Fox News star Sean Hannity is both among former President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters and the primary cheerleader for dubious GOP probes purporting to show corrupt behavior by Democrats. Since Trump himself is a manifestly corrupt con man, sometimes these roles combine in hilarious ways that demonstrate his abject contempt for his viewers. This is one of those times.

Hannity offered a telling hypothetical last month while complaining that the press wasn’t playing along with bogus Republican investigations that attempt to tie President Joe Biden to his son’s foreign business dealings.

“Imagine what the media and how the country and the left in this country would be reacting if Donald Trump and the Trump Organization or the Trump family were making tens of millions of dollars from our top geopolitical foes like China and Russia,” he told his radio listeners. “I can't imagine the left in this country not going insane, but lo and behold, here we are.”

This is not a reasonable comparison: The actual sums in payments from foreign sources to members of Biden’s family are much smaller than what Hannity suggests, and notably there’s no evidence Joe Biden made a dime this way. But Hannity was laying down a marker that it would be a problem if it turned out that Trump and the businesses he and his family control were taking money from “top geopolitical foes like China.”

Lo and behold, here we are. 

House Democrats released a report on Thursday showing that the Chinese government and two state-owned businesses spent more than $5.5 million at Trump hotel properties during his presidency. These payments are corrupt bribes in their own right — the report describes them as unconstitutional “foreign emoluments” and links them to “positions favorable to specific Chinese interests” Trump took as president. And as The New York Times noted, the transactions also “offer concrete evidence that the former president engaged in the kind of conduct that House Republicans have labored, so far unsuccessfully, to prove that President Biden did as they work to build an impeachment case against him.”

Hannity, to his credit, responded to the news by denouncing Trump’s corrupt dealings and demanding answers from the former president.

Ah wait, no, he actually mocked the report while hiding its evidence from his viewers and suggested that the nebulous claims about Hunter Biden were much worse than anything Democrats had uncovered.

Hannity lumped the report in with other “lies” levied against Trump by “Democrats and the liberal media mob” in his first mention of the report on Thursday’s edition of his Fox show. “Oh, well Donald Trump did business with the communist Chinese, they stayed at his hotel in Washington. Oh, he's just like Hunter Biden,” Hannity sneered. “I'm like, no, nice try though.”

Hannity returned to the subject later in the show, again concealing the sum Trump’s companies took from China and other foreign governments

“Democrats in the House are trying to compare the fact that, well, some people from foreign countries, 20 foreign countries stayed at Trump's hotel in Washington, D.C., as if that is the equivalent,” he said. 

Hannity went on to claim the media was “muddying the waters” because reporters “showed no interest in Hunter,” but “all of the sudden they’re interested, ‘Oh, a hotel room was rented to a Chinese national.’”

But the Fox host is the one who is trying to deceive the public — and dramatically moving the goalposts he previously laid down. Last year, he said that it was relevant that in purported contrast to the Bidens, “there've never been any accusations that Donald Trump got paid by China or his children made deals with China.”

It also makes a mockery of what Trump and his son had told Hannity and his audience in interviews. 

Trump himself had baselessly suggested that China had purchased Hunter Biden’s paintings to funnel money to him, asking, “Could you imagine me doing that or my sons doing that, or my sons doing that?” And Donald Trump Jr. said it would have been a huge scandal if he even “took 1.5 dollars from China.”

Hannity and company don’t care at all about public corruption, any more than they are truly concerned about proper email management by government officials. They just want to con their audience into voting for Donald Trump and his allies so Republicans can carry out priorities like cutting taxes for rich people and banning abortions.