Over and over we’ve noted the fact that supporting Donald Trump inevitably requires self-abasement, self-beclowning, and totally rejecting anything you had previously believed in. Case in point: Sean Hannity.

I’ve never accused Hannity of being the sharpest knife in the drawer though I will admit to admiring his work ethic and, until this year, I’d considered him a solid conservative of the “blue collar guy at the end of the bar” variety. But with the rise of Branch Trumpidianism, something that Hannity has enabled, aided and abetteed, Hannity has descended into something of self-parody. His riotous Twitter fight with Jonah Goldberg accomplished the “self beclowning” phase of his descent. Last night, however, Hannity may very well have staked a claim to being the David Koresh of Branch Trumpidianism.

Last night, Hannity’s guest was none other than Russian tool and accused rapist, Julian Assange of Wikileaks.

HANNITY: In other news, Julian Assange has said he has, quote, significant documents that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Here to join us, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. How are you, sir? Welcome to the program.

ASSANGE: Well as can be expected for being detained for six and a half years.

HANNITY: I understand—you know, part of me in the beginning was conflicted about you, and I’ll tell you why. I believe in privacy, I believe that people especially when it comes to private emails, personal emails, et cetera, I think people have a right to that privacy. On the other hand, you have done a lot of good in what you have exposed about how corrupt, dishonest, and phony our government is. Do you understand people when they talk about the privacy issue?

ASSANGE: I do. And we have exposed a lot of governments. Wikileaks has—we specialize in bringing the First Amendment to the world, and we were always very surprised one of our biggest battles would be trying to bring it to the United States under an Obama administration.

HANNITY: That’s interesting to say. Why do you say that’s a surprise to you?

ASSANGE: Well, because if you see the rhetoric from coming out of the Democrats is that they’re pro-civil liberties, and an important part of civil liberties is respect for the First Amendment and the rule of law, and that has broken down under the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton was part of that process. She has—the Obama administration has attempted to prosecute more journalists and journalistic sources under the same Espionage Act she was being investigated under in all previous presidencies combined.

HANNITY: Yeah.

ASSANGE Not just more than any one of them. More than all of them combined. So there’s, under Obama, an epidemic has developed of abusing national security laws to crack down on legitimate use of the First Amendment.

HANNITY: You said to PBS that you have a significant amount of information, the information itself is significant, pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You will be releasing it in several batches as you’re finishing it from a journalistic standpoint. How many batches do you think you’ll be releasing and how soon?

ASSANGE: Tricky question, Sean.

HANNITY: That’s actually a pretty simple one. That’s not tricky.

ASSANGE: The first batch is reasonably soon. We are quite confident about it now. We might put out some teasers as—I don’t want to promise anything because you have to see how the formatting goes. But we might put out some teasers as early as the next week or the week after.

HANNITY: Last question. It’s not really hard to hack into these even secure systems, is it? I’ve talked to some real smart computer friends of mine. They say it’s far more simple than anybody would ever know. Is that true?

ASSANGE: It is. I just want to say one thing. In the FBI report released Friday, I agree with your analysis. It is very strange that was released Friday afternoon on a Labor weekend. I do think it draws questions to what sort of game the FBI is trying to play. Hillary Clinton says she can’t remember what a (C) in brackets stands for. Everyone in positions of government and in WikiLeaks knows it stands for classified, confidential. And in fact, we have already released thousands of cables by Hillary Clinton [holds up document]—here she is, Clinton see, hat’s her signature. Clinton with a (C) in brackets right there.

HANNITY: Wow.

ASSANGE: Thousands where she, herself, has used a (C) in brackets and signed it off, and more than 22,000 times that she has received cables from others with this (C) in brackets. So it’s absolutely incredible for Clinton to lie. She is lying about not knowing what that is. But it’s a bit disturbing that James Comey goes along with that game.

HANNITY: Wow. Julian Assange, fascinating. I do hope you get free one day. I wish you the best. Thank you for being with us.

ASSANGE: Thank you, Sean.

Let’s look at where Hannity was on Assange when Wikileaks first hit the news:

SEAN HANNITY: All right. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will make an appearance before a British judge tomorrow. Now the appearance is related to sexual assault charges that he’s facing in Sweden. Now this news comes just as there’s word that Assange is apparently not done waging his war against the U.S., at least not yet.

[…]

Revealing their identities, helping us and cooperating with us in our battle against the Taliban. These are real lives that are now in jeopardy and in danger. That was step one.

Then 390,000 other documents were released. Many of them classified documents. And now we have this. What is — why? Why didn’t they go after this guy and why didn’t they arrest him? Why didn’t they stop this from being published when we had so much time to do it?

[…]

Why can’t Obama do something about the Wikileaks? We got this four months ago. You know, we can stop pirating a music and Hollywood movies, but we can’t stop this guy from stealing highly classified documents that puts people’s lives at risk?

In the course of one presidential administration Hannity has gone from wanting Assange’s head on a pike to being Assange’s comrade in defending the First Amendment. Never a word was mentioned about how the Wikileaks document drops have undoubtedly put lives at risk and probably caused the deaths of US assets in hostile areas.

I don’t have a problem with using Wikileaks obtained material against Hillary Clinton. To not do so would be irresponsible. Having said that, this never lose sight of who and what Assange is. He is relentlessly anti-American in his outlook and cause a rift within Wikileaks because of his focus on hating America. He is a tool of the Russian FSB. He is aided by the Russians. His objective is to undermine targeted governments by eroding the trust their citizens have in the functioning of that government. To date the Wikileaks documents have been accurate but it is only a matter of time until the Russians start salting these pillaged files with dezinformatsiya. What Hannity has done is embrace Assange and given an imprimatur to any future releases that are designed to damage US interests. That is inexcusable.