I retracted nothing!' Sean Hannity defiant after Fox News pulls this story

Fox News host Sean Hannity has been in the hot seat over his coverage of a controversial story many are calling a conspiracy theory. On his radio show Tuesday he angrily and defiantly said he would press on, despite Fox News pulling one of their articles on the story.

"Just to close the circle here," he said, "I never, I - the family's actually on the internet saying they want to find the truth. I, I, feel so badly for this family and what they have been through, and what they are going through, and my thoughts and prayers are with them."

"This issue is so big now," Hannity continued. "That the entire Russia-collusion narrative is hanging by a thread, if in fact, take Seth out of it - there was a whistleblower within the DNC, a truth-teller, that actually was the source for WikiLeaks and not Russia, working with the Trump campaign."

"That, these are questions that I have a moral obligation to ask," he explained. "And I will do the mainstream media's job like I have most of my career."

"Like we got it right on Obama," he added, "his radicalism, his record, on Trump having a chance to win, on Michael Brown, on Trayvon Martin, on Cambridge police, on Baltimore, we're right they're wrong. Like I was right in Atlanta in the Jewell case - when everybody else said, 'oh he fits the profile of a lone bomber,' Richard Jewell. I was right then too."

"And all you in the liberal media," he concluded, "I am not Fox.com, or FoxNews.com, I retracted nothing!"

Hannity insists that he has a moral obligation to continue peddling the story despite the family of the victim, Seth Rich, pleading with him to stop. In a letter from Seth's brother Aaron, he appealed to the decency of the executive producer of the Hannity show.

"It is a travesty that you would prompt false conspiracy theories and other people's agendas rather than work with the family to learn the truth," it read. "We appeal do your decency to not cause a grieving family more pain and suffering by allowing your platform to be used by someone to drag our family name through the mud."

According to Hannity, if Seth Rich was murdered for leaking emails to WikiLeaks, then it would exonerate the Russians in the cyber hacking of the DNC, which has been widely blamed as one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election.

In apparent response to his detractors, Hannity tweeted about the story Tuesday, giving no hint that he was to back off: