This week in New York, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen faced a sentencing hearing over an array of charges he’s been slapped with and pleaded guilty to — and in the process, he dragged President Donald Trump through the mud yet again.
After a back and forth involving prosecutors for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Cohen’s own defense team, the lawyer himself addressed the court.
He commented, in part:
‘Today is the day that I am getting my freedom back… I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real estate mogul whose business acumen that I deeply admired.’
That’s a wild shift from the stance he’s had in the past, having at one point pronounced that he’d take a bullet for the president. As a hush money scheme the two were involved in meant to silence women with whom Trump had affairs fell apart, so did the two men’s relationship.
Cohen eventually agreed to cooperate with authorities and in the process, implicated the president in his crimes. The hush money operation enacted a tremendous societal cost, SDNY prosecutors asserted Wednesday, and Cohen worked closely with Trump throughout the entire process. He did not work alone as the president previously asserted.
Ultimately this Wednesday, after a recommendation to that effect from prosecutors, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison — for crimes including ones in which the president of the United States was involved. Besides the campaign finance law violations associated with the hush money, he’s also previously pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the Trump team’s ties to Russia.
