(CNN) Turn CNN on Tuesday night and a familiar face was looking back at you. You might not have been able to recall his name immediately, or even remember his story. But you knew you knew the face: Tanned with sagging bags under the eyes and a sparse thatch of hair atop his head.

That face belongs to Lanny Davis, the man who, suddenly, is at the center of the burgeoning battle between Michael Cohen and President Donald Trump -- a fight with huge implications for the second half of the President's first term in office.

For Davis, who signed on as Cohen's lawyer earlier this month, his advocacy for Cohen -- on Tuesday night he handed over a secretly recorded conversation between Trump and his client to CNN -- is the latest odd iteration of a man who has spent a lifetime reinventing himself as a staple of political Washington. Depending on your view of him, Davis is either the ultimate survivor or a bad penny that just keeps turning up. (New York magazine's Jonathan Chait described Davis as a "buffoon" and a "sleaze merchant" in 2012 .)

Either way, however, no one can deny that Davis is a man of (at least) nine lives.

Davis' career in politics began in the most mundane of ways: As a committeeman from Maryland to the Democratic National Committee. He entered the big time, in terms of national politics, in the mid 1990s thanks to -- who else -- the Clintons. (Davis had met Bill and Hillary Clinton at Yale Law School.) Davis was plucked from relative obscurity by Clinton to serve as special White House counsel -- a job that amounted to serving as Clinton's very public legal defender against a series of allegations, most notably the fundraising issues (think "Lincoln bedroom") surrounding the incumbent's 1996 re-election effort. (Davis, in a bit of good fortune, left the White House just before the Monica Lewinsky scandal began to come to light.)

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