FORMER TRUMP LAWYER GETS 3 YRS IN PRISON
NEW YORK: Michael Cohen, US President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, was sentenced to a total of three years in prison on Wednesday for his role in making illegal hushmoney payments to women to help Trump’s 2016 election campaign and lying to Congress about a proposed Trump Tower project.
US District Judge William Pauley in Manhattan sentenced Cohen to 36 months for the payments, which violated campaign finance law, and to two months for the false statements to Congress.
The two terms will run simultaneously. The judge set March 6 for Cohen’s voluntary surrender. Cohen pleaded guilty to the campaign finance charge in August and to making false statements in November. As part of the sentence, the judge ordered Cohen to forfeit $500,000 and pay restitution of nearly $1.4 million for the campaign finance law violations.
WASHINGTON: A US federal court on Wednesday sentenced Michael Cohen, a former long-time lawyer and fixer for President Donald Trump, to three years in prison on multiple charges, including violation of campaign funding law.
Prosecutors said this was coordinated with and directed by Trump, identified in court filings as “Individual-1”.
Cohen had faced a jail term of around five years, but had pleaded for none in exchange for cooperating with at least four investigations, including one by US special counsel Robert Mueller.
His jail term starts on March 6, 2019. He has the option of having that term reduced by continuing to cooperate.
Judge William Pauley also ordered Cohen to pay nearly $2 million in financial penalties.
Cohen faced nine charges, including tax evasion, misleading financial institutions, campaign finance law violation and lying to Congress.
The campaign funding violations were in connection to hush-money payments that he had arranged to buy the silence of two women, former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film star Stormy Daniels, who have claimed to have had affairs with Trump.
“I take full responsibility for each act that I pled guilty to: the personal ones to me and those involving the president of the United States of America,” Cohen said to a federal judge in Manhattan.
“My weakness could be characterised as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump,” he added.
He went on, “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.”
Trump has denied having those relationships as claimed by the women and has pushed back against suggestions that he has been implicated in the case of campaign funding law violation and sought to put the blame squarely on Cohen.
Cohen is a lawyer and, he told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday, “I assume he would know what he’s doing.”
There were no public comments or remarks from Trump or the White House after the sentencing till the filing of this report.