John Boehner Spills on Shocking Meeting With Roger Ailes to Try to ‘Put a Leash’ on Fox News Hosts Like ‘Nut’ Sean Hannity

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Former House Speaker John Boehner did not hold former Fox News founder Roger Ailes, or current prime time host Sean Hannity, in the highest esteem. Politico has just published an excerpt adapted from his book On the House, to be published by St. Martin’s Press on April 13, 2021, in which Boehner calls out the strange rise of rhetorical bomb-throwing and conspiracy theorists within his own party and the remarkable influence that Fox News has had on the evolution of the Grand Old Party.

Not that long ago, there was a time that the House Speaker was the most powerful Republican official in all the land. He was the first line of Republican defense against President Barack Obama, and featured the self-made, bootstrapped pulling back story of having grown up the son of a barkeep. The fact that he openly wept at the opening of a sentimental element was endearing to many on both sides of the aisle. While he was fierce in his opposition to Democrats, he knew how to accommodate his political foes, make deals, and get things done.

At the same time, however, the mutation of Tea Party Republicanism—the momentum of which he took advantage—evolved into a more naked populist and nativist form that came with then-candidate Trump. Boehner now lays the blame for a party, now completely out of power, on the extremist side of the GOP and the media surrogates who led that movement, namely Ailes and conservative talk radio hosts like Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh, who he calls out in the book excerpt.

Boehner lays out how “right-wing propaganda nuts had managed to turn Obama into a toxic brand for conservatives.” He goes on to explain how the political media ecosystem had evolved dramatically since when he was first elected to Congress, saying, “we didn’t have any propaganda organization for conservatives, except maybe a magazine or two like National Review. The only people who used the internet were some geeks in Palo Alto. There was no Drudge Report. No Breitbart. No kooks on YouTube spreading dangerous nonsense like they did every day about Obama.”

But it was the embracement of conspiracy theories as means to build ad revenue by the aforementioned players? That was something Boehner was not planning on and made his job far more difficult. Let’s let Boehner tell that.

Mark Levin was the first to go on the radio and spout off this crazy nonsense. It got him ratings, so eventually, he dragged Hannity and Rush to Looneyville along with him. My longtime friend Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, was not immune to this. He got swept into the conspiracies and the paranoia and became an almost unrecognizable figure.

After explaining the affable and collaborative relationship he enjoyed with Ailes, as they are both from Ohio originally, and to a lesser extent Rupert Murdoch, Boehner notes how something “changed” in Ailes after Obama’s election in 2008:

At some point after the 2008 election, something changed with my friend Roger Ailes. I once met him in New York during the Obama years to plead with him to put a leash on some of the crazies he was putting on the air. It was making my job trying to accomplish anything conservative that much harder. I didn’t expect this meeting to change anything, but I still thought it was bullshit, and I wanted Roger to know it.

When I put it to him like that, he didn’t have much to say. But he did go on and on about the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which he thought was part of a grand conspiracy that led back to Hillary Clinton. Then he outlined elaborate plots by which George Soros and the Clintons and Obama (and whoever else came to mind) were trying to destroy him.

“They’re monitoring me,” he assured me about the Obama White House. He told me he had a “safe room” built so he couldn’t be spied on. His mansion was being protected by combat-ready security personnel, he said. There was a lot of conspiratorial talk. It was like he’d been reading whacked-out spy novels all weekend.

After establishing how he saw the paranoid undoing of arguably the most influential person in all of American politics at the time, Boehner was sure to take a shot at Sean Hannity:

Places like Fox News were creating the wrong incentives. Sean Hannity was one of the worst. I’d known him for years, and we used to have a good relationship. But then he decided he felt like busting my ass every night on his show. So one day, in January of 2015, I finally called him and asked: “What the hell?” I wanted to know why he kept bashing House Republicans when we were actually trying to stand up to Obama.

“Well, you guys don’t have a plan,” he whined.

“Look,” I told him, “our plan is pretty simple: we’re just going to stand up for what we believe in as Republicans.”

I guess that wasn’t good enough for him. The conversation didn’t progress very far. At some point I called him a nut. Anyway, it’s safe to say our relationship never got any better.

Hannity and Boehner have gone at each other for years, so this particular snipe might be the least surprising to read. Still, the candid spilling of tea from his DNGAF attitude is a fascinating and refreshing reminder that not everyone needs to suck up to whoever is holding the microphone.

Read the entire essay here. It is very much worth your time.

UPDATE: Sean Hannity responds: