News broke this afternoon that Fox News host Sean Hannity was the secret third client of Michael Cohen, the lawyer who allegedly arranged massive payouts to women who had affairs with President Trump and former RNC fundraiser Elliot Broidy. Hannity’s name surfaced in connection with Cohen’s challenge to the FBI’s seizure of records from his office based on assertions of the need to protect attorney client confidentiality.
The news came as a shock to many in the media, but Trump-supporting conspiracy theorists have already begun their work weaving the revelation into their ongoing conspiracy theory narrative alleging that the so-called “deep state” or “shadow government” is secretly working to undermine the Trump administration, its allies in the media, and conservative voters.
Last December, Hannity told former White House strategist and Breitbart executive Steve Bannon that he feared that he “may end up in jail” for defending Trump against a deep-state effort to remove Trump from office. “By the way, people like us may end up in jail,” he told Bannon. “Let me tell you. They will stop at nothing. This is what I’m trying to get across to people. This is serious. This is the rule of law in this country now.”
Since then, conspiracy theorists like Hannity have ramped up the rhetoric they’ve used to discuss what they believed to be direct opposition from the deep state. Conservatives across right-wing media have been repeatedly warning voters that government agencies, technology companies, and satanic forces have been working in tandem to undo people who support Trump.
Since Hannity is one of the right-wing media’s most popular purveyors of the “deep state” narrative, some of his supporters naturally reacted to today’s news by folding it into the same conspiracy theories he promotes with his nightly Fox News program.
Pro-Trump pundit and One America News contributor Jack Posobiec immediately worked to downplay the revelations:
Michael Cohen is also Sean Hannity lawyer
Kind of like how Marc Elias was Hillary’s lawyer and the DNC’s lawyer and Fusion GPS’s lawyer and John Podesta’s lawyer and Al Franken’s lawyer and John Kerry’s lawyer and David Brock’s lawyer and works for George Soros PACs
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 16, 2018
They doxed Sean Hannity now. Great. Now everyone can see this partisan witch hunt for the circus it is
— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 16, 2018
“This is banana republic,” Posobiec said in a Periscope live stream soon afterward. “This is bad, folks, this is bad. Just assume if you’re a conservative and you’re well known that you have no privacy anymore, you have no rule of law, you can be wiretapped, you can be doxed. No one is going to protect you, no laws are there to preserve it for you, regardless of who wins elections. That’s why they sent Stormy Daniels there [to Cohen’s court hearing]. They sent Stormy Daniels there because they knew that would draw out the media and then, boom!”
He added, “That’s what it is folks. The deep state, they’re going to come for you.”
Pro-Trump pundit and self-described “New Right” leader Mike Cernovich didn’t seem to understand why the information had been released:
Why was this released? How is it relevant to the case? https://t.co/xsRED5wmDw
— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) April 16, 2018
In a Periscope video reacting to the news, Cernovich told viewers “it’s none of our business” if Hannity hired Cohen and claimed that revealing Hannity as Cohen’s third client violated client-attorney privilege.
“We are now entering a post-rule-of-law world where the rule of law no longer applies to your political enemies,” Cernovich said.
Michael Morrison, a lesser known figure within the “New Right,” speculated that the judge who ordered Hannity’s name to be revealed was an Obama appointee (she was a Reagan nominee):
Which law states that Michael Cohen needs to reveal all his clients?
Is this judge another Obama apointee?
— Michael J. Morrison (@OfficeOfMike) April 16, 2018
Stefan Molyneux, a far-right video blogger, said that “attorney-Client privilege is completely dead”:
Attorney-Client privilege is completely dead. https://t.co/J080kbbGuj
— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) April 16, 2018
