In just two years, Fox News host Sean Hannity went from inviting Julian Assange to fill in for him on his radio show to scrubbing all references to the WikiLeaks founder from his Twitter stream.
Assange was arrested Thursday in London, where he's been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in order to avoid extradition to Sweden and then, he feared, the United States. Hannity told Assange in a 2017 interview that he believed "every word he says," because "nothing he has published has ever been false." Over the years, Hannity devoted several positive tweets to Assange and WikiLeaks, but observant Twitter users like Matthias Reynolds discovered on Thursday they are all gone. Hannity does have one related tweet still up: A link to a story on his website about Assange's arrest.
The Washington Post's Aaron Blake argues this could all just be a coincidence, saying Hannity's cleansing of all things pro-Assange and WikiLeaks "appears to have taken place as part of a mass deletion — not in response to Assange's arrest today." Tweets about Assange and WikiLeaks may have gotten the boot, but Hannity did elect to keep about eight million references to Jussie Smollett, Hillary Clinton's emails, and "collusion delusion."
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