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Yesterday Michael Cohen and Donald Trump tried to claim an exceptional level of attorney-client privilege regarding the records seized from Cohen’s offices last week. What they were essentially advocating was the power for Trump to unilaterally decide which records seized from Cohen are privileged.
“A federal judge signaled Monday that she is unlikely to grant President Trump’s request to let him unilaterally determine what material seized last week from his personal lawyer is privileged, but she indicated that she may appoint an outside attorney to assess the records in an effort to carefully navigate the high-stakes case.”
But the big news of the day was the revelation that the identity of another of Cohen’s clients is: Sean Hannity.
“The investigation of Michael Cohen — which has pitted the president against his own Justice Department — took another unexpected turn Monday with the courtroom revelation that one of Cohen’s legal clients was Fox News commentator Sean Hannity.”
“Hannity played down the relationship, saying he occasionally asked Cohen legal questions but never paid him. On his show Monday night, he described it as a “minor relationship” that had to do with real estate.”
This attempt to hand wave it by calling it minor doesn’t answer the question but rather raises new ones.
“So Cohen advised Hannity “almost exclusively about real estate,” which in this crowd sometimes means money laundering, and not about buying off Playboy bunnies.”
“But what are the other conversations about?”
“Hannity has played even more of a role in protecting Trump than Sullivan makes out. It’s not just that he fed the uproar over Trump’s lawyer being raided. But he did an interview with Julian Assange in January 2017 that helped seed the narrative that Russia didn’t hand the DNC files to Wikileaks. More grotesquely, Hannity fed the conspiracy theories about Seth Rich (I hope the multiple entities that are suing Hannity over that will demand discovery on any claimed privileged conversations about the topic with Trump’s lawyer).”
“Sure, the matters on which Cohen purported gave legal advice to Hannity might be about buying a condo.”
“But given the effort Cohen made to protect those conversations from the eyes of the FBI, they also might involve coordination on some of the more insidious pushback on the Russian story.”
When the Stormy Daniels story first broke many in the MSM thought it was a nothingburger. I thought from the outset it was not going to be a nothingburger because of the payment that gets into campaign violations and conspiracy to effect an election. And at an elementary level-if it’s no big deal why make the payment and why conceal it? There literally is no answer.
This is similarly true of the Hannity-Cohen relationship. If it were totally innocent why conceal it?
When Hannity’s name was mentioned in the courtroom there were audible gasps:
“From his Fox News pulpit, Sean Hannity has been one of the most ardent supporters of President Trump, cheering his agenda and excoriating his enemies.”
“He has gone from giving advice on messaging and strategy to Mr. Trump and his advisers during the 2016 campaign to dining with him at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.”
“Now, Mr. Hannity finds himself aligned even more closely with the president.”
“During a hearing at a packed courtroom in Lower Manhattan on Monday, he was named as a client of Mr. Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen.”
For the record Cohen is the second attorney Trump and Hannity share in common that we’re aware of-at this point why would you ever assume this is the last bombshell? It never is.
“That revelation nudged the conservative commentator into the orbit of those who have lately come under legal scrutiny related to the investigations of Mr. Trump and his associates by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. Both inquiries have provided fodder for Mr. Hannity’s prime-time cable show and nationally syndicated radio program.”
The host’s closeness with the president may not sit well with media watchdogs, but the cozy relationship has been good for the Hannity business: “Hannity” is the most-watched cable news program, averaging 3.2 million viewers in the first quarter of 2018, up from 1.8 million in the early months of 2016.
Although Rachel Maddow had more viewers than him in March. Sorry-had to get that in.
“In a legal filing before the hearing on Monday, Mr. Cohen said that, since 2017, he had worked as a lawyer for 10 clients, seven of whom he served by providing “strategic advice and business consulting.” The other three comprised Mr. Trump, the Republican fund-raiser Elliott Broidy and a third person who went unnamed.”
That third person turned out to be Hannity. In any case the closeness with Herr Trump-on every level-may be great for ratings but it has also put him under fire from media ethics watchdogs. That Hannity didn’t mention this relationship-regardless of how ‘minor’ he claims it to be-is highly problematic from a journalistic ethical standpoint.
Fox News has to fire Hannity. You can't have a host who interviews his own lawyer on TV without disclosing it, and who interviews a politician he's regularly advising on policy without disclosing it, and not become state television rather than a "news outlet" measured by Nielsen. pic.twitter.com/OvjaQw4QsE
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) April 16, 2018
A question that has dogged him over the years is wether Hannity is a journalist or a conservative activist?
On the matter of his failure to disclose his relationship with Cohen, it really doesn’t matter.
“Sean Hannity has wavered over the years on whether he is a journalist or conservative activist, but ethics specialists say that whichever hat the Fox News host was wearing last week when he condemned the FBI raid on attorney Michael Cohen’s office, he should have disclosed that he’s a client of Cohen’s.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a newspaper reporter or an opinion journalist,” said Indira Lakshmanan, the journalism ethics chair at the Poynter Institute. “If you want to maintain credibility with an audience, and be honest with them, you have to disclose all facts.”
“Just hours after the raid on the office of Cohen, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Hannity inveighed that special counsel Robert Mueller had “declared war against the president of the United States.” But Hannity didn’t disclose that he, too, had received legal advice from Cohen. Hannity’s relationship with the embattled attorney was revealed during Monday’s hearing over materials gathered during the raid — and only after a judge pressed Cohen’s attorney on the identity of a previously unnamed third client.”
“The omission raised questions about whether Hannity had violated journalistic ethics — or whether he was a journalist at all.”
Hannity has mostly been a ‘journalist’ when it suits him; if he’s attacking liberals for journalistic failures then he’s a journalist; if someone points out his own failures then he’s an activist or ‘opinion journalist.’ But moving into the realm of opinion doesn’t move you out of the realm of ethics.
What he does in truth is the political version of WWF-Keith Olberman says that when they worked together Hannity admitted that what he does is theatrics; then you add to that the revelations by that young former Fox News staffer who revealed that he used to get scripts for his shows-what he would say, how he would ‘defeat the liberal’, word for word.
“Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said you don’t “move out of the realm of ethics when we move into the realm of opinion.” She said commentators should still be expected to maintain independence from subjects they are covering and disclose relevant ties.
“This is not a small matter,” she said. “We’re talking about one of the most important new stories of this time and he did not disclose his connection to it while commenting on it. His audience deserves to know when he has connections that may be affecting that commentary.”
UPDATE: Even Alan Dershowitz-who was on Hannity’s show in order to criticize Comey-told him he should have disclosed the relationship.
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/dershowitz-puts-hannity-on-the-spot-you-should-have-disclosed-your-relationship-with-cohen/
As EmptyWheel, quoted above, noted, Hannity’s interview with Assange in January, 2017 planted the seeds of the idea that Russia didn’t give the emails to Wikileaks and the appalling Seth Rich conspiracy theory.
“Yesterday, VanityFair’s Gabriel Sherman reported that Cohen gave Hannity legal advice when he was boycotted by progressive groups regarding the Seth Rich slander.”
“On Twitter, Hannity disputed reporting by Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman that he brought in Cohen last year when facing an advertiser boycott spurred by progressive groups over his fueling of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. “What part of Michael and I never discussed anything that involved any third party is so hard to understand?” Hannity tweeted.
It’s not hard to understand, it’s just that he fails to understand his lack of credibility. More substantially if Hannity is telling the truth here-which doesn’t happen too often-it means that Cohen’s lawyer lied in court in saying Hannity was his client. In which case Cohen should ask him why it’s so hard to understand.
UPDATE: Of course there’s a lot of water under the bridge since I wrote this chapter on April 16, 2018-at the time Cohen had just recently said he’d ‘take a bullet for the ‘President’-but in May he would move on from taking a bullet to ‘Family and Country.’ Next he’d be speaking with Al Sharpton and re-registering as a Democrat.
However, even now you wonder to EmptyWheel’s question above-what else Cohen and Hannity discussed? In all seriousness the way Hannity-essentially the Commisar of Trump’s version of Kremlin State TV-coordinated with Trump on fomenting the disgusting Seth Rich conspiracy theory deserves to be investigated in its own right.
UPDATE