Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, reaches deal
Guilty plea regarding campaign finances could be pivotal
NEW YORK — Michael Cohen, U.S. President Donald Trump’s former fixer, agreed Tuesday to plead guilty to campaign finance charges, making the extraordinary admission that he paid a pornographic film actress to secure her silence about an affair she said she had with Trump.
Cohen is also expected to plead guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud. For months, prosecutors in New York have been investigating him in connection with those crimes and focusing on his role in helping to arrange financial deals with women connected to Trump.
Cohen surrendered to the FBI at the bureau’s Manhattan offices at about 2 p.m. Tuesday. He was expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Manhattan before Judge William H. Pauley III later in the afternoon.
His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The plea agreement doesn’t call for Cohen to co-operate with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, but it doesn’t preclude him from providing information to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is examining the Trump campaign’s possible involvement in Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.
If Cohen were to substantially assist the special counsel’s investigation, Mueller could recommend a reduction in his sentence.
The guilty plea could represent a pivotal moment in the investigation into the president: a once-loyal aide acknowledging that he made payments to at least one woman who said she had an affair with Trump, in violation of federal campaign finance law.
Cohen had been the president’s longtime fixer, handling his most sensitive business and personal matters. He once said he would take a bullet for Trump.
The investigation of Cohen has focused in part on his role helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Trump, including Stephanie Clifford, an adult film actress better known as Stormy Daniels.
The charges against Cohen weren’t a surprise, but he had signalled recently he might be willing to co-operate with investigators who have been conducting an extensive investigation of his personal business dealings. But any bid to negotiate a plea deal under which he would provide information to federal prosecutors in the hopes of a lesser sentence appears to have broken down.
Cohen’s plea agreement comes slightly more than a month after he gave an interview to George Stephanopoulos on ABC News and said he would put “his family and country first” if prosecutors offered him leniency in exchange for incriminating information on Trump.
In July, in what appeared to be another public break with Trump, one of Cohen’s lawyers, Lanny J. Davis, released a secret audio recording Cohen had made of the president in which it seems that Trump admits knowledge of a payment to Karen McDougal, a model who said she had an affair with him.
As part of their investigation, prosecutors had been looking into whether Cohen violated any campaign finance laws by making the US$130,000 payment to Clifford in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen’s plea culminates a long-running inquiry that became publicly known in April when FBI agents raided his office, apartment and hotel room, hauling away reams of documents, including pieces of paper salvaged from a shredder, and millions of electronic files contained on a series of cellphones, iPads and computers.
Lawyers for Cohen and Trump spent the next four months working with a court-appointed special master to review the documents and data files to determine whether any of the materials were subject to attorney-client privilege and should not be made available to the government.
The special master, Barbara S. Jones, who completed her review last week, issued a series of reports, finding that only a fraction of the materials were privileged and the rest could be provided to prosecutors.