Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer and “fixer” for Donald Trump, pleaded guilty in federal court on Tuesday to eight counts of income tax evasion, lying to a bank, making an unlawful campaign contribution and, in a charge that appears to directly involve the $130,000 “hush money” payment he made to Stormy Daniels, making an “excessive campaign contribution,” Bloomberg News reported.
And in the biggest bombshell of Tuesday’s court hearing, Cohen admitted that “a candidate for federal office” ordered him to make the payment to Daniels—a candidate later confirmed by Cohen’s own lawyer to be President Donald Trump.
“Today [Michael Cohen] stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis wrote on his Twitter account. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn't they be a crime for Donald Trump?”
The plea agreement filed by prosecutors noted that the $130,000 payment was made on October 27, 2016, the same day that Cohen finalized the hush money deal with Daniels, according to The Washington Post.
In his guilty pleas, Cohen also admitted arranging a $150,000 payment to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. Both Daniels and McDougal say that they had sexual relationships with Trump in 2006.
In his plea deal, Cohen admitted that he followed Trump’s orders to keep “information that would have been harmful to the candidate and the campaign from becoming public.”
Cohen told a judge in the Southern District of New York federal court that the payments to the two women were made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election,” according to The New York Times.
Daniels sued Cohen and Trump over the hush money deal in March, but a federal judge in California has delayed the case until at least September 10, to wait for the outcome of the investigation into Cohen in New York. But Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said that Cohen’s confessions in open court clears the way for that case to be resumed—and for Trump to sit for a deposition.
“The developments of today will permit us to have the stay lifted in the civil case and should also permit us to proceed with an expedited deposition of Trump under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it,” Avenatti wrote on Twitter. “We will disclose it all to the public.”
Cohen now faces a prison term of between four years and six years, according to Bloomberg News.
Photo by IowaPolitics.com / Wikimedia Commons
