- Fox News host Sean Hannity tried urging Trump to stop the rioting at the Capitol on January 6.
- "Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol," Hannity texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
- The January 6 committee revealed the texts during a hearing on Monday.
As a violent crowd descended on the Capitol on January 6, Fox News host Sean Hannity sought to get then-President Donald Trump to stop the chaos.
"Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol," Hannity urged then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to texts revealed by the House select committee investigating January 6.
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, vice chair of the committee, read the text aloud during a hearing on Monday, which reveals a stunning difference between Hannity's private reading of the situation and public portrayal of the riot.
On his Fox News show a few hours after the attack, Hannity floated the conspiracy theory that groups like antifa may have infiltrated the crowd.
"Then we had the reports that groups like antifa, other radical groups — I don't know the names of all of them — that they were there to cause trouble," Hannity said at the time.
The FBI said its found no evidence that groups such as antifa had been involved in the riot. At least 719 people have been charged in connection to the riot so far.
—Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) December 14, 2021
Cheney also read out texts sent on January 6 by other Fox News anchors, including Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade, who similarly tried to spur Trump into action.
Kilmeade texted Meadows: "Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished."
"Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy," Ingraham texted Meadows.
But on the air that night, both Kilmeade and Ingraham cast doubt on the fact that Trump supporters were behind the insurrection.
"I do not know Trump supporters that have ever demonstrated violence that I know of in a big situation," Kilmeade said.
"I've been to a lot of these rallies. I know you, you both have covered them. I have never seen that before. Ever," Ingraham said.
These messages, submitted by Meadows, were revealed as the committee recommended to hold him in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to appear before the panel. The House is expected to vote on the contempt charges on Tuesday.
A Fox News spokesperson did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Hannity and Trump had a reported falling out in late 2020 over the former president's election fraud lies.
"If you were hearing what I'm hearing, you'd be vaping too," Hannity reportedly told a colleague at one point.
Since his antifa comments in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol siege, Hannity has, like other conservative media personalities who initially floated the baseless theory, largely steered away from the topic of the insurrection altogether.
The notable exception at Fox News is Hannity's fellow primetime host Tucker Carlson, who has doubled down on his whitewashing of January 6. He even released a three-part miniseries, titled "Patriot Purge," that pushes a demonstrably false conspiracy theory that the US military and the FBI secretly plotted the attack.
Carlson, however, has mostly left his whitewashing of the Capitol riot within the confines of the FOX Nation streaming app — where ad boycotts are of no concern — with the exception of a June 2021 segment where he first rolled out the FBI "false flag" theory that later became the subject of the streaming miniseries.