the infamous chief counsel for the red-baiting, joseph mccarthy-chaired senate subcommittee in the 1950s, cohn was indicted four times from the mid-'60s to the early '70s-for stock-swindling and obstructing justice and perjury and bribery and conspiracy and extortion and blackmail and filing false reports. and three times he was acquitted-the fourth ended in a mistrial-giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability. cohn, tyrnauer's work reaffirms, took his sanction-skirting capers and twisted them into a sort of suit of armor. it's the past quarter or so, though, of tyrnauer's film that is perhaps most salient at this stage of trump's first term. it deals with the less discussed but arguably much more trenchant lesson of cohn's life-not his decades of dark-arts untouchability but his brutal comeuppance. 