One of the weirdest bits of news about Trump’s longtime fixer and bagman Michael Cohen is how much of the money he received from corporations to provide access to Trump was paid to him even though he ended up doing nothing for them. For example, pharmaceutical giant Novartis:

Novartis said it signed a one-year contract with Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants, for $100,000 per month in February 2017, shortly after Trump was inaugurated as president.

Novartis said it believed Cohen “could advise the company as to how the Trump administration might approach certain U.S. health-care policy matters, including the Affordable Care Act.”

But just a month after signing the deal, Novartis executives had their first meeting with Cohen, and afterward “determined that Michael Cohen and Essentials Consultants would be unable to provide the services that Novartis had anticipated.”

But Novartis kept paying Cohen.

Cohen eventually cleared $1.2 million for this deal, providing absolutely nothing in return.

This whole thing just absolutely stinks to high heaven. Trump’s associates and cronies used his election to the presidency as a free ticket to rake in as much loot as possible by promising access to him.

And it wasn’t only Novartis; Cohen was also paid $200,000 by telecom giant AT&T to do nothing.

Meanwhile, telecom giant AT&T was also revealed to have paid Cohen’s shell company $200,000, again with no visible action.

“Essential Consulting was one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration,” AT&T said in a statement. “They did no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”

All of these payments were made to a company that has no website or known employees, that was previously described as a “real-estate consulting company,” and that was only set up in October 2016. Crucially, it was the same shell company Cohen used to make a $130,000 payment to Daniels, an adult film actress, and which, according to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, might have been used to pay off other women for Trump “if necessary.”

A senior official inside the drug giant Novartis told NBC News that Michael Cohen reached out shortly after Trump’s election “promising access” to the new administration. https://t.co/xtP2C2KyFw

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) May 9, 2018

WOW. Novartis source tells @statnews Cohen came to them promising “access to not just Trump, but also the circle around him … we were hiring him as a lobbyist.”

After a bad first meeting with Cohen, @Novartis kept paying him so as not to “anger” Trump. https://t.co/11fl4IkyWn

— Christina Wilkie (@christinawilkie) May 9, 2018