You’re gonna need to be more specific here. That describes quite a few of the people mentioned in this thread.
I’ll agree that there is a chance that the Hannity / Cohen relationship may be privileged. IANAL, but I don’t think it would be illegal for Hannity to negotiate a non-disclosure agreement to shut up someone that had embarrassing information on him.
But the holes in his statement are not what bother me the most. It’s that it is totally obvious that the statement was designed to present the relationship in such a way that the law would regard it as privileged - without any regard to the truth of his answer. It’s like they don’t even have to try to be believable anymore - everyone knows they all lie, it’s just that about half of them don’t care.
So strange.
You know … if Stormy Daniels is suing Michael Cohen for defamation, it seems to me that it would be relevant to know if Sean Hannity was coordinating his coverage of that lawsuit with Cohen. If I were Daniels’ lawyer, I’d want to know if they were conspiring together in what Hannity said about Daniels.
But what do I know.
While I am a big fan of justice, Heaven knows, I am mindful that millions if not billions of our fellow Terrans suffer brutal injustice every day, it may be ingrained in the species. But if we could just focus that on those few who are clearly neutron-density assholes, that would be a major step forward in our civilization.
Just sayin’ what nobody else is thinkin’…
That’s a hell of a thought there…
When you read about conspiracy theories and the Clinton’s - you have to find and follow all kinds of tenuous (at best) connections and inferences.
This group of “not Hillarys” really needs to take some of Hillary’s master classes in how to run the deep state.
Good.
I hope he paid a LOT- a lot more than he could really afford, and I hope he gets to see it all go down the shitter for nothing.
Can’t have it both ways.
You can, depending on the circumstances. You don’t have to necessarily pay money to have a privileged attorney/client relationship. Ask somebody with a public defender, or a client of a lawyer working pro bono.
I think he was saying you can’t have attorney-client privilege while simultaneously denying you are a client, for whatever reason.
My guess:
Hannity never asked Cohen for a single bit of legal advice. Hannity knows Cohen is a shit lawyer only good for gutteral ‘fix-its’. Besides, wealthy, connected Hannity has access to top-tier law firms that wouldn’t hire Cohen as a paralegal’s assistant. Closest they ever came to legal talk was pundit-level bullshitting about legal issues in general, nothing remotely close to Hannity asking for legal advice.
But…
Hannity, Cohen and Tump (at least) discussed, coordinated and strategized their attacks on the Mueller probe, from general talking points to fabricated justifications for firing him to the best ways to undercut witness credibility.
Whether that rises to the legal level of obstruction of justice isn’t on their minds — they know at best it will appear close enough to screw up the works for a long time. And because they never expected these conversations to land in the prosecutors’ laps, they were probably candid as shit and full of faux alpha-male bravado; they know that the tapes will steamroll right past the legal definition of obstruction and into deep, deep shit.
Going into the hearing, Cohen et al were desperate to keep Hannity out of the proceedings, not from a sense of loyalty, but because he’s the cornerstone of the Fox News arm of their obstruction strategy.
So Cohen moves to cull all ‘privileged’ communications with ‘other’ clients before the Feds get a look. Alone at best or within chambers/a special master/whatever, it was their hope that by claiming Hannity was a Cohen client — a client that had nothing to do with the Stormy payoff or other financial issues in play — it would be easy to excise every scrap of Cohen–Hannity conversation from the proceedings.
Cohen hits a wall when the judge wouldn’t let him keep the so-called third party’s name out of it. Given the timing, the whole ‘privilege strategy’ was quickly cobbled together in the first place, and with the enormous spotlight on them there wasn’t a lot of room to surreptitiously coordinate.
So Cohen is before the judge when she requires the name to be said in open court. He tries to put it off, maybe in chambers, maybe in writing, maybe the goombah fallback of ‘you’d better rethink it because an insta-appeal is in the cards’ but it doesn’t work and oh please oh please shit shit shit don’t make me announce it oh fuck I have to announce it shit shit shit!
What’s he going to do? Can’t talk to Hannity at the moment and can’t Bugs Bunny his way out of the courtroom. Shit shit shit … can’t name anyone else — there’s no other name in the files that would justify it and shit shit the few names that might work would be blindsided before he got out of the court and he’d get rat fucked for perjury at best. Shit shit, no other choice but to name Hannity and hope that Hannity follows his lead enough to get them out of this jam.
Hannity does the best he can given his sense of self-preservation and having to wing his response on minimal time and information and zero communication. He senses a need to deflect the appearance of needing Cohen to fix a sex scandal so treads as fine a line as he can. He sure as shit knows that there are no lengthy legal conversations or representations of any sort but his name is all over the files, so he grabs at straws, ending up in an apparently contradictory position from Cohen.
If my guess is remotely right, then they’re proper screwed. The full gamut of Cohen-Hannity-Trump conversations are going to be in the hands of the Feds. A small handful of Cohen-Hannity conversations might be withheld if they’re lucky, but the motherload is there for the taking.
And this is how Stormy Danials and Michael Avenatti go down in history as saviours of the planet.
Well, yeah. That’s probably true.
Probably because he knew he’d be subject to the exact type of speculation that is currently going on.
I haven’t heard his statement, but my guess is that he just meant that he’s not Cohen’s client in the sense of an ongoing relationship but that the specific communications were intended to be confidential.
My understanding from lawyers talking about it is that even minor one-off discussions with lawyers can be confidential, if that’s how they were understood by the participants, which is why they’re constantly putting disclaimers on things. If someone had such a discussion without a disclaimer, that might be privileged, but they wouldn’t be “my lawyer” or “my client” in the sense that these terms are generally used.
Basically, the “not my lawyer” was meant to minimize his connection in a political context, but doesn’t carry legal connotations.
All guesswork, FWIW.
Hmmm…your ideas are not totally without merit. Nicely done.
Seems like Sundays would be spent with a bottle of single-malt Scotch, fortifying yourself for another six days of “When are you going to tell that side piece to hit the road?”
“My side piece is Scarlett Johansson” makes for a nice bumper sticker.
Some discussion of the Hannity-Cohen legal aspects here.
So, wait, who would have to get entangled in the Trump-Cohen mess to get Gal Gadot to show up on my doorstep, too?
So there is a constant refrain that “nothing will alienate the base”.
Will that remain true if it is revealed that Cohen “fixed” a Trump problem by paying for an abortion? For several?
Damn right he expected speculation. Let’s not act like there wouldn’t be good reason for that, okay? We should all be asking why Hannity would use Cohen’s services, when the man is rich enough to have more reputable lawyers on retainer and when having a relationship with him obviously compromises his ethics as a journalist.