Posted on 04/16/2018 8:24:13 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I know he’s a Democrat, I know Hannity once pulled a gun on him, but I’m still surprised to see a Fox contributor broaching the big ethical criticism of their 9 p.m. guy on their own airwaves before he’s even had a chance to address the situation on his show.
Fox host Juan Williams questions Hannity's refusal to disclose his relationship with Michael Cohen: pic.twitter.com/XOrRWFVeWj
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) April 16, 2018
I wonder if Williams freelanced it or if he got the green light from management, which must be highly annoyed by Hannity’s cameo in the news today — assuming he didn’t disclose it to them privately before. Although, if he did disclose it, that would raise a bigger ethical problem. Namely, why’d they let him go on the air without insisting that he tell viewers that he’d gotten legal advice from Cohen?
Then again, maybe they wouldn’t care:
Why is anyone surprised @seanhannity is a client of Michael Cohen's?
Hannity doesn't work for @FoxNews. He works for Trump.
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) April 16, 2018
Hannity claimed earlier this afternoon that the legal advice he sought from Cohen was almost exclusively about real estate. Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair wonders:
“You know, this is a fast-moving story, so I am going to be doing a lot more reporting but what I have heard so far is that at some point last year Sean Hannity hired Michael Cohen to help defend him against left-wing groups that were calling for boycotts in the wake of Bill O’Reilly’s ouster from Fox News,” Sherman told host Ali Velshi.
Noting that Hannity had come under pressure from left-wing groups — Media Matters, for one, targeted Hannity’s advertisers over the Seth Rich story — Sherman said he was told that Hannity “got paranoid” and hired Cohen to look into those groups.
“This could be interesting because oftentimes private investigators are hired by law firms because it allows attorney/client privilege to be maintained,” Sherman added. “So there is a scenario in which if they seized Michael Cohen’s documents inadvertently we might be able to learn to what degree did Sean Hannity try to go after his enemies with shady tactics like private investigators.”
It’s hard to tell if Sherman’s just speculating about the P.I. angle or if there’s more to it but Hannity emailed MSNBC after Sherman’s appearance to deny that his consultations with Cohen had anything to do with that.
In fairness to him, as I noted earlier, there does seem to be a scenario in which Hannity may have been honestly mistaken about whether he was a “client” of Cohen’s or not. If it’s true that the only time he sought legal advice was informally, when he and Cohen were shooting the breeze about other matters, and all he asked about was mundane real-estate stuff, I can imagine him assuming that there was no lawyer-client relationship. He didn’t pay Cohen, he didn’t ask him to represent him against a third party, so he wasn’t a client — or so he thought. Cohen, however, may have had an incentive to inflate Hannity’s importance because he’s grasping for ways to impress the judge in Manhattan that there are *lots* of privileged communications in his files and therefore prosecutors shouldn’t be allowed to sift through them willy-nilly. So voila — Hannity is elevated by Cohen to “client” status, whether he really is or not.
I think that’s what Stormy Daniels’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is hinting at here in accusing Cohen of throwing Hannity under the bus. If it’s true that Hannity and Cohen had no meaningful lawyer-client relationship and Cohen exaggerated it for the purposes of asserting attorney/client privilege, Hannity’s suddenly smack dab in the middle of a media sh*tstorm because it was convenient for Michael Cohen to put him there:
Michael Avenatti on the reveal of Cohen’s mystery third client: “I think Sean Hannity got thrown under the bus by Michael Cohen’s counsel” https://t.co/jUy5Zfe1Ns
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) April 16, 2018
Two things, though. If Cohen gave Hannity legal advice only sporadically, almost in passing, why would there be anything in his files about Hannity that prosecutors might now possess? Wouldn’t that advice have been given verbally, in person or over the phone? If Hannity was emailing him for legal tips, that formalizes things a bit. And second: Are we sure Hannity never paid him? What on earth does this mean?
Hannity on Cohen: "I never gave him a retainer. Never received an invoice…. Might have handed him $10. I definitely want attorney-client privilege."
?
— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) April 16, 2018
“Pause for a moment to reflect upon what one Sean Hannity might do with news that an MSNBC personality had hidden a relationship with a Clinton attorney under criminal investigation,” said one of Hannity’s enemies at Media Matters. Touche.
Cohen and Trump lost their hearing today, by the way. At least one Democratic House member has called on Hannity to be fired for failing to disclose his relationship with Cohen to Fox’s viewers but it’s almost impossible to imagine that. To restate a point I made earlier, does anyone believe that Hannity would have criticized the feds less, or not at all, for raiding Cohen’s office if his own communications hadn’t been caught up in the raid? Is it possible at this point to imagine Hannity being less than 10 out of 10 on the volume scale with respect to any political problem Trump has, whether he’s personally caught up in it behind the scenes or not? Andy Levy joked in response to the outrage, “yes i for one will never think of sean hannity as an impartial deliverer of the news again.” Hannity’s ethic is to defend Trump in all things, with maximum vehemence. How does his personal interest in the Cohen raid conflict with that?
I met Pappy Boyington several times. I guess I’m an ace!
What an idiot
Hey Juan tell me who you talked to last week
And why might we learn this Gabriel?
Isn't this exactly the kind of stuff the "taint team" is supposed to filter out as not being relevant to Trump's relationship with Cohen?
Are you suggesting, Gabriel, that the whole "taint team" idea is a sham and everything will leak, and that you can't wait for it to happen?
What business is it of yours, Gabriel, how Hannity dealt with the left-wing attacks on his career, and why should that information be expected to be exposed as relevant to a Trump election investigation?
-PJ
Sean needs to resign because he didn’t disclose drinking Diet Cokes like Drumph does!!!!!
Payment is not necessary to establish attorney-client privilege.
All that matters is that the client felt the interaction was privileged when it happened.
F Juan Williams . Go back to Panama , cabrone
Sean was next after OReilly. But Rush is #1. IMHO
Even if true, so what?
he is the most un prepared and unpreparedperson on Fox News. i learn
nothing from the guy
“Is it now a crime to hire a lawyer?”
It’s not. Is that what Hannity did? What was the deal there? Quid pro quo, pro bono, cash on the barrel head, green fees and lunch at the turn, one free telephone consultation? What constitutes a citizen as having hired a lawyer?
I didn’t know Hannity was under obligation to tell viewers who his lawyer is. This is all nothing but BS. The Deep State Cabal probably wants Hannity to STFU about all their crimes. The Furrowed Brow Juan was probably put up to bringing that information out since he works for the cabal.
“Any competent atty would have refused...”
Even non-attorney Susan McDougal knew she could not be forced to speak and suffered the consequences. Many big city, politically connected white-shoe lawyers like to talk big then go home to drink and sleep; won’t go to jail for a client, and especially not go to jail defending the attorney-client privilege. You are right, the argument should have been to demand her recusal first. Then the judge’s demand to reveal clients’ identities without the government first proving that the seized documents with the unnamed client was relevant to the (un)constitutional seizure, the judge’s order to disclose was premature at best and there was no legal urgency for such disclosure.
Money is not necessary to exert the privilege. Otherwise those attorney “free-consultations” would not be protected.
Consider also . . .
In California state court, Robert Kardashian was lawyer, long time friend and business associate to OJ Simpson. It was reported that dependable Bob had left the legal profession 15 years prior, never tried a criminal case, then had his license re-instated and became part of OJ’s legal team....the claim of attorney-client privilege in order to not be compelled to be questioned or testify as a witness. No cash was exchanged between OJ and his lawyer prior to Bob’s joining the team.
...Juan Williams = token hire. There could be no other reason this clown is on the air...
He is there to remind us daily of the double standards, lies, and propaganda liberalism uses against freedom and individualism of everyday Americans. Stay vigilant.
Stasi, the KGB are alive and well in the US, as they go under the name of the FBI. Hannity has been exposing Mueller as a crooked cop, and now he (Hannity) gets a shot across the bow from the feds. You can bet they’ve been watching Hannity for quite awhile hoping to get something on him.
Conservative defending himself always=Going after the enemies.
Tempest in a teapot.
Token hire not because of race, but intelligence. The man is a nitwit.
“But I do sort of admire how they fight. Tooth and nail, gouging biting and spitting. Wish our side could do more of that. ”
Me too. We should searching hard and deep for any and all MSM rats with any links to any lawyers connected to Obama, Clinton, Mueller, Comey, Soros, et al. Then let the accusations fly.
Rules for Radicals. We are the radicals now.
What’s gonna be fun is when all of these so called “journalists” are called out for doing the same thing.
Can’t wait for the blowback.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.