“I did it out of my own heart,” Hannity said in an interview with HuffPost. “Nobody tells me what to say on my show. They never have and frankly they never will.”

“I’m not that type of person you can say, ‘Go on air and say this.’ That’s been the beauty of Fox News all these years,” he continued. “They leave me alone.”

The 55-year-old conservative and staunch supporter of President Trump also called a Media Matters of America decision to post a list of his Fox program’s advertisers a “kill shot” in an attempt to take him out.

“There’s nothing that I did, nothing that I said, except they don’t like my position politically,” he said. “They’ll try to ratchet up the intensity of their rationale. It does not justify an attempt to get me fired. And that’s what this is. This is an attempt to take me out. This is a kill shot.”