really, not a major ruling today. the big drama was certainly around sean hannity s name. let s go outfront now to david gergen, former adviser to four presidents, including nixon and clinton, and john avlon, editor in chief of the daily beast. brynn describes the drama around this. it s hard to describe, in a world where one can no longer be surprised, how surprising this moment was for those of us today. cohen is trying very hard to keep any communications he had with sean hannity private, claiming attorney/client privilege. it was a spit take. the last name we expected to hear was sean hannity. we know they re all really tight, but we never imagined the president s personal fixer was also representing his number one advocate on tv. it just it s the kind of stuff if it was in a script or a novel, it would get thrown out for being implausible.
he involve donald trump and if he did not, was it a violation? you yourself named sean hannity as somebody who was not a journalist and wouldn t be bound by the same ethical constraints as an attorney or a journalist. and the bottom line is it opens the door. it opens the door to what was there? what were these conversations? what was this information that was gicven to sean hannity? what was he doing with it, and what was the nature to this? the an, we don t know, but i will be shocked if it s casual real estate advice. that s not what michael cohen specializes in. and that information, especially if he has been recording conversations, as has been reported, that could be explosive, because we know they re sharing talking points. what else have they been sharing. i don t think we know for certain that there s anything really illegal or inappropriate, but there s something terribly suspicious and it does look incestuous and fox and hannity have to come clean on exactly what it s
investigation and he claims today that sean hannity is one of only three legal clients. if the conversations between hannity and cohen were, as hannity claimed today, so, quote, de minimis, why would cohen describe hannity today as one of only three clients and seek attorney/client privilege to protect those conversations? that is the big question tonight. what is the nature of this relationship? and why does michael cohen want to keep it private? let s go to the courthouse where brynn gingras is outfront. brynn, unexpected drama in the courtroom today spaen h. sean hannity. reporter: yeah, and it was very dramatic fashion in which his name came out in the courtroom. it s not like the judge asked for the name and the lawyer said, sean happen ty. what happened leading up to that was actually very, very minutes long. as you ve already laid out for your viewers, cohen s attorney said this would be embarrassing to disclose this third client s name. at one point, they even offered to th
a sealed note with sean hannity s name on it and the judge wasn t accepting any of that. and that s why sean hannity s name eventually came out. it certainly does beg this question of why did they take such care and concern to conceal sean hannity s name, certainly in the after-effect of sean hannity saying he only asked the for legal advice from michael cohen. but getting back to exactly why we were here today. of course, that s because of all the documents that were seized in that fbi raid last week, of michael cohen s home and his office and his hotel room. and essentially, the judge made somewhat of a ruling today, and that ruling was really in favor of all parties involved. the u.s. attorney s office is now going to have to hand over all of those documents to michael cohen s attorneys, and they re told by the judge to sift through them, see what the volume is of those that are protected by attorney/client privilege. and the prosecutors are going to do the same. they re going to re
if one of your clients is the president of the united states, why does it look any better to have two or three? it doesn t! i got one and it s the big guy, okay. it s as big as they get. but the problem is the second one we now know is an rnc donor, former member of the finance committee, who he paid off a playmate for, $1.6 million. this is not a lawyer you call for real estate advice. this guy is a fixer. and there is no attorney/consigliere privilege, as david wrote last week. this is a problem for cohen and the ability to keep these documents private. sean hannity s story has been shifting throughout the day. at first he was arguing, i never sought attorney/client privilege, just assumed it, but later on he said, aggressively sought it. i wanted to make sure my conversations were him were protected. so this wasn t just casual real estate, should i invest in a condo somewhere. there was something more serious. and that opens the question,