WASHINGTON — President Trump’s longtime lawyer and hard-nosed fixer, Michael Cohen, lost an early round in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, as a judge ordered him to disclose the name of a client he had tried to keep secret: Fox News personality Sean Hannity.

The disclosure was the latest surprise in a highly unusual court case in which the president is fighting his own Justice Department.

Cohen, his lawyer disclosed, represents Hannity along with Trump and Elliot Broidy, the prominent Los Angeles-based Republican fundraiser. Earlier in the day, Cohen’s lawyers said in a letter to District Judge Kimba Wood that he had only three clients, but they refused to divulge Hannity’s name.

The lawyers did not say what work Cohen has performed for Hannity.

President Trump’s personal attorney Michael D. Cohen did work for Fox News commentator Sean Hannity in the last year, one of just three legal clients Cohen represented after leaving his post as a counsel for Trump’s private company in early 2017, his attorney told a federal judge Monday, April 16.

Cohen has arranged at least two hush-money payments to women who claimed they had sexual affairs with Trump. One was $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, the porn actress, and she attended the crowded court hearing.

For Broidy, Cohen helped broker a $1.6 million payment to a former Playboy model with whom he had a sexual relationship. The woman became pregnant and subsequently had an abortion, Broidy said in a statement last week after The Wall Street Journal first reported Cohen’s role.

Cohen’s lawyer argued to keep the third client’s name confidential, but Wood dismissed his pleas to write it down in a sealed note. She ordered him to say it aloud.

“I rule it must be disclosed now,” she said.

The disclosures came at a hearing at which Cohen is trying to stop federal investigators from sifting through a trove of tax records, business documents, emails and other material that FBI agents seized in court-approved searches of his apartment, hotel room, office and safe deposit box last week.

Cohen’s lawyers argued that the evidence should be protected by attorney-client privilege.

According to court filings, the public integrity section of the U.S. attorney’s office in New York has been investigating Cohen for months because of allegations that his private business dealings – including the secret hush-money payments – may have violated federal bank fraud or campaign-finance laws.

Cohen has said he paid the $130,000 to Daniels himself, was not reimbursed by Trump, and never even told Trump what he’d done.

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