The fixer's toolbox, weaponized. By Josh Marshall

We know that a key, maybe the key to Michael Cohen’s job for Donald Trump was making prob-lems go away, most especially making women who had stories to tell – whether consensual sex-ual encounters or abuse – stay silent. Yesterday I suggested the possibility that this defensive capacity could very easily be weaponized against others. When you consider it, it’s frankly hard to imagine it wouldn’t be. Cohen had close relationships with lawyers for clients with damaging revelations. He had an equally close relationship with The National Enquirer, which is in the busi-ness of damaging revelations but seemed willing to subordinate that business to its transactional relationship with Donald Trump.

We have a couple other odd examples. Trump insider and fundraiser Elliott Broidy had a mistress who became pregnant and then threatened to go to the press. And well, Michael Cohen called up Elliott and told him he had a big problem but Michael could help. For a price. I mentioned this odd set of connections between Jerry Falwell, Jr., Michael Cohen and Jerry’s odd decision to go into business with a 21 year old pool attendant in starting a booze and sex flophouse in South Beach. Is this really happening? Something seems odd and maybe compromising about Falwell’s relationship with Giancarlo Granda. Michael struck up a relationship with Falwell while he was trying to put together a Trump campaign for President in 2012. He got Falwell to endorse Trump in 2016.

It’s all very fuzzy and amorphous, a lot of smoke and a fair amount of fire and who knows? But there is maybe another example of it.

Remember Eric Schneiderman? He was the well-respected and hard-charging New York Attor-ney General who everyone loved until news emerged of abusive behavior towards a number of women and then within a day he had resigned and disappeared. But then a short time later a lawyer who said he’d represented two of Schneiderman’s victims (not the four who came for-ward in the article that led to Schneiderman’s resignation) came forward and said he’d shared the information with Michael Cohen back in 2013.

The lawyer is named Peter J. Gleason. He’s apparently a bit of a self-promoter who often posi-tions himself in proximity to big news stories. In this case he went before Judge Kimba Wood, who was overseeing the exploding Michael Cohen investigation and asked that any documents related to his clients be kept confidential.

At the time, I think it was hard to know what to make of Gleason’s claim because it immediately and inevitably got caught up in suspicions that Schneiderman may have been set up (not really guilty of the accusations) or that Trump or Cohen were behind the stories that brought him down. Those points don’t really need to concern us though. Schneiderman did what he did. He resigned and left public life. How the story made its way into the press doesn’t matter for our purposes. But the fact he went to Cohen and shared the information with him seems highly rel-evant to understand this part of Cohen’s work for Donald Trump. Just for perfect clarity, we treat as a given that Schneiderman did what he did and saw his career collapse because of it. There is also no evidence I can see that Cohen or Trump leaked the information that led to his downfall. (I think the author’s The New Yorker piece specifically said they weren’t the sources.) What we’re concerned with is purely Michael Cohen’s MO and whether he used the tool box and relation-ships he used to protect Trump to attack and control Trump’s enemies or simply those who could help him.

Here’s the portion of a New York Times article that discusses Gleason’s interactions with Cohen, circa 2013 …

    In his letter, Mr. Gleason said that after his attempts to assist the women fell on deaf ears, he decided to take their accusations against Mr. Schneiderman to Steve Dunleavy, a former column-ist for The New York Post. According to the letter, Mr. Dunleavy “offered to discuss the matter with Donald Trump.”

    Within a day of speaking with Mr. Dunleavy, Mr. Gleason said, he received a phone call from Mr. Cohen.

    “In the conversation,” Mr. Gleason recalled, “I said, ‘Listen, I’m looking for somebody to help.’ At the time, Trump was considering running for governor. And Cohen said, ‘If Trump runs and wins, you’ll have an ally for bringing these women forward.’”

    Mr. Gleason added, “I’m no fan of Michael Cohen, but he was sympathetic.”

It’s just one example. But the examples or apparent examples are piling up.