“Remember something,” Michael Cohen told me, unbuttoning his navy cashmere double-breasted Moncler coat and unrumpling his gray turtleneck. “If she would have come to me a month before, or three months before, I would have done the same thing.” It was a Wednesday afternoon and Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney and loyal fixer, was sitting on a desk chair in the office of a friend’s townhouse on the Upper East Side. He was referring, of course, to Stephanie Clifford, the adult-film actress also known as Stormy Daniels, who has alleged that she and Trump had a consensual affair in 2006. As Cohen spoke, his combativeness and notoriously deep fealty to Trump were indeed evident. “People are mistaking this for a thing about the campaign,” he continued. “What I did defensively for my personal client, and my friend, is what attorneys do for their high-profile clients. I would have done it in 2006. I would have done it in 2011. I truly care about him and the family—more than just as an employee and an attorney.”

Stormygate has, in many ways, become a quintessential political saga for the Trump Age. And Cohen is a fitting star. Once a bit player inside Trump’s New York inner sanctum, he has gained his own twisted notoriety during his boss’s ascent. Last year, Cohen sued BuzzFeed for libel after the news organization published the infamous dossier alleging that he met with Russian officials in Prague during the summer of 2016. (Cohen said he has never been to Prague and was visiting the University of Southern California with his son at the time that the dossier had him taking the meetings.) But that crisis has hardly compared to the scrutiny Cohen has received since January, when The Wall Street Journal first reported that he facilitated a $130,000 payment to Clifford weeks before the 2016 presidential election. Cohen has reiterated, as he noted in his friend’s sunlit office, that the six-figure payout came out of his own pocket, and that he was not reimbursed by the Trump Organization or the Trump campaign. It was not an election issue, in other words. In fact, it seemed that Cohen, like the rest of the world, was surprised by his boss’s win. At the time, Cohen said, he was “hopeful and optimistic” about Trump’s chance in the election, but “everyone said that you can’t beat the Clinton machine. The election would be over in a few weeks.”

Yet Trump did win, and in the two months since the Journal story, there have been numerous questions surrounding whether Cohen’s payment violated federal-election law; what the president knew; why Cohen had paid Clifford out of his own pocket, particularly after she had already shared her story with In Touch Weekly (which reportedly shelved the story for over six years, after Cohen threatened Trump would sue their parent company); and if the contract could actually be enforced. In order to answer some of these questions, a government watchdog group has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. (There are laws and ethics and rules that require the reporting of any outlay that could influence one candidate’s standing. Trump had not reported Cohen’s settlement. Cohen has claimed that his client didn’t know about the payment at the time, and told me that it was not a campaign donation. “There is clear case law that negates the F.E.C. complaint raised against me.”) Meanwhile, Cohen, who was compelled to respond to the complaint, issued a statement describing his actions to The New York Times in mid-February—a move that Clifford’s manager subsequently claimed violated the terms of her non-disclosure agreement, thus allowing her to tell her version of the story. (Both Cohen and the White House have denied Clifford’s accusations.)

At the end of February, Cohen obtained a temporary restraining order through an arbitrator in California to prevent Daniels from speaking about the alleged sexual encounters. Clifford’s new attorney, Michael Avenatti, followed up with a lawsuit of his own at the beginning of March, contending that the non-disclosure agreement was void because Trump did not personally sign it. (Avenatti filed a civil suit in Los Angeles claiming that the agreement was signed by both his client and Cohen, but Trump himself did not sign the agreement, which he argues makes it invalid, unenforceable, and void.) Then, a couple weeks back, Clifford taped an interview with Anderson Cooper, which is set to air on CBS’s 60 Minutes on March 25. And if the interview hadn’t already become a Super Bowl-sized media supernova, Avenatti went on a morning-show blitz, on Friday, to promote what has essentially become possibly the most anticipated political interview since Larry King sat down with Bill Clinton in January 2000. When Avenatti appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski asked him if his client had been threatened in any way. “Yes,” Avenatti responded. “Was she threatened with physical harm?” she followed up. “Yes.”