Hannity downplays Cohen, Manafort filings: ‘How will America ever recover?’

Fox News host Sean Hannity downplayed the importance of federal filings involving former longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Friday night, joking, “How will America ever recover?”

“When you read these documents, we hear about taxi medallions, fraudulent loan applications, tax evasion, lying about a potential project in Moscow that never got off the ground and whether they stopped talking about it in January in 2016 or June in 2016,” Hannity said on his show.

“Wow the horror, how will America ever recover?” Hannity, a vocal ally of President Trump, added.

On Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller submitted new filings in the cases involving Cohen and Manafort. Federal prosecutors in New York submitted a separate filing on Cohen, recommending he serve “substantial” prison time despite his cooperation in the federal probes.{mosads}

“In the Manafort case we’re talking about tax evasion … bank loan applications back to 2007,” Hannity said, adding that none of the alleged crimes “have anything to do with President Trump, none of which have to do with Russia or anything to do with collusion.”

Regarding New York prosecutors’ filing on Cohen, Hannity focused on the part of the document saying that Cohen did not deserve a decreased sentence.

The document also for the first time directly tied Trump to campaign finance violations that Cohen pleaded guilty to in August.

“Zero evidence in any of these documents of Trump-Russia collusion, zero,” Hannity said of all the filings. 

“After months of intense investigation millions … of your dollars spent, seedy perjury traps and legal coercion we have absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing by the president of the United States.”

The investigation has lasted 18 months and reportedly cost nearly $17 million, according to figures from the Justice Department. 

Many legal pundits have argued that the filing by federal prosecutors does implicate Trump in campaign finance violations because it says Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of” the president when steering payments to silence Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, two women claiming they had affairs with Trump in 2006.

Trump has denied the affairs.