Sean Hannity has not been honest with you.
Attorneys for President Trump’s self-described “fixer,” Michael Cohen, named the Fox News personality Monday as one of three clients who received legal counsel in 2017 and 2018 from the New York City lawyer.
Cohen, whose other two clients include the president and GOP fundraiser Elliot Brody, both of whom used the New York attorney to arrange payouts to alleged mistresses, tried to keep Hannity’s name a secret, reportedly at the request of the Fox News host himself.
No luck: A judge ordered Cohen this week to disclose his clients by name, and that’s where Hannity comes into the picture. This all comes just a few days after FBI agents raided the lawyer’s offices.
Hannity responded Monday after his relationship with Cohen was revealed, saying, “We have been friends a long time. I have sought legal advice from Michael.”
He added that he “never retained [Cohen] in the traditional sense,” but has only asked questions about the law and those conversations are privileged. “I might have given him 10 bucks and said, ‘I definitely want attorney client privilege at times,’” Hannity said on his radio show.
One anonymous source who is supposedly familiar with the nature of the Hannity/Cohen relationship told CNN political pundit Gloria Borger that “Hannity did not get billed, there was no formal attorney client relationship, called from time to time and got input from Cohen on legal issues.”
This is bad for Hannity, and not just because Cohen is tangled up in a federal investigation.
It’s bad because the Fox News host has defended Trump’s personal lawyer several times without mentioning that the New York City attorney is also Hannity’s on-again, off-again legal adviser. It’s true that commentators and reporters are governed by different rules. Whereas we expect the former to give his opinion and his own unique brand of analysis, we prefer the latter do no such thing. When it comes to reporters, the public and the press itself prefer a “just the facts” approach.
But the criticism here isn’t that Hannity gave his opinion, or that he acted as a partisan. The criticism is that he failed to disclose an obvious conflict of interest. Reporters and pundits may operate by different standards, but we expect full disclosure from both as far as personal ties are concerned. Hannity failed on this count, leaving one to wonder whether the omission was willful deception or simple ignorance.
Did it never occur to Hannity that his viewers might be interested in knowing that he has sought legal counsel from the same person he is vigorously defending? Maybe it did it occur to him, and he decided simply to withhold that very pertinent and relevant information. If so, that’s some rotten, dishonest behavior, the kind he would never tolerate if it came from a host at a competing network.
Hannity can try to downplay Monday’s news by focusing on the financial aspect of his dealings with Cohen, but that doesn’t change the fact that he kept the full extent of his relationship with a person he has defended many times a secret from his audience. It also doesn’t explain why Cohen’s attorney sought to keep Hannity’s name a secret. This is to say nothing of the clear discrepancy between what Cohen considers a “client,” and what Hannity considers legal counsel.
There’s no scenario where Hannity comes out of this looking good. If he wasn’t being intentionally dishonest, he is a fool.
