In the wake of news that Robert Mueller has asked witnesses in the Russia probe to turn in their phones so that the special counsel's office can inspect their comings and goings on encrypted messaging apps, Fox News host and presidential bedtime storyteller Sean Hannity sat down in front of the cameras and urged those witnesses to commit even more crimes than they may already have under their respective belts. "If I advised them to follow Hillary Clinton’s lead," he said, employing just enough O.J.-style speculative language to maintain plausible deniability, "delete all your emails and then acid-wash the emails and hard drives on your phones." He wasn't done.

Then, take your phones and bash them with a hammer into little itsy bitsy pieces. Use BleachBit. Remove the SIM cards and then take the pieces and hand it over to Robert Mueller and say, "Hillary Rodham Clinton. This is equal justice under the law."

Hannity's monologue is not, as the dregs of /#ResistanceTwitter might have you believe, a felony, and this multimillion-dollar television personality is not about to be sentenced to a lengthy term in federal prison. But the act he encourages—destroying evidence in order to obstruct an investigation—is almost certainly not a course of action that the witnesses' attorneys would recommend. Later in the show, he claimed that he was "kidding" and acknowledged that he was providing "bad advice," but then he repeated it again, in case any members of his intended audience needed instructions and forgot to DVR his show that night.

His sarcastic tone and leering facial expression seem to indicate that to him, this is all a big joke, the cable news equivalent of the first fourth-grader in his class to discover the devastating rhetorical appeal of "I'm just doing to you what I think you did to me!"-type arguments. At worst, he is kidding on the square, at once encouraging witnesses to impede a criminal investigation and disclaiming liability for their hypothetical future decisions. In the MAGA hierarchy of needs embedded deep inside Sean Hannity's brain, "launching underexplained attacks on Hillary Clinton" is just beneath the "sing Donald Trump's praises" pinnacle, and this bit of gotcha reasoning provides the rare opportunity to satisfy both of these primordial urges.

Sean Hannity has become so adept at tossing a new conspiracy-theory word salad each night that it is easy to lose sight of what a deeply weird role he plays in American politics. Aside from occasional claims that he is an "advocacy journalist" whenever an association with the world of Serious News would suit his interests, he has steadfastly denied that he is a journalist throughout his career, instead burnishing an image as a bombastic talk radio guy who happened to get a TV gig.

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