Fox News host Sean Hannity is denying a new report that he wrote a 2020 campaign ad for former President Donald Trump — an ad that then aired on his show.
An upcoming book by Mike Bender, White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal, about the 2020 presidential election includes the detail that Hannity allegedly had a role in writing a campaign ad for Trump last year, which only aired on his Fox News show, according to an excerpt published Tuesday by Punchbowl News.
"Multiple internal campaign emails referred to the spot simply as 'Hannity,'" Bender reports, per Punchbowl News. "Another referred to it as the 'Hannity-written' spot. 'POTUS has not yet approved, but Hannity has,' read one email. 'Hannity said this is our best spot yet,' another campaign aide wrote."
The ad deemed then-candidate Joe Biden a "forty-seven-year swamp creature" who supported a "radical, socialist Green New Deal." Bender writes that it "was mocked mercilessly" inside the Trump campaign "mostly because of the dramatic, over-the-top language and a message that seemed to value quantity over quality." In fact, the campaign reportedly "deemed it so useless that they limited it to exactly one show," Hannity's, hoping he and Trump would stop asking about it. It reportedly cost the campaign $1.5 million.
Hannity denied the reporting, telling Bender he "was not involved that much" in the Trump campaign and that "anybody who said that is full of sh--." According to Punchbowl, though, Trump "did not dispute that Hannity wrote the ad" during an interview with Bender.