Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, has been sentenced to three years in prison for his role in illegal hush money payments and for lying to congress.
His defence lawyers had hoped for leniency after he pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations relating to payments to silence two women claiming to have had affairs with Trump in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
But US District Judge William Pauley described his crimes as “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct” before ordering him to report to prison next March to serve a 36-month term.
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CNN says “his sentence will be the longest thus far for anyone involved with the President or stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election”.
Federal agents raided Cohen’s office and home in April, and he later turned on the president, making the remarkable admission in court that Trump had directed him to arrange the payments.
Trump has denied the alleged affairs, with porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, and dismissed the six-figure payments to them as a “simple private transaction” – a change in his story, having previously denied all knowledge of them, adds The Guardian.
The New York Times says it marks “a startling fall” for the president’s one-time fixer turned enemy number one, “who had once hoped to work by Trump’s side in the White House”.
The case has also become a proxy battle between Trump and Mueller.
Cohen’s role in the hush-money scandal “could threaten Trump’s presidency by implicating him in a scheme to buy the silence of two women who said they had affairs with him”, says the New York Times.
Yet it is his claims about Trump’s possible connections with Russia that are by far the greater threat to the president.
Last month, in a case brought by Mueller, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the duration of negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, as well as about the extent of Trump’s involvement.
“Cohen’s sentencing underscores the scope and breadth Mueller’s probe has taken as it has investigated the ties between Russia and Trump’s team, an examination that often has consumed the President for the first half of his term,” reports CNN.
Others connected to the president who have pleaded guilty in the special counsel’s investigation, include Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, but none were as close to the president for as long as Cohen.
The White House offered no comment yesterday on Cohen, but pointed reporters to a tweet Trump posted last week, saying: “He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.”
