This Wednesday, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for crimes including campaign finance law violations in which he involved the now president of the United States, Donald Trump. He’s been trying to distance himself from Cohen — and so might be Fox News host Sean Hannity, who was the surprise third client Cohen maintained, as revealed earlier this year.
The high profile conservative personality has been deleting tweets including some in which he referenced Cohen. The since removed posts include one in which he downplayed his connection to Cohen, insisting that he never “paid legal fees” so shouldn’t be considered a client of the lawyer.
He ranted:
‘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.’
Sean Hannity deleted this tweet (using: Twitter for iPhone). #SeanHannity #seanhannity #deletedtweet #screenshotbot #sshotbot pic.twitter.com/zRPYSXtVlZ
— Screenshot Bot (@sshotbot) December 11, 2018
Despite Hannity’s claims, his connection to Cohen was evidently substantive enough to warrant becoming a point of discussion in court. The judge handling Cohen’s case earlier this year demanded he reveal the identity of a client he’d previously kept hidden as the initial document battles associated with Cohen’s case raged on.
Besides Trump and Hannity, the third client in question at the time was now former Republican National Committee official Elliott Broidy, who Cohen helped arrange a hush money agreement targeting a woman with whom he’d had an affair and gotten pregnant. Broidy has become the center of a whole host of other problems, ranging from abuse Shera Bechard claims he perpetrated against her during their affair to the possibility he sought to sell his access to the White House to foreign interests.
That’s not all Hannity might want to get away from, however, considering Cohen’s three year prison sentence. During his remarks delivered Wednesday in the courtroom, Cohen slammed Trump and explicitly implicated him in his crimes, which in part constituted a secret hush money operation targeting women with whom the eventual president had affairs. Cohen has also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump team’s business connections to Russia and agreed to cooperate with authorities’ Russia investigation.
The government’s criminal case against Cohen burst out into the open after authorities raided the lawyer’s home, office, and hotel room. Those raids sparked a significant turn in President Donald Trump’s public rhetoric about Special Counsel Robert Mueller, since the special counsel’s team had referred prosecution of the lawyer he was then sticking by to the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York. In the time since, the president has slowly but surely come to maintain a constant vilification of the special counsel as an out of control, rogue prosecutor.
One of the tweets Hannity deleted just recently advertised a discussion he was going to have on his show about the raids on Cohen.
Sean Hannity deleted this tweet (using: Twitter for iPhone). #SeanHannity #seanhannity #deletedtweet #screenshotbot #sshotbot pic.twitter.com/PGu2vK3VWO
— Screenshot Bot (@sshotbot) December 11, 2018
He’s long been an ardent defender of the president and opponent of the Russia investigation, but none of his verbal shenanigans can let the GOP escape the reality of the situation it’s found itself in.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
