Gasps in court

You couldn’t make it up.

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.

And the mystery client izzzzzzzzzzz

Sean Hannity.

[A]fter 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.

I didn’t know Sean Hannity could be embarrassed.

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.

Maybe Trump will make him Secretary of State.

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.

Ahhhhh now isn’t that dishonest.

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.

He continued to support a man who talks about women in the most contemptuous dismissive terms possible, as if they were so much hamburger laid out on a slab.

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.

Isn’t that itself kind of sleazy? Do presidents normally do that – socialize with opinionators who can influence what the public thinks of the prez? Did Obama have Maddow over for din-dins? If he’d invited her would she have gone? I think normally journalists want to keep their distance, and presidents know it wouldn’t look good. Hitchens hated the White House correspondents’ dinner because it was way too cozy.

What a sewer.

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