The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump's Former Lawyer Michael Cohen Sentenced To 3 Years In Prison

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

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. This episode: political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and justice correspondent Ryan Lucas. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Rachel from northern New Jersey on my first day of maternity leave solo now that my husband has gone back to work. This podcast was recorded at 2.06 p.m. on Wednesday, December 12th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. President Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison and we are here to give you the update on that. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. So today, Ryan, you're up in New York because you were there at the courthouse when Michael Cohen was being sentenced. What was the scene like? What happened? Well, first of all, I got

there about almost three hours before this hearing was supposed to begin. There was already a line that was forming in the courthouse. The courtroom itself was packed. You had journalists on one side, and then a lot of Cohen's family was there. You had his father, who's a Holocaust survivor, a man by the name of Maurice Cohen. He was there in a gray suit sitting in a wheelchair. Cohen's mother was there, brother, sister. His wife showed up and their two children, his daughter and son, who were 23 and 19. So there

was a very strong family presence for Cohen. It was almost like they were dressed for a funeral. And then the proceedings themselves got underway. Right. So what we learned today is what he was sentenced to three years in prison. I mean, you talked about it being like a funeral. Well, they are potentially they are saying goodbye to him for a few years. And not only that, but he's going to pay what, like up to two million dollars in restitution in some form. Right. Well, yes, he got three years in prison, forfeiture of half a million dollars, restitution of nearly one point four and then fines that add up to about one hundred thousand dollars. So, yes, it was not all told particularly sunny day for the Cohen family. But that said, it could have been worse. It could have been that he

saw four to five years in prison. So 36 months, three years in total is not as bad as it could have been. So you had the special counsel's office, and then you also have prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Did they sort of make different arguments about how much time he should get? The special counsel's office has not specified how much time they thought that he should get. They thought that he should get credit to his benefit for cooperating with the special counsel's investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Southern District of New York, which was conducting a separate investigation into Cohen's business dealings. So he pleaded guilty to tax evasion, financial crimes, to campaign finance violations,

which involve hush money payments made to women who alleged that they had affairs with President Trump. Notably, Cohen has implicated the president in that, saying that he was ordered and directed to make those payments by Trump himself. Now, prosecutors in Manhattan and the Southern District of New York had asked for substantial prison time. Okay, so what did Cohen have to say for himself at this hearing? Well, Cohen got up, stood up, buttoned his suit, walked over to the lectern and talked for about 10 minutes. And he was very contrite. He took responsibility for his actions. And he actually said that this may be hard to believe, but today is one of the most meaningful days of my life. Today, I get my freedom back. And he went on to explain what he meant by that.

And basically, he said that he'd been living in personal and mental incarceration ever since he agreed to start working for Trump, and that he acted out of blind loyalty to Trump that led him, he said, down a path of darkness, not light. These are kind of apocalyptic tones that he was speaking in. He acknowledged that the president has called him weak. Yes. And Cohen said, I was weak, but not in the way that Trump means it. I was weak because I viewed it as my duty to cover up Trump's dirty deeds. I was weak for not having the strength to refuse his demands. And he says owning that mistake will make me free to once more be the person that I truly am. It was almost like the president had cast a spell over him for the years that they worked together.

And Cohen just couldn't shake himself out of it. And out of this blind loyalty, under this spell, he would do anything that Trump asked him to do. And he said, even though he knew in the cases of the campaign finance violations, that these were the wrong things to do, that he was essentially cheating the American people. He went ahead and did it anyways, out of loyalty to Trump. Can I just offer a counterpoint to that or a theory on this, at least? Yeah. Which is that Michael Cohen knows that there is a large appetite in this country for people who will say things that are negative about the president. Once he gets out of prison,

if he wants to have a life again, if he wants to work and make money and contribute to society, he needs to repair his reputation. And this seems like the beginning of repairing his reputation. Right. Or attempting to, at the very least. There's the long-term view on that, which is absolutely correct, I think, Tam. And then there's also the short-term view, which is he's talking to the judge asking for leniency when he's going to be sentenced to prison. And he's trying to make as convincing a case as possible to say he is a changed man. I think that it was legitimately difficult for him. And he broke up when he was talking in court, when he was saying what this meant for his family and the

shame that it has brought to his family and how his wife and two children have come under attack because of his actions. And with his parents in the courtroom, he also kind of broke up when he started saying they don't deserve this. You know, they raised me right and they don't deserve to be here in a situation like this where their son is pleading guilty to these sorts of crimes. And we should stress here that this isn't just about hush money for covering up an alleged affair, right? Or just about tax evasion, because tax evasion is a big crime. And this is about campaign finance violations to affect an election. Yes. And the sentencing judge, Judge William Pauley, the Southern District of New York, made that clear. After Cohen spoke,

Pauley had a chance to explain his reasoning as to why he was coming to the decision that he ultimately would come to. And he said that Cohen had basically committed what he described as a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent activity and that as a lawyer, he should have known better. So Tam and Ryan, you guys cover this much more closely than I do. So how big of a development is this, this sentence of three years? Well, from the perspective of the president, he had complained that, you know, people turn state's witness and they become rat and then they get a lighter sentence. Michael Cohen's getting a pretty serious sentence here.

It doesn't mean that the president won't have plenty to complain about. But Cohen's not saga that began with the FBI raid on his office and residences in April. With sentencing today, it brings that thread to an end, but Cohen has agreed to continue to cooperate with the special counsel's office. So while his sentencing is complete, and he will, as of now, report on March 6th to serve his sentence. That doesn't mean that any information that he has squirreled away in his head can't come back and bite the president. Right. And I have a statement from his one of his attorneys, Lanny Davis. that Michael Cohen continues to tell the truth about Donald Trump's misconduct over the years at the appropriate time after Mr. Mueller completes his investigation and issues his final report.

I look forward to assisting Michael to state publicly all he knows about Mr. Trump. And that includes any appropriate congressional committee interested in the search for truth and the difference between facts and lies. Oh, man. So this is not necessarily the last that we've heard from him at all. No, I mean, as long as Lanny Davis, who was also a lawyer for for Bill Clinton and was the who was sort of Bill Clinton's cable lawyer who went out on the news and fought for him. As long as Lanny Davis is representing Michael Cohen as part of his reputational repair. This is not the last we've heard of Michael Cohen.

Right. OK, well, on that note, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we are going to look ahead to where the Russia investigation goes next and how the president is reacting to all of this. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Grow with Google. Digital skills are becoming more and more important in today's economy. That's why Grow with Google is providing free online training and tools to help Americans learn the skills they need to succeed. Learn more about Grow with Google and get started by visiting google.com slash grow. Looking for the perfect gift for the public radio and podcast nerds in your life? NPR t-shirts, caps, totes, mugs, pet products, toys, and puzzles

are just waiting to be checked off your holiday shopping list at shop.npr.org. And we're back. Ryan, before the break, you just told us that this kind of caps off the Michael Cohen story, but there are a lot of other threads dangling out there, threads named Flynn and Manafort and so on. Can you just run down what other storylines are still going here? Well, Michael Flynn, the president's first national security advisor who had to resign after lying about his contacts with Russians, he is due to be sentenced next week. He put out a rather lengthy sentencing memo yesterday saying that he basically deserves to get off without any time.

And that's more or less what the special counsel's office has said as well because he's provided substantial cooperation. So that will kind of wrap up. Manafort was convicted in August of various financial crimes in Virginia. He has since pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in a separate but related case in Washington. He had a cooperation agreement, which appears to have blown up. The special counsel's office has accused him of lying to them after he agreed to cooperate. There is now a sentencing date scheduled for Manafort in March. And there's still going to be some legal wrangling over whether or not Manafort did lie.

Special counsel's office said he did. Manafort's attorneys say they believe that he provided truthful information. And I have one other thing that's dangling out there. Sure. Michael Cohen may be done, but I don't think the Southern District of New York is done. And the reason for that is that today we also got word of a cooperation agreement between prosecutors in New York and AMI. That's the parent company of the National Enquirer. Right.

And they were involved in one of these hush money payments. That there is a cooperation agreement might mean that there is ongoing cooperation. And what AMI does is appear to corroborate what Cohen has told investigators about that payment to Karen McDougal, the Playboy model who said that she had an affair with Trump. And there's been questions of whether there is legal exposure for the president in this. He, of course, Tam, as you've said, he says, no, not really no big deal. Bottom line at this point, though, is while Trump is in office, according to Department of Justice guidance, he cannot be indicted. A sitting president cannot be indicted. So sitting president cannot be indicted.

So it's kind of an academic exercise at this point. Well, as far as Trump saying no big deal, I mean, he's tried to distance himself from Cohen. He's tried to downplay the campaign finance violations here. I mean, from what we've learned today and in the last week, I mean, does this change any of that, how we look at Trump's statements? As far as these campaign finance violations, which are felonies, the president is describing them as just a civil thing. Let me just read this quote from an interview he did with Reuters. This is sort of where he's coming from on this. Number one, it wasn't a campaign contribution. If it were, it's only civil. And even if it's only civil, there was no violation based on what we did. OK. So maybe final thought to wrap this up. This is the closest person to Trump to be sent to jail as a result of this whole investigation. So does Cohen serving three years in prison, how much does that change things for the president? Does that change how the public sees him? It's not clear to me that this is a tipping point. If Cohen standing in court several months ago and saying that President Trump had directed him to make these payments wasn't a tipping point,

then Cohen being sentenced to prison, I don't know if that's a tipping point either. And I think I think it will be interesting to see how this is interpreted by the public in polls, because after Paul Manafort was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia in August, which was actually the same day that Cohen originally pleaded guilty to the financial crimes, there was a bump in public confidence or public faith in Mueller's investigation. And it will be interesting to see whether Cohen's guilty plea about lying to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and now his sentencing have a similar effect. Okay, that's a wrap for today. We'll be back tomorrow with our weekly roundup.

Until then, please follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Just search NPR Politics to find us. Until then, I'm Danielle Kurtz, Laban political reporter. And I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.