Fox News's Sean Hannity testified under oath that he never believed former President Donald Trump's lie of a stolen or rigged 2020 election through voting machine fraud. Hannity and others at Fox knew they were propping up a lie, even though it is still tearing this country apart.

Hannity was responding to a question about the Kraken lady, Sidney Powell, who represented the one-term President in lawsuits related to the 2020 election. Powell made a wild-eyed claim that Dominion voting machines were corrupted to change votes from Trump to Biden.

The New York Times reports:

At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used "to trash large batches of votes."

Mr. Hannity interrupted her with a gentle question that had been circulating among election deniers, despite a lack of supporting proof: Why were Democrats silencing whistle-blowers who could prove this fraud?

Did Mr. Hannity believe any of this?

"I did not believe it for one second."

That was the answer Mr. Hannity gave, under oath, in a deposition in Dominion's $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, according to information disclosed in a court hearing on Wednesday. The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April.

Mr. Hannity’s disclosure — along with others that emerged from court on Wednesday about what Fox News executives and hosts really believed as their network became one of the loudest megaphones for lies about the 2020 election — is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false

As Susie Madrak wrote, "Dominion has to get a jury to agree that people at Fox were saying one thing in private while telling their audience the opposite. And that requires showing a jury convincing evidence that speaks to the state of mind of those making decisions at the network."

Via NPR:

Meade Cooper, Fox News' executive vice president, "confirmed under oath she never believed the lies about Dominion," the Dominion attorney, Stephen Shackelford, Jr., also said.

"Tucker Carlson, he tried to squirm out of it at his deposition," Shackelford added, and then alluded to the Fox News star's texts from November and December 2020, when Judge Eric Davis cut Shackelford off.

But Hannity was something else again. He promoted the fake electors scheme. Here he is insinuating that Dominion changed votes or somehow altered outcomes in Pennsylvania, and therefore a "do-over" was the only solution:

Here's Sean Hannity castigating Brian Kemp for not overturning the will of the voters:

And here, Hannity let Sidney Powell lie on his radio show with no correction or even attempt to correct her.

And now he admits under oath that he knew all along Trump lost.

Hey, Trump, do you feel that shiv in your back? That's got to hurt. I hope it hurts.