Donald Trump Jr. Interview Scores Top Cable Crowd Of Night For Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program featuring First Son Donald Trump Jr. talking about his campaign-period meeting with a messenger of the Russian government averaged 2.9 million viewers. That made it Tuesday night’s most watched program on all of cable TV.

Hannity was up 20% in total viewers and 41% in the news demo, compared with the same night last year. About 664,000 of Hannity‘s 2.9M total viewers fell in the news demo of 25-54.

In the same time slot, MSNBC’s Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell clocked 2.34M viewers and 576K news-demo viewers. And CNN Tonight logged 1.13M viewers, including 369K in the news demo.

Don Jr’s dad, who had been unusually quiet since his oldest son tweeted out an email chain with a Kremlin intermediary offering incriminating information about Hillary Clinton, praised his appearance on Hannity’s show as “open, transparent and innocent.”

During the exclusive interview, Donald Jr. told Hannity, “In retrospect, I probably would have done things differently” about his June 2016 meeting with the Kremlin-attached lawyer. “Honestly, my takeaway, when all of this was going on, is that someone has information on our opponent. Things are going a million miles per hour. You know what it’s like to be on a campaign. We just won Indiana, but we’re talking about a contested convention.”