Today, Attorney General Todd Blanche was sworn in. The ceremony was closed to the media, but Donald Trump was in attendance. Another one of Trump's former lawyers, Emil Bove — who is now a federal judge — did the "honors."

For Trump, however, this wasn't just another swearing-in of a loyalist to a position of power. It was a milestone in his personal quest to find his new Roy Cohn.

Cohn started his career as a prosecutor in the prestigious Southern District of New York. He could have had a perfectly respectable and successful legal career, but Cohn had other ideas. He was an anti-communist zealot who eventually caught the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. It wasn't long before Cohn became McCarthy's right-hand man in carrying out what is now known as "McCarthyism."

Cohn wasn't doing the normal work of an investigator. Instead, he was doing McCarthy's dirty work, carrying out aggressive questioning and prosecutions that perpetuated the Red Scare. Cohn didn't just play fast and loose with the facts and ethics — he was McCarthy's legal weapon, an orchestrator of McCarthyism itself.

Eventually, the tide turned against McCarthy and Cohn. After watching countless people's lives ruined by smear and innuendo, the American people recoiled.

It was ultimately a Boston lawyer named Joseph Welch who broke the spell McCarthy had cast on the nation. In a now-infamous exchange, Welch defended a young lawyer at his firm whose character was being assassinated, asking the powerful senator: "Have you no sense of decency?"

Cohn's involvement in the McCarthy-era investigations eventually left him cast out of Washington, D.C., and the mainstream of the legal profession. He left government and went into private practice.

As fate would have it, one of his clients was a young real estate developer named Donald Trump, who needed legal assistance for his discriminatory rental practices...