Fox News heavyweight Sean Hannity, unprompted, declared on Thursday that he never had a legal relationship with the president’s longtime “fixer” Michael Cohen—and told Fox & Friends that he received an apology from the former personal Trump attorney for the alleged mixup.
Cohen spent most of Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee, remaining remarkably calm in the face of repeated attempts from GOP lawmakers to shred the self-described “fool” and convicted felon’s already-flimsy credibility.
Hannity further distanced himself in advance of Cohen’s second day of testimony Thursday, which will be behind closed doors with the House Intelligence Committee.
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“I think we all interviewed Michael a lot during the campaign,” the night-time marquee name said by satellite from Hanoi, where friend with a small f President Donald Trump had just abruptly ended his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un after talks broke down over the rogue dictator’s nuclear arsenal. “I know I did on radio and TV, and I got to know him. He apologized for once. His attorney, in court, said I was his client. That was never true in any capacity. He apologized to me, and I did appreciate it.”
Last year, Fox News stood by its primetime star after it was revealed by Cohen lawyers in a court hearing that he and Hannity had a previously undisclosed arrangement, describing the relationship as “informal.” Hannity has consistently denied that Cohen “represented” him, despite also acknowledging on his radio show: “I might have handed him 10 bucks [and said,] ‘I definitely want your attorney-client privilege on this,’ something like that.”
Hannity’s property empire of real-estate investments was discovered after the revelation of his relationship to Cohen, when records obtained by The Guardian linked him to a group of shell companies that spent more than $90 million on about 900 homes. At the time of the report, Christopher Reeves, Hannity’s actual real-estate attorney, did not dispute that he’s the owner of those properties.
He has since repeatedly claimed that his legal discussions with Cohen were always limited to the subject of buying property.
When Hannity joined the curved-couch crew Thursday, Friend Brian Kilmeade asked if he believed Cohen’s testimony, in which the recently disbarred attorney claimed that Trump ran for president “not to win but to market himself.”
Hannity pretzeled his response into an impressive “no, but if he did” arrangement, chuckling all the while.
“I promise you, Donald Trump doesn’t get into anything to lose,” Hannity intoned. “He was passionate about winning. That is not true. But in an ironic way, think about it: If he was really in it only for marketing, then there really couldn’t have been any collusion, and that he was really just trying to make the Moscow Trump deal—that we all knew about anyway—a reality.”
