Sean Hannity Is Named as Client of Michael Cohen, Trump’s Lawyer
A lawyer for Michael D. Cohen said in court on Monday that one of Mr. Cohen’s clients was Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality and an ardent defender of President Trump.
Lawyers for Mr. Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, had sought to keep the identity of one of Mr. Cohen’s clients a secret in a court challenge of an F.B.I. search of Mr. Cohen’s office.
But after several minutes of back and forth between the government and Mr. Cohen’s lawyers, Kimba M. Wood, a judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, ordered that Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, Stephen Ryan, disclose in open court the name of a client in question, who turned out to be Mr. Hannity.
Before Mr. Hannity’s name was revealed in the courtroom, Mr. Ryan had argued that the mysterious client was a “prominent person” who wanted to keep his identity a secret because he would be “embarrassed” to be identified as a client of Mr. Cohen’s.
Robert D. Balin, a lawyer for various media outlets, including The New York Times, CNN and others, interrupted the proceedings to argue that embarrassment was not a sufficient legal argument to keep a client’s name secret, and Judge Wood agreed.
After Mr. Hannity was named, there were audible gasps in the courtroom.
On the Fox News Channel, the anchor Shepard Smith reported that his colleague’s name had been mentioned as a third client of Mr. Cohen’s in open court. He did so after other news outlets had broken the story, saying that it was time for him to address “the elephant in the room.”
“Hannity’s producers are working to contact him,” Mr. Smith said. “Since it’s now a part of the story, we’ll report on it when we know the rest of it. A lot of people here know his number, so we’ll get on that in just a second.”
At roughly the same time, Mr. Hannity was hosting his nationally syndicated radio show. He said it was strange to see his name appearing on the Fox News Channel and wondered aloud if he should release a statement.
Just before 4 p.m., he posted a message on Twitter: “Michael Cohen has never represented me in any matter. I never retained him, received an invoice, or paid legal fees. I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective.”
In a follow-up tweet, Mr. Hannity added, “I assumed those conversations were confidential, but to be absolutely clear they never involved any matter between me and a third-party.”
After offering those initial statements on Mr. Cohen, Mr. Hannity returned to Twitter late Monday afternoon to provide more detail, saying that his “de minimis discussions with Michael Cohen” had been “almost exclusively about real estate.”
Mr. Cohen is under criminal investigation by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. The F.B.I. raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room on April 9, seizing business records, emails and documents related to several topics.
Without disclosing his relationship with Mr. Cohen, Mr. Hannity was fiercely critical of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and the F.B.I. during the April 9 broadcast of “Hannity” on Fox News.
During the show, Mr. Hannity described the F.B.I. raid, adding, “Now, what that means is Mueller’s witch-hunt investigation is now a runaway train that is clearly careening off the tracks.”
“We have now entered a dangerous phase and there is no turning back from this,” he continued.
“We will always be fair and balanced,” Mr. Hannity said as he closed his segment. “We hope you’ll always join us.”
The Fox News host has long been one of Mr. Trump’s most zealous supporters. Before a nightly audience of more than three million viewers, the biggest in cable news, Mr. Hannity has regularly defended the president and excoriated his critics.
His close relationship with Mr. Trump goes back to the fraught final days of the 2016 presidential campaign. After The Washington Post published the so-called “Access Hollywood” tape, during which Mr. Trump was captured on a hot microphone boasting in vulgar terms of “grabbing” women, Mr. Hannity continued to support the candidate at a time when many other conservative commentators had turned against him.
Last summer, Mr. Hannity dined with Mr. Trump at the White House. As recently as last month, he was a guest of the president’s at his Florida retreat, Mar-a-Lago.
In a legal filing before the proceeding on Monday, Mr. Cohen revealed that he had worked as a lawyer since 2017 for 10 clients, seven of whom he served by providing “strategic advice and business consulting.” Of the other three, two were President Trump and the Republican fund-raiser Elliott Broidy, the filing said. The third person remained unnamed — at least until Judge Wood forced Mr. Cohen’s lawyers to identify him as Mr. Hannity before a packed courtroom.
Last week, it came to light that Mr. Cohen had arranged for Mr. Broidy to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model, Shera Bechard, who became pregnant during an affair with Mr. Broidy. The payment, to be made in installments over two years, was intended to keep her silent about their relationship. After the confidential deal became public on Friday, Mr. Broidy resigned from his post as deputy finance chairman of the Republican Party and offered a public apology to his wife and family.
The contract in the confidential settlement between Mr. Broidy and Ms. Bechard included the same aliases — “David Dennison” and “Peggy Peterson” — that were used in a 2016 contract between Mr. Trump and Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic actress known as Stormy Daniels, according to a person familiar with the deal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/b...en-client.html
