Fixer. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In the brief time that he’s been making headlines, President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen has not established himself as a great legal mind. Branded a “bozo” and “clown,” Cohen went to the nation’s worst law school and it shows.

But Trump has not stuck by Cohen for this long because he’s a master litigator; he’s stuck by him because he’s a “fixer.” And now NPR has provided a taste of what Cohen’s brand of fixing looks like.

On Thursday, in a piece by reporter Tim Mak about Cohen’s history of legal threats, NPR published the audio of a 2015 phone call between Cohen and Mak, who worked for the Daily Beast at the time. The call was recorded before the Daily Beast published a story on Ivana Trump’s claim, later recanted, that Trump raped her.

In addition to wrongly claiming that a husband cannot rape his wife, Cohen lit into Mak and made a series of threats, some of which were published by the Daily Beast at the time:

“I will make sure that you and I meet one day while we’re in the courthouse. And I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”

Now NPR has published the audio.

Listen: Lawyer Michael Cohen has used legal threats to protect Donald Trump for years. NPR now has the audio of him doing it. Read @timkmak's story here: https://t.co/VC2FuIhY3g pic.twitter.com/8xA43T7pLS — NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) May 31, 2018

Cohen is like a character out of a bad mobster movie. He’s also all bark. As Mak writes, despite Cohen’s bluster, the story ran and he never filed a lawsuit.