Fox News host Sean Hannity faced some friendly fire on his own show Monday evening, with longtime Fox legal analyst Alan Dershowitz chiding him to his face about his Michael Cohen connection.
“I really think that you should have disclosed your relationship with Cohen when you talked about him on this show,” said Dershowitz with the look of a man who just swallowed a grenade.
“You could have said that you had asked him for advice or whatever, but I think it would have been much, much better had you disclosed that relationship.”
The public rebuke took Hannity by surprise, who attempted to short-circuit Dershowitz with a promise to address the matter later in his show.
“If you understand the nature of this, professor — I’m going to deal with this later in the show — It was minimal, I put out a statement about it.”
“I have a right to privacy,” Hannity stammered as Dershowitz continued to explain the situation to him. “It was such a minor relationship.”
Dershowitz wasn’t the only one to criticize Hannity on the network yesterday. Earlier on “The Five,” co-host Juan Williams also zinged his colleague for not disclosing the relationship.
"The question for me is why @seanhannity didn't disclose this earlier" — @TheJuanWilliams on "The Five" pic.twitter.com/Ufs07nqXVN
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) April 16, 2018
On Monday, attorneys for Michael Cohen lost a brief, but vigorous battle in a Federal court in New York City when a judge forced them to reveal two additional clients of Cohen’s. One of those individuals turned out to be Sean Hannity.
“Michael Cohen has never represented me in any matter. I never retained him, received an invoice, or paid legal fees,” Hannity said in a widely disseminated statement after the story broke.
“I have occasionally had brief discussions with him about legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective. I assumed those conversations were confidential, but to be absolutely clear they never involved any matter between me and a third party.”