…by whom? Conveniently, Michael Avenatti won’t say. If she’s been threatened by randos, that’s bad but unfortunately a fait accompli when you pose a political risk to one side or the other in modern America.

If she’s been threatened by someone associated with the president of the United States, that’s obviously a very big deal. It would also make no sense since Daniels’s allegations *aren’t* a big deal for POTUS. If Michael Cohen loses in court and Stormy tells all, eh. So what? The president cheated with a porn star 10 years ago. No one would be surprised. The potential cost of that scandal is nowhere near damaging enough to the White House to make physical threats a rational means of trying to contain it. The threats themselves, if proven, would be a scandal orders of magnitude more serious than Stormygate.

Michael Avenatti’s coy about what happened but the NYT reported this a few days ago:

The campaign was not without its risks, legal and otherwise. Mr. Avenatti said he was assigning 24-hour security to Ms. Clifford after a car tailed her after a dance performance at a Florida strip club this weekend.

He elaborated in a separate interview with CNN this morning:

“My client was physically threatened to stay silent about what she knew about Donald Trump,” Michael Avenatti told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on “New Day.” He said more details would be forthcoming in Daniels’ upcoming interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” which is scheduled to air later this month.

Daniels herself claimed as far back as two months ago, in an interview with “Inside Edition,” that she’d hired security because she’d been threatened. I’m tempted to think Avenatti’s playing up the risk deliberately to further inflate public interest in the lawsuit, which makes things that much more awkward for Trump and Michael Cohen, but as you’ll see, he’s not the one who brings it up in the “Morning Joe” interview below. Mika Brzezinski does, practically as an afterthought at the end of the interview.

The “60 Minutes” interview is now set to air a week from Sunday, more than two weeks after Avenatti started hyping it on social media. That feels like an unusually long lag time to bring an interview to air; CBS’s lawyers must be fine-combing it for defamation problems given Cohen’s willingness to sue to try to keep Daniels quiet. Avenatti, meanwhile, claims that six more women have contacted him with “similar stories to that of my client,” which you can parse however you like. Two of them claim to be under nondisclosure agreements. That’s always been the real risk to Trump and Cohen: Daniels’s story is already out there in In Touch for anyone who cares to read it but a domino effect involving other mistresses could create a lasting headache.

JUST IN: Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti tells @Morning_Joe that his client has been "physically threatened."

"I think it will become apparent to people when they tune in to 60 minutes … the details related to the threat." pic.twitter.com/l3xGXjciS4

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 16, 2018