Updated at 12:57 p.m. ET A federal judge sentenced Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen to three years in prison on Wednesday following Cohen&
Updated at 12:57 p.m. ET
A federal judge sentenced Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen to three years in prison on Wednesday following Cohen’s guilty pleas to a number of political and finance crimes.
Those three years would be followed by three years of supervised release, and Cohen also is subject to forfeiture of $500,000, restitution of $1.4 million and a $50,000 fine.
Cohen faced a potential maximum penalty of some 45 years in prison, according to information from the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
Cohen had asked for leniency. The Justice Department asked a judge to give Cohen some consideration for the information that he has provided to prosecutors but argued that Cohen nonetheless still deserved a “substantial prison term.”
Cohen’s sentence marked the latest drop in a precipitous fall from the elbow of the powerful man whom Cohen served for years, sometimes as a brutal but fiercely loyal fixer.
Now, Trump’s former lawyer has broken completely with his onetime boss and handed the president’s political opponents new weapons that could have serious implications for Trump.
First, Cohen told authorities that Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women ahead of Election Day in 2016 to keep them quiet about sexual relationships they said they had with Trump — allegations Trump denies.
Federal authorities call that a violation of campaign finance law — one for which Trump also may be culpable.
Later, Cohen admitted that he and other Trump aides continued negotiations with powerful Russians about a potential real estate project in Moscow well into the 2016 presidential campaign.
Cohen had told Congress in 2017 that the talks ended in January, but his subsequent admission meant that Trump’s aides had a channel open with Russia even as Trump was becoming the GOP front-runner and was denying he had any ties to Russia.
