The full scale of Cohen’s revenues is not yet clear, nor are the connections of all of his clients, such as Columbus Nova, the mysterious company linked to Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The two best-explained examples, AT&T and the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, are plenty illustrative, though. Between early 2017 and December, the company paid Cohen $600,000. Novartis signed a deal with Cohen in February 2017 looking for advice on health policy, with Cohen’s Essential Consultants set to receive $100,000 every month for a year, for a total of $1.2 million.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidently been aware of the transactions for months, contacting both companies last year. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told Time that he had recently spoken to Trump and the president didn’t know anything about the payments Cohen was receiving, though the lesson of last week is that no one should take what Giuliani says publicly at face value, whether because he is uninformed or actively misleading.

What exactly was Cohen peddling? According to at least some accounts, he told his clients he could deliver access to Trump; certainly, one imagines that clients were hoping for it, either way. As has now become clear, though, Cohen was already in the process of being marginalized from Trump’s inner circle. The common description for deals like this, when companies contract with people who are not registered as lobbyists, is that they are seeking “insight” into Trump. A friend told The Washington Post, “There’s probably no one in the country who understands the mechanics of Trump world better than Michael Cohen.”

The very idea of understanding Trump is a fraught one. No matter Cohen’s experience, the idea that the president’s actions are rational and follow some sort of set process does not hold up to scrutiny, and his frequent changes of heart suggest even Trump doesn’t understand Trump. Nor is proximity to him a guarantee of persuasion, as the policy defeats of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have shown.

Whatever these two clients were seeking, they did not get it. AT&T had good reasons to want to understand Trump better, or even better to curry favor with him, or best yet to get access to him. The company was seeking federal approval from regulators to acquire Time Warner. In the case of AT&T, however, the Trump administration moved to block the merger, notwithstanding whatever insights Cohen provided.

Novartis’s account of what happened after they signed on with Essential is jawdropping:

In March 2017, Novartis had its first meeting with Michael Cohen under this agreement. Following this initial meeting, Novartis determined that Michael Cohen and Essential Consultants would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated related to US healthcare policy matters and the decision was taken not to engage further. As the contract unfortunately could only be terminated for cause, payments continued to be made until the contract expired by its own terms in February 2018.

The drugmaker agreed to shell out huge sums of money to Cohen, but apparently hadn’t done enough homework to realize he would be useless on health policy, and also signed a contract they couldn’t exit due to the contractor’s incompetence.