EARLIER this month Sean Hannity – conspiracy theorist, Republican propagandist, Trump confidant, and ultra right-wing multimillionaire Fox News host - reported on the FBI raid on the home and office of Michael Cohen, Trump’s attack-dog personal lawyer.

“What that means,” the combative Hannity told his primetime TV audience, “is [Robert] Mueller’s witch-hunt investigation is now a runaway train that is clearly careening off the tracks.” On his radio show, he went further, saying the development “opened up an area where it seems that there’s no limit at all into the fishing expedition that Mueller is now engaged in.” Mueller is the former FBI director now tasked as special counsel investigating Russian interference in the presidential election.

What Hannity somehow forgot to mention was that he himself was one of Cohen’s clients. Cohen was forced by a judge to reveal Hannity’s name last week, and the news of what was widely seen as Hannity’s blatant conflict of interest was greeted with glee and astonishment. NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell tweeted that there were “gasps in the courtroom” when Hannity’s name was disclosed. CNN host Brooke Baldwin seemed to be momentarily speechless at the news.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, however, was far from speechless. “So it would seem the President and Sean Hannity share more than dinners and frequent phone calls and a mutual love of Fox News programming,” he noted, caustically. “They also share an attorney.”

“No disclosure,” he added, “no disclaimer, not even a casual mention that, ‘Oh yeah, this guy also represents me in some form or fashion, mostly real estate’.” (Hannity had said in a statement that he had only ever had discussions with Cohen “almost exclusively about real estate.”) Cooper went on: “Not disclosing a business or legal relationship with someone you report on, and have had as a guest at least 16 times since Donald Trump declared his candidacy, that doesn’t sound either fair or balanced.” Fair and Balanced is the motto of Fox News - a news station notoriously neither fair or balanced.

The New York Daily News headed its report with ‘Oh, for Fox Sake!' adding: "Hannity ID’d as Trump lawyer’s secret client’. Twitter swarmed with vituperative pro- and anti-Hannity tweets. Among the late-night TV hosts there was considerable glee. Stephen Colbert led the way. “How did Fox News let him on the air with this massive conflict of interest?” he asked. “Did he not tell them? Or did he tell them and they just ignored it? I’m going to with the first one, because I know Sean Hannity, and delivering factual information is not his strong suit.”

Top US lawyer Alan Dershowitz, a Fox News contributor, criticised Hannity saying he ought to have disclosed his relationship with Cohen when he talked about the lawyer on the programme. To no-one’s surprise, Fox News said it had been unaware of Hannity’s “informal relationship” with Cohen, but had spoken to the host, “and he continues to have our support”. Fox News would, of course, have frothed with outrage had a prominent host on one of the rival news networks been caught up in a similar conflict of interest.

For much of the US media, the story has a personal element. As Fox media pundit Howard Kurtz noted, “Hannity regularly denounces what he calls the ‘destroy-Trump media’ in vehement terms. So for some of his rivals, this is payback.”

But then Hannity is a man who has made enemies partly by promoting conspiracy theories and unabashedly going for his political opponents’ jugular. A New York Times magazine profile last November said: “As a broadcaster, Hannity has thrived as a champion of insurrection.”

In his recent book Trumpocracy, George W Bush’s speechwriter David Frum, a fierce critic of Trump's conduct, details how Hannity used his Fox show to lend credence “to any story, no matter how wild, that might deflect attention from the Trump-Russia connection”. He “reverentially interviewed” Julian Assange after the WikiLeaks dump of Democratic Party emails (a trove received from Russian intelligence) and “publicised the fantasy” that they had come not from the Russians but from Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee worker who had been murdered in July 2016.

Washington DC police suspect that Rich was shot dead in a botched robbery but Hannity and others promoted the conspiracy theory that he had been bumped off by Democratic operatives for leaking the emails. Rich’s parents are now suing two Fox News contributors and the network for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

When Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” tape emerged, Hannity, ever the Trump loyalist, said that while such remarks were wrong, they were simply a politically motivated distraction. But some advertisers pulled their ads from his TV show after it broadcast remarks by a legal analyst about victims of sexual predators, in the wake of the sexual-misconduct allegations engulfing Roy Moore, the right-wing Republican Senate nominee in Alabama.

His TV show has often promoted the so-called 'birther' conspiracy theory - that Barack Obama wasn't born in America and therefore could not legally be president. He has crudely attacked the 'never-Trumper jerks out there', and he even seemed to rationalise treason over the release of the hacked Democratic emails.

Hannity remains characteristically defiant in the face of the latest story. On Wednesday he told his 3.6 million Twitter followers on Wednesday: “I have to laugh. People in 'destroy Trump media' just make sh*t up. Thx for all the BS free press.” His TV and radio shows are immensely popular and lucrative (his annual income is reportedly $36m). And, importantly, he and Trump speak by phone several times a week. The President values his friend's frank talking and advice to the extent that, according to the Washington Post last week, some White House aides even refer to Hannity as the “unofficial Chief of Staff.”