A prison sentence is a breathtaking fall for Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer.
Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday, telling a judge that he initially admired Mr. Trump’s business acumen but ended up in a job where “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.”
The prison sentence was for what the judge called a “veritable smorgasbord” of crimes. They included arranging hush-money payments to two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump, tax evasion, making a false statement to a bank and lying to Congress.
Prison is a breathtaking fall for Mr. Cohen, a man who scrapped his way up from a seedy world where he ran a taxi fleet and practiced personal injury law to serve as a well-compensated fixer at Mr. Trump’s real estate company.
Here are our takeaways from the case.
From the start, Mr. Cohen followed a risky and unusual legal strategy. He tried to cooperate with prosecutors in a bid for leniency, but he wanted to do it on his own terms, declining to discuss many topics.
He refused to sign a full cooperation agreement like most people sign when they agree to testify against their former partners in crime. That kind of deal would have required Mr. Cohen to admit to every crime he ever committed and to offer all the details he knew about the crimes of others.
He explained at his sentencing that he did so to end his legal ordeal quickly and to spare his family the glare of publicity over the years he would have spent testifying in other cases, waiting for a final decision on his fate. “I do not need a cooperation agreement to be in place to do the right thing,” he said.
But federal prosecutors in Manhattan said his refusal to cooperate fully made it impossible to vet his criminal history or know how good a witness he would be. Calling him deceitful and greedy, they recommended in a scathing memo to the judge that Mr. Cohen be given a substantial sentence of about four years in prison.
Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference with the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign was involved, offered a more positive assessment of Mr.
