Now that we're stomping around the Middle East in a whole new way, we've got to take the laughs where we can get them. Enter Michael Cohen, a real Lawyer's Lawyer, in that he is a lawyer who often needs a lawyer.

Before he went to prison, Cohen was Donald Trump's fixer, which often involved venturing to far-flung locales with intriguing political leadership to scrounge up money for the big man. One such trip was to Kazakhstan, where, according to the newly released Mueller Memos, Cohen traveled for "a Trump Tower project." It's not clear when this took place, though it appears in the memos after a reference to a meeting Cohen took in March 2017. (It may well have been before the election, unlike Cohen's under-the-table deal with a Kazakh bank. That was after the bossman trudged into the Oval Office.) Whenever it was, Cohen got quite a taste of the post-Soviet republic in a single interaction.

Mueller Memos

You may remember that in the film Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen depicts Kazakhstan as an over-the-top backwards cesspool of misogyny and sectarian hate and rabid anti-Semitism. The scenes set in Kazakhstan are actually shot in Romania, and the language Cohen speaks is some hybrid of Hebrew and Polish slang and nonsense. This was all designed to lure out some of the very same prejudices in the unsuspecting Americans that Borat runs into in the film, but it seriously pissed off many Kazakhs in the process—especially the Kazakh government around 2006.

When did Michael Cohen realize he was in trouble because of Borat? How did he explain his way out of it? Did Mueller's investigators include this nugget because they found it funny? Has Robert Mueller ever laughed? Is this Trump Tower story more or less important than the fact that Cohen helped chase a Trump Tower Moscow all the way through the election with the big man's full knowledge and approval while Trump and his allies lied about it constantly until they got caught? Are we ready for a third cycle of my wife?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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