash[ing] the emails and the hard drives," and "bash[ing] the phones with a hammer."

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Notice this whole thing is couched in a smirking joke: I'm not really suggesting you obstruct justice this blatantly, Hannity intimates, I'm just trying to trigger the libs.

(It seems like a waste of time to wade into the truth value here, but it's worth pointing out that Clinton deleted emails that her legal team deemed "personal" in 2014, when she was not under investigation. This is obviously different from destroying evidence a special prosecutor has asked for in an investigation. Also, Clinton didn't "acid wash" anything. This is absurd and has been repeatedly debunked, so naturally it featured on Hannity's program.)

With that time successfully wasted, we can get back to Hannity's current gambit. The "I Was Just Joking" excuse is well known to high-school bullies, as well as the president. After the public became aware of the extent of Russia's interference in our elections, people started to question Trump's call during the campaign for "Russia, if you're listening" to "find" Clinton's missing emails. His team suggested he was joking. When Trump called Democrats "traitors" and "un-American," they suggested he was joking. When the president appeared to suggest police should handle suspects more brutally, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "he was making a joke."

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These jokes have become a way to smuggle toxic bullshit into the discourse. How many of Hannity's viewers will internalize what he just said primarily as a joke? How many will have moved closer to rationalizing potential obstruction on the part of Trump and his associates Because Hillary Did It Too? This galaxy-brain Whataboutism is particularly dangerous in our current era of absolute lawlessness, as Republicans embrace convicted criminals as heroes and the president blatantly interferes into an investigation into himself and his associates in public. In fact, Trump is already under investigation for obstruction of justice.

Hannity's knee-slappers are not merely sad attempts at humor or incredibly immature. (This is, after all, a man charged with disseminating information to millions of people, joking that associates of a president suspected of colluding with a hostile foreign power should destroy potential evidence of that effort.) The Fox host relentlessly slammed the Russia probe on air for months without disclosing that he was one of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's three clients. Hannity and Trump tuck each other into bed each night with a phone call in which they presumably commiserate on how tough it is being so great. How often does Hannity disclose this relationship while defending the president?

Hannity might frequently be cited as the dumbest person on the Fox News airwaves, but that doesn't mean he doesn't sometimes know what he's doing.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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