Cohen, indeed, has been consumed with his legal challenges. The warrants to raid his home, office, and hotel room were signed on April 8, and allowed the government until April 22 to execute the searches, according to two people familiar with the situation. But agents wasted little time, entering Cohen’s premises a little after 7 A.M. the next day. The warrants were also notably broad: they sought records related to the payment to Daniels; records about Karen McDougal, a former Playmate who also claims to have had an affair with Trump; and any records of communication between Cohen and A.M.I., the media company that owns The National Enquirer, and David Pecker, the Trump confidant and proprietor of the publication. (McDougal entered into a deal with A.M.I. during the 2016 presidential campaign cycle, effectively keeping her account from publication. In the weeks since the raids, The Enquirer put a photo of Cohen on its cover under the headline: “Trump Fixer’s Secrets & Lies.”)

The warrants also sought records related to the taxi medallions that Cohen owns, his bank accounts, loans, mortgages, L.L.C.s, communications with the Trump campaign, and communications about campaign-finance laws. The government walked away with about eight boxes of physical documents, including binders that the Cohens had punctiliously maintained, with tabs designated for each of their bank accounts and monthly statements for each one, hole-punched and placed within its correct tab, according to two people familiar with the situation. They also walked away with more than a dozen electronic devices—cell phones, iPads, laptops, external hard drives—about half of which belong to Laura and their two children. They devices contained data including study guides, photos of their kids and their friends on family vacations and posing like Charlie’s Angels, and Marvel movies downloaded to iTunes.

Since the government has started returning copies of what it seized to Cohen’s attorneys, Cohen has been spending up to 10 hours a day at his lawyers’ offices on Madison Avenue, starting at 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning, designating what they deem privileged communication between attorney and client. They are moving through the information almost as quickly as the government is giving it back to them, two people said.

For most of his life, Cohen operated out of the spotlight, making a small fortune flipping real estate and taxi medallions before falling in with Trump. His involvement with Daniels, however, has transformed him into an unlikely pop-culture curiosity. Last weekend, Cohen got the Saturday Night Live treatment, with actor Ben Stiller portraying him as a tragicomic figure, as eager to please his former boss as he is desperate to avoid prison time. Indeed, on cable-news networks, his state of mind has become something of an obsession for pundits, with constant, breathless speculation about what it might take for Cohen to “flip.” As Giuliani said Sunday morning on ABC News, he expects Cohen to cooperate with authorities, though he does not think they will be happy because, as he said it, Cohen does not have “any incriminating evidence.” He called him an “honest, honorable” lawyer. He also said that a pardon “obviously is not on the table,” though he added “that’s not a decision to be made now; there’s no reason to pardon anybody now.”

Cohen, for his part, is mostly distraught over the impact on his family, according to the people familiar with his thinking. “I live for my wife and my kids,” he tells friends. “I’d die for my wife and my kids. And this is all ruining their lives.” An inaccurate NBC News report on Thursday saying that the government had wiretapped his phone, which was corrected by the network the same day, was particularly difficult on his children, according to one person. Once they read it, it doesn’t matter if it’s corrected, he has told people. The damage, he has said, is already done. (Though he has said he’s glad they did ultimately correct it.)

Cohen himself is grappling with the fact that, in his early fifties, his life and his business will never be the same, and that he is isolated from the people in Washington around Trump, who, he has said, have been treating him as though he is “disposable.”

“I am sitting here in this nightmare,” he has told people. He has said he has had no peace since January 2017, when BuzzFeed published the so-called “dossier” that made several claims about Cohen’s interactions with Russians throughout the presidential campaign (claims he has repeatedly denied). Since the raids, however, and following Giuliani’s media blitz, two people said that Cohen feels even more alone. Friends have said that “Washington has made a huge mistake” in hanging him out to dry. “That,” one person said, “is a dangerous place for him to be.”