MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Monday slammed Fox News host Sean Hannity for trying to downplay his connection to Michael Cohen after he was outed as the mystery third client of President Donald Trump’s longtime attorney.
The conservative broadcaster begged the court to keep his identity secret as Cohen tries to prove he’s a lawyer in the “traditional” sense, but Judge Kimba Wood found no lawful reason to do so.
Hannity downplayed his connection to Cohen shortly after the news broke, asserting that Cohen had never formally represented him in legal proceedings.
“I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective,” Hannity tweeted, adding that those conversations “dealt almost exclusively about real estate.”
What part of Michael and I never discussed anything that involved any third party is so hard to understand? https://t.co/uha1z13RJf
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) April 16, 2018
But MSNBC’s Joy Reid was not about to let the culpable Fox News host off easily. Instead, she took to Twitter to pose the questions everyone’s been asking.
Hi Sean. Did you disclose to your bosses that you were Cohen’s client while you were talking about him on air? Does your workplace have a standards and practices department? Did you feel no obligation to disclose your relationship w/ Cohen to your viewers? https://t.co/8zoy0ib9tL
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) April 17, 2018
Hannity is a staunch ally of Trump’s, and frequently defends the president on his Fox News show. He was fiercely critical of last week’s raids on Cohen’s office, using it as a launching point to attack special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The implications of the fact that Michael Cohen is lawyer to both Donald Trump and Sean Hannity are massive.
There is, of course, the glaring conflict of interest that the President of the United States and a right-wing conspiracy theorist who gives instruction to him via Fox News are represented by the same man. In fact, Hannity reported for weeks on Michael Cohen without ever disclosing that he himself is also a legal client, in flagrant disregard to any modicum of journalistic ethics that Fox News has left.
