Judge rules against Donald Trump and Michael Cohen amid Sean Hannity revelation

| 7:40 pm EDT April 16, 2018
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The big headline today coming out of the legal proceedings involving Donald Trump and Michael Cohen is the startling claim from Cohen that one of his legal clients was Fox News host Sean Hannity. The shock and awe surrounding this revelation is so earth-shaking that it’s threatening to drown out what may end up being the more important news out of those legal proceedings: Trump just lost.

Trump and Cohen were in court today to try to convince a federal judge to throw out the communications between the two of them that were seized last week during an FBI raid. Trump and Cohen made the argument that because Cohen is Trump’s attorney, their communications are protected by attorney-client privilege. There is no attorney-client privilege if those communications reveal a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Cohen. But prosecutors took things even further, arguing that Cohen isn’t really a practicing attorney to begin with.

The judge then ordered Cohen to disclose the names of his supposed clients, and he coughed up Sean Hannity’s name. Hannity quickly jumped on Twitter and partially denied this, claiming that he only ever sought legal advice (about real estate) from Cohen in an informal capacity. But even as that scene was playing out in the foreground, the judge ruled against Trump and Cohen’s request for a temporary restraining order.

This isn’t quite the last of it. Donald Trump and Michael Cohen have some more legal tactics they can try before it’s all over and the admissible evidence is plucked out and handed over to federal prosecutors. But it’s a bad sign that their first and most realistic line of defense got struck down today. It turns out Cohen gave up Sean Hannity’s name, which created a whole new set of problems for Trump and Hannity, for nothing.