Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer who flipped on the president in order to get a favorable plea deal for charges relating to a hush-money scandal surrounding payments made during the campaign to two women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday in a Manhattan federal court. Cohen must also pay $1.4 million in restitution.
Cohen, who was once a member of the closest of the president’s circles during his 2016 presidential campaign (as well as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee), eventually turned on his former employer once federal agents raided his New York office in an inquiry into payments made to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal in exchange for their silence on past affairs with Trump. Cohen admitted to arranging to give $130,000 to Daniels, which, according to The New York Times, “the government considers an illegal donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign since it was intended to improve Mr. Trump’s election chances.” He also orchestrated a payment of $150,000 by American Media Inc., which owns The National Enquirer, to McDougal, a former Playboy playmate.
Federal prosecutors charged Cohen with eight criminal counts, to which he pleaded guilty in August; Robert Mueller, the special counsel in charge of the investigation into Russian meddling into the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with Donald Trump’s campaign team, charged him with an additional crime, for which Judge William Pauley added two months to his sentence. “Mr. Cohen pled guilty to a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct,” Pauley said. Cohen will surrender on March 6, likely to Otisville Federal Correctional Facility in upstate New York, which Cohen’s defense requested.
The public learned from a filing sent by prosecutors in Manhattan to Judge Pauley that Cohen had “acted in coordination with and at the direction” of Trump (“Individual-1” in the documents). When first asked about the payments months ago, Trump said he had no knowledge of them; he then characterized them as private transactions that had nothing to do with campaign laws.
Cohen’s sentencing has some pundits declaring that the various trials of his disgraced associates could actually start to spell the downfall of the president himself. Among other revelations in the prosecutor’s briefs were that Cohen admitted to the Mueller investigators that he had lied about he duration of dealings on a Trump Tower project in Moscow. And, according to *The Washington Post*, “Cohen’s Russian business associate, Felix Sater, told BuzzFeed News that he and Cohen plotted to give Russian President Vladimir Putin a supposed $50 million penthouse in Trump Tower Moscow to help lure oligarchs into the project.”
In court, Cohen addressed not just Donald Trump but also his Twitter account: “Recently the president tweeted a statement calling me weak, and it was correct but for a much different reason than he was implying. It was because time and time again I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.” He continued, “Today is one of the most meaningful days of my life. I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real estate mogul whose business acumen that I deeply admired." The real estate “mogul” was, of course, Donald Trump.
