A Smoking Gun, On Fifth Avenue?

                                                                                                                                                                  Does anybody think it's weird that the search of the pit bull attorney Michael Cohen's "offices" happened only a day after a contained but startlingly aggressive looking blaze obliterated some reclusive guy and all his treasures near the top of the vile NYC tower (not to be confused with the still stalled Moscow monstrosity)?

Maybe I have always been a conspiracy theorist. Back in the early '90's, I had lots of working hypotheses about who killed Vince Foster. Well, not lots of them; just one really. But nobody ever seemed all that interested in my Bob Dole counter-conspiracy theory, and I've long since let it go. Well maybe not completely -- but when I smell smoke, it's usually because there's fire. This time, there actually was a fire, but for some reason nobody's paying attention.

This morning, somebody assured me that Michael Cohen is brilliant, and had to know the FBI was coming and was well prepared. Brilliant is hardly the first word that springs to mind when I think of someone who claims he would take a bullet for his boss, and described him -- out loud, no less -- as generous, compassionate, humble, kind, and empathetic. Did he mean to say shameless, delusional, whorish? I'm sure Mike's children are feeling pretty proud these days.

Brilliant, no, but I do believe he's ruthless and immoral and sly like a fox, and I do believe he had already tucked away the really good secrets somewhere else. Say, in the sprinkler-free, unsaleable apartment of a depressed and eccentric, bankrupt recluse who is stuck in a building from hell, surrounded by pricey old paraphernalia that nobody wants. Vintage guitars, ukeleles, artwork, tax returns. You know, the usual stuff.

In this era of assault on truth, who's to say my fake new is any more fake than all the other crap out there. I can't help but think, though, that the fire seemed a little bit too catastrophic, a bit extreme. Had the poor collector wished to kill himself, he could have pulled a Vince Foster. Why die from the outside in, and why destroy all those other treasures. Unless....  Unless....