For the past few days, I've been spending the 11 p.m. to midnight hour reading in bed Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, and each night without fail laughing out loud, repeatedly, which I think should burnish my bona fides as not-a-very-good-person. I'm now done with Portnoy, however, and have been reading up on the Internet about Michael Cohen, President Trump's lawyer-slash-fixer. According to Wikipedia, he grew up on Long Island, son of a surgeon and a nurse, but went to law school in the Midwest, at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, which is now affiliated with Western Michigan University. Did he want to imbibe some "Midwestern values"? Did he follow a girl? Curious, I clicked on the hyperlink in the Cohen article and read:
In 2017, the school was one of ten American law schools found to be out of compliance with the American Bar Association's requirement that schools only admit students capable of earning a J.D. degree and passing the bar examination. The school was recently ranked the worst law school in the country by Above the Law. . . . The total cost of attendance (indicating the cost of tuition, fees, and living expenses) at Cooley for the 2013-14 academic year is $63,772. . . . In 2017, Cooley was sanctioned by the American Bar Association's Section of Legal Education and Admissions due to its lax admissions standards. According to Law School Transparency, Cooley is considered one of the most at-risk law schools for exploiting students for tuition.
Maybe the school has been in decline since Cohen attended, but my new theory is that he really wanted to be a lawyer, and, since dad had the money, the worst law school in the country, with the lowest admissions standards, was for him the best (or only) option. It's worked out for him, because, as is known, Trump hires "the best people." Recently, questions have arisen about whether Cohen actually practices law or is only Trump's "fixer," a position for which a law degree is helpful inasmuch as it abets the claim that embarrassing--or even criminally conspiratorial--communications are privileged. Tim Mak, a reporter at the Daily Beast, got a taste of Cohen's legal acumen when, having asked questions about Trump's second wife once alleging that she had been raped by her husband, he was told by Cohen, "I'm warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I'm going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting." Zealous legal representation!
We now know that Cohen's law practice, if that's what it is, has three clients. Trump is one. Another is the Republican fat cat (in every sense of the phrase) who paid his mistress $1.6 million in hush money after she had an abortion--one of a dwindling number of pro-choice Republicans, apparently. The third is Sean Hannity, of Fox News, who tweeted yesterday that on a few occasions he has spoken with Cohen regarding "legal questions about which I wanted his input and perspective." I think Hannity makes about $3 million per month. Naturally, people are wondering about the nature of the "legal questions" for which he deemed the "input and perspective" of Michael Cohen to be on a level with the counsel he receives from the passel of attorneys who provide the balance of his legal advice.
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