When Michael Cohen claimed in federal court that certain documents seized from his office by federal investigators were protected by attorney-client privilege, Judge Kimba Wood asked the obvious question of a lawyer with a notably thin legal résumé: Who, exactly, counts as a "client"? Cohen revealed that he had three, and while he could name two of them—Donald Trump and disgraced former RNC staffer Elliott Broidy—the third, he explained, did not want his identity made public. After Judge Wood responded with a more courtroom-appropriate version of "Tough shit," Cohen's attorney shrugged and uttered the two most beautiful words one could associate with a shady fixer known for arranging payment of large sums of money to make stories about extramarital affairs go away: Sean Hannity.

As onlookers gasped and the Internet threatened to break under the sudden infusion of glee, Fox News' most famous talking head began literally and spiritually tweeting through it. On his radio show, Hannity explained that while he had had "brief discussions with [Cohen] about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective," Cohen didn't represent him in any "matter involving a third party," which sounds like a euphemism for "Michael Cohen didn't do the thing for me that he did for Donald Trump and Elliott Broidy, okay, stop asking." Instead, he says, their conversations were "almost exclusively" about "real estate."

Whatever the precise nature of the business that transpired between the two men, the more galling aspect of this story is that Sean Hannity has spent the last week blasting the Cohen raid as evidence that Robert Mueller's "witch-hunt investigation is now a runaway train that is clearly careening off the tracks"; part of an "all-hands-on-deck effort to totally malign and, if possible, impeach the president"; and a declaration of "legal war" on Donald Trump. One of his guests, almost-Trump lawyer Joe diGenova, opined on the air that Jeff Sessions has an "obligation" to fire Rod Rosenstein for authorizing the "unconstitutional and unprofessional" search of Cohen's offices. At no point during any of these deranged tirades—one of which characterized the Mueller probe as an intricate Deep State plot hatched by Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and Whitey Bulger—did Hannity breathe a word about his relationship with the man he was defending.

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Trump Is Finished

Even his colleagues claimed to be puzzled by this omission. Alan Dershowitz, a Fox News legal analyst and frequent Trump stooge, scolded Hannity during his own show on Monday night, reasoning that Hannity's silence, at the very least, creates the appearance of impropriety. "You could have said that you had asked him for advice or whatever," said a disappointed Dershowitz over the host's protestations. "But I think it would have been much, much better had you disclosed that relationship." Others in the media voiced a similar brand of tut-tutting outrage at the whole unsavory mess.

Todd is right, but also, where has he been for the last two decades? His word choice resolves the very conflict he identifies: Fox News has never been a "serious news organization." It was created by partisans for the explicit purpose of pushing a right-wing agenda, and the ideologues in charge of its programming would sooner take a chainsaw to the studio's transmission capabilities than offer even a tepid critique of the Trump administration. Disclosing anything that looks like a conflict of interest is a basic tenet of honest journalism. But when the entire organization is one giant, continuous conflict of interest, the people who work for it feel no obligation to repeat such a disclaimer aloud every night.

Perhaps more than anyone else at the network, Hannity has taken advantage of the leeway conferred on him by this arrangement, calling himself a "journalist" whenever it suits his purposes and then sternly disavowing that label whenever he is caught, say, promoting a disgusting, debunked conspiracy theory insinuating that a 27-year-old former DNC staffer supplied stolen Clinton-adjacent emails to Wikileaks and was subsequently murdered to ensure his silence. He gets away with this because he harbors no expectations that his actions will ever be subject to meaningful oversight. Fox News operates only in bad faith, and as long as ratings are good and Donald Trump retweets him every now and again, Sean Hannity can say whatever he wants without facing any consequences.

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