A little more than a week ago, Michael Avenatti was, indisputably, overexposed. A lantern-jawed soundbite-master, Stormy Daniels’s attorney had been on every possible cable station flogging his long-shot legal case against the president and his sad-sack attorney, Michael Cohen. But the raid on Michael Cohen’s office and home has turned Avenatti from an obsessive into an expert. He is already far down the road that others are just getting started on—there’s no one who knows more about the Cohen case. This week, for instance, when it was revealed that Fox News host Sean Hannity was one of Cohen’s clients, Hannity tried downplaying his relationship to Trump’s lawyer as informal and insignificant, with no paper trail to speak of. But Avenatti’s view is different. As he explains it, when Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District of New York demanded to know which of Cohen’s clients would be impacted by the F.B.I. raid of Cohen’s home and office on April 9, she specifically meant clients impacted by the seizure of documents or audio tapes. “There’s no question that among the documents that were seized are documents with Sean Hannity’s name on them,” said Avenatti.

What those documents may reveal is anybody’s guess, but the latest bombshell is yet more proof that Avenatti has become a major thorn in the side of Donald Trump. Most of the media presumed the Stormy Daniels case against the president and his lawyer would fade after the porn actress (whose real name is Stephanie Clifford) appeared on 60 Minutes a month ago, claiming that she had an affair with Trump in 2006, was threatened by an unidentified “thug” who warned her to stop talking about the alleged affair, and later accepted $130,000 from Cohen to keep quiet in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Avenatti promoted the interview as a Watergate-level event, but it didn’t quite deliver, and questions were left unanswered, most notably the contents of a mysterious DVD Avenatti teased on Twitter, suggesting revelatory images or video were forthcoming.

The F.B.I. raid, however, re-invigorated the story, setting the stage for potential indictments against Cohen on charges of bank fraud, campaign-finance crimes, and money laundering—and, just maybe, corollary charges against the president himself. At this stage, Avenatti seems certain of one thing: Michael Cohen is under such urgent duress that it will be difficult for him not to flip on the president and turn state’s witness as soon as this summer. “There is zero question in my mind that Michael Cohen is going to be indicted for some very serious, pervasive conduct,” he said. Avenatti is not alone: according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, a longtime counselor to Trump, Jay Goldberg, has told the president that on a scale of 1 to 100, where 100 is Cohen protecting the president and 1 is near-certain flipping, the chances Cohen will protect Trump are not even a 1.

Avenatti is still declining to talk about the contents of the DVD, but the F.B.I. investigation has elevated the case well beyond an alleged sexual liaison. Now the more important liaison is between Avenatti and the F.B.I. “There’s been three raids executed by the F.B.I. in the last eight days,” Avenatti said. “And there’s a significant level of cooperation between us and the Southern District of New York U.S. attorney’s office.”

Indeed, Avenatti is now alleging that he has evidence of bank fraud involving Michael Cohen, which he has almost certainly shared with the F.B.I. And the F.B.I. may soon respond in kind: “We expect to have access to at least some of what was seized at some point in the near future,” he added. (The Department of Justice declined comment.) And what might that yield? Avenatti’s preferred scenario is that it would cough up proof that Trump not only knew about Cohen’s payments to Daniels and other women, but compensated Cohen from campaign funds. But he believes the true smoking gun is a so-called Suspicious Activities Report (S.A.R.) reportedly created by the Treasury Department earlier this year after a bank is reported to have flagged Cohen’s account for dubious transactions. (The Treasury Department and First Republic Bank did not provide a comment to The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, while Cohen called it “fake news.”) “That is a critical document at this juncture of the case,” said Avenatti. If such a report existed it could very well describe a narrative of events in which monies were moved from bank account to bank account in an effort to cover up campaign payments to Trump’s alleged mistresses. “The importance of that document cannot be overstated,” he said.