Cohen: ‘There still remains much to be told’
He spoke eight times with Robert Mueller’s investigators, appeared before three congressional committees and helped federal prosecutors with at least two criminal inquiries into President Donald Trump’s inner circle. But on Monday, perhaps the most important number in Michael Cohen’s life will be 1,095: the number of days in a three-year prison term.
Cohen, the president’s former fixer and current antagonist, reported to the federal prison in Otisville, New York, to begin serving his sentence for campaign finance violations, tax evasion and other crimes. He pleaded guilty last year to arranging a hush money scheme in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, involving two women who said they had had affairs with Trump.
Before leaving Manhattan Monday morning, Cohen spoke briefly with reporters outside his residence at Trump Park Avenue.
“I hope that when I rejoin my family and friends, that the country will be in a place without xenophobia, injustice and lies at the helm of our country,” he said before ducking into a black SUV for the twohour drive to Otisville. “There still remains much to be told.”
Late Monday morning, two federal agents stopped the SUV in a forested area just past the prison entrance. Cohen, in the passenger seat, chatted with them for a few minutes before putting his cellphone to his ear.
One of the agents pointed up the road, which twisted out of sight to the prison. Cohen cast a brief glance at the crowd of reporters lining the road and the SUV slowly pulled ahead.
Cohen, who implicated the president in the hush money scheme, was among the earliest subjects of Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the special counsel’s office ultimately handed over the Cohen investigation to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, Cohen was a central figure in Mueller’s report, which named him more than 800 times.
But Cohen’s sentence has also become a reminder of what the special counsel’s report did not do: directly accuse the president of a crime.
As Cohen heads to prison, the president is newly emboldened and the nation divided over whether the report let Trump off the hook. And unless the president or any of his family members face charges in the years to come, Cohen, a former personal-injury lawyer with a hangdog expression and a Long Island accent, may go down as an unlikely big fish caught in the net of Trump World investigations.
Of the half-dozen people sentenced in those investigations, Cohen has received one of the longest prison terms.