USA TODAY International Edition
Prosecutors aren’t sure Cohen told all
New York team doesn’t recommend leniency
NEW YORK – Did President Donald Trump’s ex-personal lawyer Michael Cohen come clean about every crime he knows about?
Federal prosecutors in New York don’t know for sure – and that’s one reason they won’t recommend leniency for the 52-year-old attorney at his sentencing Wednesday.
The uncertainty explains the contrast with the more forgiving sentence recommendation Washington-based special counsel Robert Mueller proposed for the attorney who once served as Trump’s fixer.
Cohen met with the prosecutors from the Southern District of New York only when he knew he faced likely indictment, the prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo filed Friday.
When they met, the prosecutors wrote, Cohen agreed to discuss only the participation of others in campaign finance violations to which he pleaded guilty in August.
He “specifically declined to be debriefed on other uncharged criminal conduct, if any, in his past,” the prosecutors wrote. He declined meetings “about other areas of investigative interest.”
“In order to successfully cooperate with this office, witnesses must undergo full debriefings that encompass their entire criminal history, as well as any and all information they possess about crimes committed by both themselves and others,” they wrote.
Cohen, they said, did not undergo such debriefings.
As a result, the prosecutors wrote, Cohen is not officially a cooperating government witness – and is ineligible for a leniency recommendation.
They acknowledged that Cohen provided information to Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, for which they said he deserves some credit. But they wrote that he should not be spared prison time, as he requested.
They urged U.S. District Court Judge William Pauley to sentence him to roughly 42 months – less than the 51 to 63 months indicated by federal sentencing guidelines but still a “substantial term of imprisonment.”
Their recommendation stems from a long-standing legal protocol.
“Federal prosecutors are crystal clear that when a defendant begins the process of considering cooperation that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition,” said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor.
Mintz, who was deputy chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force Division for the District of New Jersey, has no involvement in the Cohen case.
Cooperating witnesses “don’t have the ability to pick and choose the areas of potential criminal conduct they want to disclose to prosecutors,” he said.“What Michael Cohen attempted to do here is to have it both ways.”
Mueller, in his separate sentencing recommendation, said Cohen committed a serious crime by lying to Congress about plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Cohen cooperated with Mueller’s Russia investigation and pleaded guilty to the lies late last month.
Mueller’s team recommended that any prison term Pauley might impose be served concurrently with any sentence the judge orders for the case brought by the New York federal prosecutors.