During a lapdog interview with Greta Van Susteren, the lawyer for Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski made a thinly-veiled threat against reporter Michelle Fields for considering a defamation lawsuit: “It really opens the door to… other allegations, other reputations, things of that nature.”

Before Sean Hannity’s lapdog interview with Lewandowski on Thursday, there was Van Susteren’s with Bradford Cohen, Lewandowski’s lawyer, a few hours earlier. That day, charges were dropped against Lewandowski over his manhandling of reporter Michelle Fields as she tried to ask Donald Trump a question.

Van Susteren’s palsiness was signaled in her first question: “How’s it been on your client throughout these past couple weeks as he faced the possibility of a criminal charge and criminal trial?”

That, of course, opened the door for Cohen to paint Lewandowski as a great guy who had been wronged: “It was extremely difficult. You know, it was difficult on him, it was difficult on his family. You know, he’s a father and a husband and he’s a great guy. …It was extremely taxing on him because of the enormous attention it got.”

Putting aside the legal question of whether Lewandowski should have been prosecuted or not, there are certainly plenty of questions about his character. Why did he first attack Fields as “totally delusional” before claiming, as Cohen now told Van Susteren, Lewandowski had grabbed Fields in an effort to protect Trump?

Furthermore, as I have previously written, there have been many other reported incidents of Lewandowski’s brutish, sexist behavior, including late-night booty calls to female reporters, “often not sounding entirely sober.”

And that’s not counting Lewandowski’s threat to Van Susteren’s own colleague, Megyn Kelly, nor the Trump campaign’s thuggish behavior with other reporters.

But none of those questions seemed to arise in Van Susteren’s mind and she offered no challenge to the “great guy” image Lewandowski’s lawyer presented. Instead, she sought more favorable details about Lewandowski with her next question, asking Cohen what he thought was “the compelling reason” behind the decision to drop charges.

After Cohen spent more than a minute on that answer, Van Susteren brought up Fields’ threatened defamation case. Van Susteren has already gratuitously advised Fields not to go there – after gratuitously attacking women journalists who had called for Lewandowski to be fired.

Van Susteren next opened the door to Cohen’s threat. Now, I don’t know for sure she knew about it but Cohen had threatened Fields earlier that day. Yet Van Susteren sure sounded like she wanted more of that. “Give me your, sort of, thumbnail sketch of what will happen if she files this," Van Susteren asked. "Thumbnail sketch and actually what the trial will be like if you get to that." Note the emphasis on “what will happen,” as opposed to asking Cohen to evaluate the merits of a defamation case.

COHEN: When you file a defamation case and I’m always careful about filing defamation cases, ‘cause it really opens the door to a lot of things that a lot of people, you know, prefer not to open the door to: other allegations, other reputations, things of that nature. It’s just probably not a smart idea. That being said, everyone has their choice to file a lawsuit. …Do I think it’s a successful one? Probably not.

But Van Susteren either missed that threat or chose not to challenge it. Instead, she asked if Lewandowski would file a counterclaim. Which allowed Cohen to talk about why he might.

Van Susteren also asked Cohen to speculate on why Fields filed the lawsuit, as if he would be in a position to know. But Van Susteren should have known that Fields said she did it reluctantly and in response to the Trump campaign accusations that she lied. And, by the way, the Florida prosecutor basically acknowledged that she had not.

That information never made it into this interview, either.

And then Van Susteren wonders why people think she's a Trump shill.

Watch how she proved why she deserves the moniker, below, from the April 14 On The Record.