text: Tweet with a location 
   
   You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more ||||| Updated | Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday offered what was perhaps the most bizarre assessment yet of former President Barack Obama's official portrait by suggesting an artist included "sexual innuendo" in his depiction of the 44th president. 
   
   A now-deleted post on Hannity's website claimed the portrait, painted by Kehinde Wiley, featured "secret sperm cells," seemingly referencing the detail of Obama's temple in the painting. In a since-deleted tweet on this, Hannity wrote, "Obama's portrait - a stark contrast to predecessors with inappropriate sexual innuendo." 
   
   Hannity has habitually made it clear he's no fan of Obama and this isn't the first time he's promoted a conspiracy theory in relation to the former president. 
   
   The conservative later issued a statement about the post that appeared on his website. 
   
   "Earlier today my web staff posted content that was not reviewed by me before publication," he said. "It does not reflect my voice and message and, therefore, I had it taken down." 
   
   Mark Wilson/Getty Images 
   
   Wiley is a Yale-educated painter who's highly regarded for his work. As the painting was unveiled Monday, Obama said, "How about that? That's pretty sharp." The former president added that he's always been quite taken with Wiley's paintings, which is why he chose to work with him on the official portrait. 
   
   "What I was always struck by whenever I saw his portraits, was the degree to which they challenged our conventional views of power, wealth, privilege and the way that he would take extraordinary care and precision and vision in recognizing the beauty and the grace and the dignity of people who are so often invisible in our lives, and put them on a grand stage," he said. 
   
   He went on: "The people in our families, people who built this country, built this capital, served food, took out the garbage. Kehinde lifted them up, and gave them a platform, and said they belonged at the center of American life. And, that was something that moved me deeply because, in my small way, that's part of what I believe politics should be about." 
   
   At Tuesday's unveiling, which took place at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Wiley expressed his delight at being the first African-American artist to earn a presidential portrait commission and to have the chance to paint the first African-American president. "It doesn't get any better than that," he said. 
   
   This story has been updated to include a statement from Sean Hannity. ||||| The official portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama received a wide array of reactions when they were unveiled on Monday. But none has been quite as insane as the one Sean Hannity promoted on his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon. 
   
   “Obama's portrait—a stark contrast to predecessors with inappropriate sexual innuendo,” the Fox News host tweeted, linking to a truly bizarre article on his website written by “Hannity Staff.” 
   
   “PORTRAIT PERVERSION: Obama Portrait Features ‘SECRET SPERM,’ Artist Joked About ‘Killing Whitey’” the headline screamed. And it only got weirder from there. 
   
   The article promises “shocking allegations” that the artist behind the former president’s portrait, Kehinde Wiley, “included ‘secret sperm cells’ within the painting and once joked about ‘Killing Whitey’ during an interview.” 
   
   The evidence for the former claim comes from a 2008 New York Times article—conveniently not “fake news” when it supports Hannity’s agenda—that reports Wiley’s portraits “initially depicted African-American men against rich textile or wallpaper backgrounds whose patterns he has likened to abstractions of sperm.” Hannity’s piece includes a close up of a vein in Obama’s forehead in the portrait that someone on his “staff” apparently thinks looks sperm-like. 
   
   It appears that the whole “sperm” theory originated on—where else?—4chan, where a thread was posted on Monday proclaiming, “Official Portrait of Obama has SPERM on his face!!!” That post just happened to include the same close up of Obama that Hannity used on his site. 
   
   As for the “Kill Whitey” part, that dates back to a quote Wiley gave New York magazine in 2012 about a painting in which a black woman holds the severed head of a white woman in the style of Biblical depictions by artists like Caravaggio. In other words, art. 
   
   The outrage echoed comments made by Hannity’s Fox News lead-in Tucker Carlson on Monday night about the “racially fraught decapitation portrait” by Wiley, who he mistakenly identified as female for some reason. “This is the person painting the Obamas’ portraits?” Carlson asked incredulously. 
   
   Evidently, this particular conspiracy theory was too crazy even for Hannity, who deleted both the tweet and the article just a couple of hours after they were posted. 
   
   But if he ever finds any evidence of bodily fluids in a portrait of Hillary Clinton, you can be sure he will let us all know. 
   
   UPDATE: In a statement provided by Fox News, Hannity told The Daily Beast: “Earlier today my web staff posted content that was not reviewed by me before publication. It does not reflect my voice and message and, therefore, I had it taken down.” ||||| Fox News host Sean Hannity has claimed with no evidence whatsoever that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., that he is in cahoots with the entire "liberal media," and that under his watch, a Democratic National Committee staffer was killed because he supposedly gave emails to WikiLeaks. Never one to miss something that definitely isn't there, Hannity's latest conspiracy involves "secret sperm cells" in Obama's official portrait. Yes, really. 
   
   The Smithsonian's portrait of President Obama pic.twitter.com/buvVAEomrj — Axios (@axios) February 12, 2018 
   
   Artist Kehinde Wiley's bold portrait of Barack Obama has been well received, with The Boston Globe calling the painting and its pair, Amy Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama, "socio-cultural documents to surviving with grace and elegance." Obama praised Wiley's work at the unveiling Monday, saying: "What I was always struck by whenever I saw his portraits was the degree to which they challenged our conventional views of power and privilege." 
   
   Hannity sees, well, something else. "Controversy surrounding Kehinde Wiley's wildly non-traditional portrait of the commander-in-chief broke out within minutes of its unveiling," Hannity's website alleges, "with industry insiders claiming the artist secretly inserted his trademark technique — concealing images of sperm within his paintings." 
   
   Sean Hannity's website claims the Obama portrait includes a hidden sperm https://t.co/dlQR08l99n pic.twitter.com/LYpqqB2V0q — Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 13, 2018 
   
   Maybe not so much. Hannity got one thing right, anyway: It is nontraditional. Wiley's portrait of Obama "dismantles so much and creates new visions of masculinity that black men rarely have the public permission to explore," argues Teach for America's Brittany Packnett. Jeva Lange 
   
   Update 5:14 p.m. ET: Hannity later deleted the post from his site. In a statement, he said: "Earlier today my web staff posted content that was not reviewed by me before publication. It does not reflect my voice and message and, therefore, I had it taken down."
target: – People have thoughts about the new Obama portraits, and some are weirder than others. On Tuesday, Sean Hannity's website pushed perhaps the weirdest of all—that the portrait contained hidden images of sperm. The Week quotes from the since-deleted page: "Controversy surrounding Kehinde Wiley's wildly non-traditional portrait of the commander-in-chief broke out within minutes of its unveiling, with industry insiders claiming the artist secretly inserted his trademark technique—concealing images of sperm within his paintings." And a since-deleted Hannity tweet read, "Obama's portrait - a stark contrast to predecessors with inappropriate sexual innuendo," per Newsweek. The allegation drew quite a bit of attention, and apparently Hannity himself was surprised. "Earlier today my web staff posted content that was not reviewed by me before publication," he said in a statement. "It does not reflect my voice and message and, therefore, I had it taken down." The sperm rumor apparently began circulating on 4chan, and the Daily Beast appears to have tracked down the original source, a 2008 article in the New York Times about artist Wiley. That article says his portraits “initially depicted African-American men against rich textile or wallpaper backgrounds whose patterns he has likened to abstractions of sperm.” This tweet shows the image making the sperm-conspiracy rounds.