Consider Cohen’s three most prominent appearances connected to the Trump campaign. One came in August 2016, when, on CNN, Brianna Keillar confronted Cohen with the fact that polls showed his boss trailing. Cohen demanded to know which polls, to which Keillar replied, “All of them.” Whatever role Cohen was playing there, it wasn’t legal, nor was it politically informed.

More telling were the other two. In 2015, The Daily Beast uncovered an old anecdote in which Ivana Trump had accused Donald of marital rape. (She later backed away from the claim—and signed a sweeping gag order in her divorce agreement.) Cohen’s threat to the Beast was less legal than brutal: “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. 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?” On matters of law, however, he was shaky, arguing that one could not legally rape a spouse—which hasn’t been true in New York since 1984.

The other was the agreement with Daniels, which came shortly before the election. The details and legality of that agreement remain up for dispute, but Trump has said that he was unaware of the agreement, and Cohen says he paid Daniels out of his own pocket, raising questions about whether Cohen was serving as Trump’s personal lawyer or something else. Daniels has also accused Cohen of sending a man to threaten her, which would be, to put it delicately, extra-legal.

Indeed, both of these cases show Cohen more in a “fixer” role than as a lawyer. It’s a label he’s embraced in the past. Cohen has compared himself to the TV character Ray Donovan, and told ABC in 2011, “If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn't like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump's benefit. If you do something wrong, I'm going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I'm not going to let you go until I'm finished.” In 2017, he told The Wall Street Journal, “I am the fix-it guy … Anything that he needs to be done, any issues that concern him, I handle.”

It can’t hurt to have a J.D., but those aren’t the kinds of skills you need to go to law school to learn. Cohen filled the void in Trump’s circle left by Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who had once represented Joe McCarthy, but while Cohen has a similarly bellicose personality, he lacks Cohn’s accomplishments as an attorney.

When Trump won, there was speculation that Cohen would get a White House job. He did not. Instead, Cohen entered into a curious “strategic alliance” with the major law firm Squire Patton Boggs. The agreement ended with the raid, but The New York Law Journal reports that Cohen’s role was mysterious to staffers at the firm. The nature of that arrangement, and Trump’s arrangement with Cohen, are important to understanding what happened.