Michael Cohen said he helped Jerry Falwell Jr. suppress 'racy' personal photos: report

If you had "now-jailed Trump lawyer Michael Cohen recorded telling comedian Tom Arnold he helped Trump-supporting evangelical leader and Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. cover up raunchy pictures" in your 2019 news predictions, congratulations. Now, look at what the hell you have done:

The Falwells wanted to keep “a bunch of photographs, personal photographs” from becoming public, Cohen told Arnold. “I actually have one of the photos,” he said, without going into specifics. “It’s terrible.”

According to Reuters, the Falwells told Cohen that "someone" had acquired the pictures and was asking them for money; Cohen met with the would-be blackmailer's attorney(?) and warned him that his client's actions amounted to a crime. The unnamed "someone" then allegedly destroyed the pictures and the matter was dropped.

It is left scrupulously unclear in the report as to just what the pictures show or who is in them. Falwell approached Cohen for help in 2015; it's not clear whether it was before or after Trump had announced his candidacy. Reuters also helpfully notes that they found "no evidence" that Falwell's extremely, very damn odd endorsement of sleazy gross person Donald Trump the next year had anything to do with the picture that Michael Cohen appears to still have in his possession.

So I think we're going to just going to leave that there and back away quietly. As an additional note: Much of Reuters' scoop is sourced to a person "familiar with Cohen's thinking," which we can likely interpret to mean Michael Cohen is himself confirming the existence of Jerry Falwell sex pics. As to the reasons for bringing that up now, we can only guess.