“Unless I’m missing something, Cohen dealing with the Qataris isn’t relevant to whether or not he paid hush money to Stormy Daniels,” said Paul Rosenzweig , a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning R Street Institute and a former Whitewater investigator. “It seems more like [Avenatti] is running a private effort to kind of spread on the public record some of what he thinks might be in the Mueller investigation.”…

“He’s a PR show and he’s trying to serve as a focal point for people to deliver information to,” Volkov said. “He’s marketing, ‘Please bring the information on this stuff.’ And he’s good at it. Look, give the guy credit, he’s good at it. He doesn’t have an army of lawyers behind him.”

Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. Attorney in Miami, puts it more bluntly: “I think he’s the go-to guy for anyone that wants to keep their fingerprints off of information about Michael Cohen.”