“I’m the easiest part of your goddamn problem and you’re going to kill me? Don't you know who I am? I’m a fixer. I'm a bagman. I do everything from shoplifting housewives to bent Congressmen.”
That was the climactic scene from the movie Michael Clayton, where George Clooney plays the title character, a fixer for a Monsanto-like corporation that decided it would be most expedient to make the fixer (and the secrets he held) go away with a car bomb. Michael Clayton flips the script on his corporate caitiff, however, and seals her doom with an incriminating recording.
“I’m Shiva the God of Death,” Michael Clayton victoriously declares as the Tilda Swinton character literally falls to her knees with the realization that she'll soon be in an orange jumpsuit.
Now we have another fixer named Michael, but his last name is Cohen and instead of working for a weed killer corporation he works for a large, let’s say “ethically challenged” corporation called The Trump Organization.
This fixer also holds a lot of secrets, from paying off Stormy Daniels to allegedly colluding with the Russians to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.
With the FBI recently seizing everything in Cohen's possession—even taking the phone out if his hand—Trump is in quite the hot beef stroganoff mess.
Besides declaring that “attorney-client privilege is dead!” and a “whole new level of unfairness” has been reached in an “attack on our country,” Trump is trying to minimize his ties to Cohen, calling him just “one of many lawyers (too many!)” that serve his legal needs.
In reality, Cohen plays such a central role within the Trump Organization that he is actually has the same title—executive vice president—as Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric Trump. And Cohen, for his part, works almost exclusively for Trump, although he does on occasion do side jobs for folks like Sean Hannity.
So why does Cohen pointedly describe himself as Trump's “personal lawyer”? It is clearly part of his attempt to hide his broad range of “fixings” under the cloak of attorney-client privilege.
But Special Counsel Robert Mueller isn’t playing along with the “personal lawyer” kabuki dance. Among other things, he’s got Cohen in Prague, meeting with the Russians, confirming a key element of the the infamous “dossier.”
The search warrant has not been made public and initial reports suggested that it was about the infamous Stormy Daniels payment, which the Right leapt on as a flimsy pretext to go on a “fishing expedition” of the President and one of his top lieutenants.
However, such a narrative ignores the facts that this warrant was approved by a federal judge and by the highest levels of the Justice Department and that the probable cause threshold for any lawyer is high, but the President’s lawyer? Stratospheric.
Sources who have seen the Cohen search warrant told CBS News that it “appeared to them that the real target of the raids was Mr. Trump.” Meanwhile, CNN has reported that the warrant mentioned not just records related to Stormy Daniels but also those related Cohen's ownership of valuable taxi medallions, indicating that investigators “are digging deeper into Cohen's personal financial dealings.”
Former Watergate Special Prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks notes that the only other search warrant related to the Mueller investigation was issued last fall and resulted in Paul Manafort being indicted shortly thereafter. And many observers speculate that those indictments as well as current efforts to add additional charges, are to put enough pressure on Manafort so he will “flip” and reveal incriminating evidence against Trump.
Several sources in the White House are worried that the same tactic is in play with Cohen and that he isn't likely to take a fall for the President. As another one of Trump’s attorneys put it, on a scale of one to 100, with 100 being most loyal, Cohen “isn't even a one.”
As ProPublica has documented, Cohen has a long history of somehow being the only one who emerges unscathed from serious criminal investigations that take down those around him.
The fixer always fixes things for himself, first.
And that could spell big trouble for Donald Trump.
Jud Lounsbury is a political writer based in Madison, Wisconsin and a frequent contributor to The Progressive.