Michael Cohen Just Took A Plea Deal That Has Trump’s White House On Eggshells

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s nightmare may be turning into reality this week. After his former lawyer Michael Cohen faced months of legal scrutiny over work including some he did for the president, he’s now reportedly reached a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty. He’s reportedly formally entering the plea Tuesday afternoon, admitting to charges including campaign finance law violations, bank fraud, and tax fraud.

The investigation he’s faced has included some legal vulnerability for the president because of the aforementioned work Cohen did for him that prompted the campaign finance law violations. The lawyer paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money covering an affair with the president, a transaction the president was eventually definitively revealed to be involved with.

In all, he was recently revealed to be facing allegations of tens of millions of dollars worth of bank fraud. That fraud was connected to his family’s taxi work, which the government got some help in examining via former Cohen partner Evgeny Friedman’s agreement to cooperate with authorities earlier this year.

For all of his crimes, he’s reportedly facing some 3-4 years in prison.

One catch to Cohen’s plea deal is that he might not be cooperating with prosecutors. They’ve already got massive troves of information seized from his office in raids earlier this year, but if that detail holds through the process, then he won’t be handing any more info over.

However, the president has already proven paranoid at the investigation into Cohen, which has been reported to have stemmed at least in part from a referral from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who’s one of the president’s favorite political targets. Trump insisted at one point that there’s no way Cohen would ever “flip,” and while, to be clear, there’s no clear cooperation on the horizon, his confidence in his former “fixer’s” commitment to holding his position against prosecutors was not well-founded.