Did anybody really think that the figure of $130,000 came out of thin air? If the media was just making up a tale of Donald Trump paying off a hooker porn star in 2016, the month before the election, wouldn’t they have come up with a more substantial figure, since Trump is a billionaire?

Trump had a brief affair while his then-new wife, Melania, was home with their newborn son.

Whatever the case, on Tuesday evening, as Patterico wrote about, Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, admitted that there was, in fact, a payoff to Stormy Daniels in October 2016.  He didn’t clarify the “why” behind the payoff, but we already know why, don’t we?

OH – and then there’s that book Cohen is shopping.

Yes, add one more book to the Trump scandal library. Cohen is a mercenary, under the best of situations, and like everybody else, he sees a profit to rolling over on Trump.

According to the Daily Mail, Cohen looks to capitalize on his relationship with Trump, and he’s using the payoff incident as a juicy tantalizer, to draw book sales.

We’ll call it the Michael Wolff Effect.

Michael Cohen is shopping the book, tentatively titled ‘Trump Revolution: From The Tower to The White House, Understanding Donald J. Trump,’ to multiple publishers.

The book proposal promises to explain Cohen’s role in an embarrassing episode surrounding $130,000 he reportedly arranged for Trump to pay to porn star Stephanie Clifford just days before the 2016 election.

Now, we’ve all seen the written statement, denying any affair and any payoff to Daniels.

Cohen wrote that note and had Daniels sign it.

How many thought that note was worth the paper it was written on?

Cohen has said the money was paid in exchange for her silence about an affair with Trump early in his marriage to first lady Melania.

The book calls the episode an ‘unfortunate saga.’

Read that part again. Particularly, read the part about Cohen saying the money was paid in exchange for her silence about an affair with Trump.

Um… yeah. That’s the very thing the initial statement denied ever happened.

And his book proposal promises a closer and better informed view of Trump, compared with other books that he says were ‘based on arm’s length observations gleaned over relatively brief periods of time.’

You can just about bet that this is going to be a puff piece, at best, so anybody looking for dirt, beware.

You also have to wonder about a lawyer writing a book about a client.

Isn’t that some sort of breach of the attorney-client relationship?

I don’t think it would be out of line to suspect that this isn’t so much a Cohen “project,” as it is an assignment.

Still, the payoff that wasn’t, but now is should be an interesting read.