Five takeaways from Cohen sentencing recommendations

WA S HING TON» Michael Cohen isn’t getting as much of a break from prosecutors as he would have liked when he started dishing about President Donald Trump, but that dishing does seem to have drawn Trump closer to potential legal trouble.

Those are the big developments from the Cohen sentencing recommendations filed Friday afternoon by the Southern District of New York and special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but there are plenty of other things worth noting:

• Cohen has overstated his cooperation with Mueller: This might be the biggest takeaway when it comes to the Southern District of New York document — and its relevance to Trump. We knew Cohen never technically had a cooperation agreement with Southern District of New York or Mueller, but he made a big public show of looking like he was atoning for his wrongs by telling prosecutors whatever they asked.

The prosecutors wound up requesting only a “modest” reduction in Cohen’s sentence, for which the guidelines recommend 51 to 63 months.

(This is separate from the plea deal Cohen struck with Mueller last week — for lying — for which Mueller recommended his sentence runs concurrent with his Southern District of New York sentence.)

“Individual-1” is back: As in last week’s documents, Trump is clearly listed as “Individual-1” and “Individual 1”: “In January 2017, Cohen formally left the Company and began holding himself out as the ‘personal attorney’ to Individual-1, who at that point had become the President of the United States,” the Southern District of New York prosecutors say.

It directly implicates Trump in crimes: We knew from his plea deal, in which he admitted to eight crimes, that Cohen had implicated Trump in campaign finance violations involving the payment to Stormy Daniels. But here the SDNY prosecutors also state Trump’s role in directing the payment as plain fact.

“In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1,” they say.

That’s significant, because it’s now on-record that they — not just Cohen — regard Trump as having directed Cohen in the commission of what has been found to be a felony.

Legal experts say it means prosecutors have corroborating evidence to back up Cohen’s claims.

Cohen was contacted by a Russian national in 2015: From Mueller’s document:

“In or around November 2015, Cohen received the contact information for, and spoke with, a Russian national who claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’ The defendant recalled that this person repeatedly proposed a meeting between Individual 1 and the President of Russia.” Cohen, however, did not follow up on this invitation.

Mueller appears to be looking at Russia ties in Trump’s business

The writing was on the wall for this when Mueller reached that plea deal with Cohen for lying about such matters last week; it was the best explanation for Cohen’s continued pursuit of Trump Tower Moscow being entered into the public record.

But the Mueller document makes clear Cohen has given it information about these matters, information it is interested in and called “useful.”