On Wednesday night, in his first interview since leaving the network, former Fox News talking head Ralph Peters climbed into bed with the enemy to excoriate his former employer. “For years, I was glad to be associated with Fox. It was a legitimate conservative and libertarian outlet, and a necessary one,” he said to no less than CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “But with the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine, and I don’t do propaganda for anyone.” Peters further indicted Fox for its coordinated effort to delegitimize Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, accusing the network of undermining the “most important” investigation in his lifetime—and, later, the Constitution itself—for “ratings and profit.” “I wanted to just cry out and say, ‘How can you do this? How can you lie to our country?’” he said. “I suspect [Sean] Hannity really believes it. The others are smarter.”

Meanwhile, over on Fox, the subject of Peters’s rebuke seemed to almost intentionally spur his attacks on the special counsel to new—and potentially illegal—heights. In response to a report that Mueller has, since April, been collecting witnesses’ phones to search their encrypted-messaging services—apps like WhatsApp, Confide, Signal, and Dust—Hannity frantically exhorted anybody involved to destroy their mobile devices. “Maybe Mueller’s witnesses, I don’t know—if I advised them to follow Hillary Clinton’s lead . . . ” Hannity said. “Delete all your e-mails, and then acid-wash the e-mails and hard drives on your phones, then take your phones and bash them with a hammer into little itsy-bitsy pieces, use BleachBit, remove the SIM cards . . . ”

Technically, Hannity’s advice could amount to tampering with evidence, a federal crime that can result in a fine or imprisonment up to 20 years—or both. But Hannity, a very smart man who knows jujitsu, offered a sound legal defense, resurfacing a common talking point about a certain Democrat’s deleted e-mails and a secret computer server in Chappaqua: “[T]ake the pieces and hand it over to Robert Mueller and say, ‘Hillary Rodham Clinton, this is equal justice under the law.’ How do you think that would work out for everybody who Mueller’s demanding their phones of tonight? Now I’m certain the result would not be the same as Hillary’s.” Later in the show, Hannity seemed to walk back his statement, admitting he was “kidding, bad advice,” but he maintained witnesses should attempt it anyway. “Here. Little pieces. Here, Mr. Mueller. Here. I’m following Hillary’s lead,” he said, pretending to throw acid-washed SIM cards at the special prosecutor.

By a strange coincidence, Hannity’s name has surfaced in connection with the Russia probe in a number of small ways. In April, Michael Cohen’s attorneys revealed in court that Hannity was on the longtime Trump lawyer’s very short list of clients, and shortly thereafter, he was found to have been connected to two other Trumpworld lawyers. He is said to discuss the probe with the president, and back in January, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sent a series of Twitter messages to an account he believed to be Hannity’s, offering him “some news” about a top Democrat investigating Russian election meddling—and asked the de-facto White House adviser to continue their conversation “on other channels,” seemingly a reference to encrypted-messaging apps.

It’s so far unclear what Mueller may have gleaned from his sweep, aside from evidence of Manafort’s alleged witness tampering, which the former Trump campaign chairman not-so-subtly conducted via WhatsApp while on house arrest. (Investigators had access to Manafort’s iCloud, where some of the messages were uploaded.) Former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg told New York magazine that when he arrived in D.C. to testify in March, he handed over his iPhone, laptop, and iPad, which were returned in short order. “I said, ‘You can just go through everything,’” Nunberg said. “It didn’t take them long to copy everything.” In a follow-up request, however, Mueller’s team asked Nunberg to turn over his old BlackBerry phones, which he had used to exchange e-mails with Stone about Assange. “I went from BlackBerry to iPhone around mid-2017,” Nunberg explained. “They never asked me the history of what phones I’ve had! . . . What the fuck do they need my fucking BlackBerrys for?” he continued. “Some of them don’t even, frankly, work . . . They can keep them.”