Immediately after the indictment, he says he didn’t really mean his guilty plea. Good luck on the witness stand.
It turns out it did not take long at all for Michael Cohen to throw a little wrench in the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump.
Late Thursday night, just hours after the news broke that the Manhattan district attorney’s office had obtained the indictment, Cohen decided this would be a great time to take advantage of the national spotlight and sit down for an interview with CNN’s Don Lemon and Alisyn Camerota. For several months, he has been interviewed by prosecutors and he’s testified before the grand jury about how Trump allegedly broke the law by directing Cohen to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels in 2016, which would likely make him a key witness against Trump at trial. Much of the CNN discussion entailed barely concealed gloating by Cohen, but at one point, he made clear what he had recently been hinting at: He believes he is not actually guilty of the federal-tax-evasion charges to which he pleaded guilty back in 2018.
“I have continuously told the same story. I’ve been shouting for five years from the rooftop,” Cohen said. “The lies by the Southern District of New York against me for the tax evasion, I actually hope it comes out. I have all the documents to show. There was no tax evasion. I’ve never in my life tax evade[d]. I’ve never filed [a] late tax return. I’ve never been audited. I’ve never received, you know, letters from the IRS. I have never had an opportunity going in to meet with an agent, and none of this is accurate.”
As I first noted several days ago, this is a major problem for Cohen’s credibility as a cooperating witness, but before we return to that, let’s quickly review the record.
When Cohen pleaded guilty, the charges included five counts of federal tax evasion stemming from his failure to report millions of dollars in income from taxi medallions he owned, which, according to the Southern District of New York, resulted “in the avoidance of taxes of more than $1.4 million due to the IRS.” As a fundamental part of a guilty plea in the federal system, the defendant has to acknowledge that he is, in fact, guilty of all the offenses — both factually and legally — which is what Cohen purported to do in 2018.
In the sentencing memo that Cohen’s lawyers at the time submitted on his behalf, they told the judge presiding over his case that Cohen “accepts full responsibility for the offense conduct.” They argued, though, that the underlying facts concerning tax evasion did not warrant significant sanctions in the form of incarceration and fines because the conduct was crude, not that serious, and did not entail the “complex and sophisticated offense conduct that characterizes many of the criminal tax cases prosecuted in this and other federal courts.
