When we first met Michael Cohen in the halcyon days of summer 2016, he was just another one of Donald Trump's interchangeable surrogates, a frumpy suit who spent his allotted airtime bickering with cable-news anchors and serving up meme fodder in an amusing accent. Today this cut-rate Louis Litt is at the center of multiple lawsuits and law-enforcement investigations, any combination of which could end with him in prison, his boss's presidency in jeopardy, or possibly both. How time flies!

On Tuesday the attorney for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, published a series of explosive allegations about the $130,000 payment that Cohen made to Daniels in exchange for her silence: About two months after it took place, Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch with close connections to Vladimir Putin, initiated a series of transfers totaling nearly half a million dollars into the same bank account Cohen used to make the hush-money payment. This money, asserts Avenatti, "may have replenished the account following the payment" to his client.

Avenatti didn't provide much by way of receipts, but others did. Within hours of his announcement, the Daily Beast confirmed that the Vekselberg-Cohen transaction took place as Avenatti stated, and The New York Times corroborated the allegations after completing a review of "financial records." Remember when CNN reported in early April that Robert Mueller's team had interviewed several Russian oligarchs during recent stopovers at airports in the United States? Sure enough, on Tuesday evening, CNN revealed that Vekselberg was one of them.

The dossier—no, not that dossier, the Avenatti dossier—highlights several other notable payments made by multinational corporations to Cohen over the past two years, including AT&T, pharmaceutical giant Novartis, and defense contractor Korean Aerospace Industries LTD. In what is probably a set of wild coincidences, AT&T has a gigantic merger with Time Warner pending before Trump's Department of Justice; the president met with the incoming CEO of Novartis at Davos in January 2018, shortly after the company's final installment went through; and KAI is in the process of chasing, along with Lockheed Martin, a multibillion-dollar deal to provide the U.S. Air Force with its Advanced Pilot Training program.

On Wednesday, KAI stated that it retained Essential Consultants LLC to provide "legal consulting concerning accounting standards on production costs." For your reference, Essential Consultants is a shell company that Cohen created days before the Daniels payment in 2016. It is certainly not the type of law firm retained by gigantic defense contractors in the midst of pursuing lucrative military contracts. And Michael Cohen, bless his heart, owns New York City taxicab medallions. He is not an accountant.

AT&T confirmed that it paid Cohen's operation for what it called "insights into understanding the new administration," which sounds a lot like a carefully-workshopped-by-the-legal-department term for "access." The company "did no legal or lobbying work for us," the statement added, a clarifier that only begs the question of what, exactly, AT&T paid Michael Cohen to do—and how it determined the importance of paying a large sum of money to a person who was just far removed enough from the White House itself to perhaps avoid further scrutiny.

Avenatti is a lawyer, not an FBI agent, and his job is to do what is best for his client, not solve the Russia collusion mystery. His public statements, especially those made outside of court filings, are carefully worded to allow readers to connect the dots—a smart way of steering clear of whatever legal trouble might ensue if he were to draw those conclusions himself. For example, Avenatti makes no definitive claims about the purposes of these payments, and so far the direct relationship between the Daniels payment and the alleged Vekselberg reimbursement is couched in qualifiers and supported only by conjecture. Also, because the United States is the greatest country in the world, the Supreme Court has held that federal bribery statutes do not apply to acts like brokering meetings or hosting events. Even if these companies were paying Cohen in the hopes of getting in front of the boss, whatever racket he was running here is not necessarily the smoking gun that the Muellerhive craves.