Michael Cohen has pulled off the seemingly impossible. He has actually sullied the meaning of the term Washington fixer. I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to see the sobriquet in a recent New York Times headline above a front-page story earlier this month: “How Michael Cohen, Trump’s Fixer, Built A Shadowy Business Empire”.

For much of my career in journalism, I’ve specialized in covering Washington fixers, the lawyers, lobbyists and consultants who earn huge fees by selling their access to the powerful. I’ve watched presidents, from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, bring along their personal lawyers from back home to Washington, where these lawyers – the fixers – rotate through the capital’s infamous revolving door and earn millions opening doors to the rulers they once served. While prostitution may be the oldest profession in much of the western world, in Washington the oldest profession is another form of prostitution: influence peddling.

I thought I had seen it all. One of Clinton’s lawyer pals from Arkansas, Webster Hubbell, followed him to the White House and a high post in the justice department, but then wound up in the slammer for overbilling law clients.

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Edwin Meese, Reagan’s consigliere in California, followed him to the White House and then became attorney general but got into ethical hot water during the Iran-Contra scandal. There were howls of protest when Jimmy Carter nominated his pal from back home in Georgia, Griffin Bell, to be attorney general. But Bell was sensitive to the criticism that he was too cozy with the president and actually publicly posted all of his communications and meetings with the executive branch each day.



After leaving public office, these men were all paid by private clients to open doors in Washington. That’s what fixers are for, after all. And this is why so many former public officials remain in Washington long after their government service and make millions peddling their influence with those still in power.



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But Cohen, Donald Trump’s fixer, has sullied the fixing trade. Indeed, he skipped the public service part of the traditional fixer’s résumé, failing to win a federal appointment from his faithless client. But that didn’t stop him from signing up blue-chip clients, like AT&T, who wanted favorable treatment from the Trump administration for a pending merger deal.

Cohen, a personal injury and real estate lawyer, operated out of various offices around New York. One, pictured in the Times, was a building occupied by a yellow taxi company. Another, far tonier, was next to the boss in the Trump Tower. Courtesy of records revealed by Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, we know that shortly before the election, Cohen set up a shell company with a most excellent name, Essential Consultants. Essential was the vehicle Cohen used to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 to remain silent about Trump.

Essential has been the recipient of some big checks: $1.2m from Novartis Pharmaceuticals and $200,000 from AT&T. A private equity firm called Columbus Nova LLC, which has ties to the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, paid around half a million. Cohen reportedly has business dealings with Ukrainian politicians and business leaders. We do not know how all these dots connect, but we do know that Robert Mueller is keenly interested in Paul Manafort’s payments from Ukrainian clients and Russia’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 election and help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton.

Normally, I believe in the confidentiality of the lawyer-client relationship and would view the government’s seizing of a lawyer’s private files as overly intrusive. Normally, I wouldn’t see the lawyer for a porn star as the beacon of truth. But these are not, as we must constantly remind ourselves, normal times.

Why would blue-chip companies like AT&T and Novartis retain a lawyer with such sterling credentials? There is only one reason

Ed Meese had years of public service in California before he joined the Reagan administration. Griffin Bell had been a federal appeals court judge and a partner at Atlanta’s most prestigious law firm, King & Spaulding. Webb Hubbell had been managing partner of the Rose law firm and mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas. These were fixers with real credentials.

After combing through thousands of pages of public documents, the Times found that Cohen’s legal work included flipping various real estate holdings for vast profits, ownerships of taxi medallions in New York City worth $250,000 a pop and a stake his uncle’s catering hall business, an establishment frequented, according to the Times, by “Russian and Italian mobsters”.

Why would blue-chip companies like AT&T and Novartis retain a lawyer with such sterling credentials? There is only one reason. He was Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer.

Donald Trump is the first American president to be elected with absolutely no prior government or public service. This is why it is not surprising that none of his fixers, especially Cohen, have any real roots in Washington. But they have the one currency that matters, a phone that still connects them to Trump.

But Michael Cohen, like Paul Manafort before him, is now presumably too hot for even the president to handle. All the president’s lawyers, and this revolving cast is hard to keep track of, have surely insisted that Cohen be expunged from the president’s speed dial. And Cohen, too, is now lawyered up. But who knows?

These are certainly not normal times. They are times in which the fixer may at last be beyond fixing.