What’s The Story? | Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

What’s The Story?

Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall

May 14 

 

The Wall Street Journal has another story trying to suss out the brief lobbying career of presidential lawyer Michael Cohen. It’s classic Cohen, a mix of hustling and money-grubbing mixed with resentment and a certain angry pitifulness.

As the Journal portrays it, after facing disappointment over not receiving a top White House appointment, Cohen set about trying to cash in on his purported access to and understanding of the President. But on the Journal’s reading, he didn’t do that well.

As we know, he signed up Novartis and AT&T, a Korean aerospace manufacturer and the U.S. investment affiliate of a big Russian oligarch. But aside from those, on the Journal’s telling, he didn’t have that much luck. Indeed, there’s one comical story of Cohen’s trying to hit up Uber — ironic since ride-hailing apps like Uber are most responsible for gutting the taxicab industry on which most of Cohen’s personal wealth appears to be based. They seem basically to have laughed at him. They didn’t sign up.

My question or suspicion about these pieces is how do we know what we think we know? Almost all of what we know about Cohen’s lobbying business stems from that document released last week by Michael Avenatti. Most of that has been confirmed. But as I noted late last week, Avenatti’s document appears to have significantly understated Cohen’s earnings from these sources. The Journal appears to have called lots of other Fortune 500 companies Cohen might have approached and heard that they either hadn’t heard from him or hadn’t hired him. This is an important exercise. But I don’t think it can really rule out other business. Indeed, it’s not wholly clear the people the Journal called would know their corporation’s engagements with Cohen or if they’d be truthful about them if there were any.

It is reasonable to note that both Novartis and AT&T were either from industries that were particularly stressed by Trump’s arrival (Novartis) or companies who had specific and critical business before the administration (AT&T). So perhaps he just lucked out in those two cases and no others. But that doesn’t sound right. None of this makes me think that we have any good reason to think we know about all Cohen’s clients and money sources. So far this seems to be an exercise in constructing a narrative around the currently available information — information which has largely gotten to us fortuitously. I see no good reason to think we know the full scope of who Michael Cohen signed up.