Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney to Donald Trump who once said he would take a bullet for the President, pleaded guilty Tuesday to a string of eight federal criminal counts.
On paper, the violations sounded grave, technical, and weedy: Tax evasion. Bank fraud. Breaking campaign finance laws. But what it really boils down to is the fact that Cohen’s confession means he worked specifically on behalf of “a candidate for federal office” to silence women.
It was the first time the lawyer “admitted to coordinating with the President on the hush-money deals with women” after months of public denial, implicating the nation’s leader in his crimes, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In short, Trump’s encounters with women may be the game changer in this presidency.
If you haven’t been following, here’s why this matters: Cohen and Team Trump have been pretty vocal about discrediting women. Former Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn actress Stormy Daniels have said they had sexual relationships with Trump; afterward, they were paid to keep quiet and, they claimed, at times threatened to stay that way.
Among the many times Cohen rejected the accounts include a statement in January, where he responded to a WSJ report that revealed the existence of the $130,000 payment to Daniels a month before the 2016 presidential election: “This is now the second time that you are raising outlandish allegations against my client. You have attempted to perpetuate this false narrative for over a year; a narrative that has been consistently denied by all parties since at least 2011.” And in a lawsuit filed by Daniels to sue her former lawyer Keith Davidson for allegedly collaborating with Cohen to disclose her legal strategy, Cohen is named in an allegation that he held a meeting with First Lady Melania Trump to discredit Daniels.
Trump has denied affairs with the women, who were not named in Tuesday’s complaint, with Cohen being the front-facing enforcer of this denial for months.
Also not named: Trump himself—but Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, left no question as to which “candidate for federal office” his client meant: “Michael Cohen took this step today so that his family can move on to the next chapter. This is Michael fulfilling his promise made on July 2nd to put his family and country first and tell the truth about Donald Trump,” Davis tweeted Tuesday afternoon.
“Today he 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,” Davis continued. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”
Cohen wasn’t the only former member of Team Trump in court Tuesday: A jury also convicted the president’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort on eight of 18 felony charges covering a variety of financial crimes.
Trump, who rallied fans in West Virginia after the competing court dramas, told reporters he considered Manafort to be a “good man” and railed against a “witch hunt.” The president addressed Cohen’s case in a Wednesday interview on Fox and Friends, claiming he knew nothing of the hush payments at the time.
Trump’s attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, insisted there was “no allegation of any wrongdoing against the President in the charges.” This is the same Giuliani who, in June, attempted to discredit Daniels with comments that many believed to be misogynistic.
“I respect all human beings. I even have to respect criminals,” he said. “But I’m sorry, I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career women or a women of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a women and as a person and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.”
There’s clearly a long record of Trump having, to put it mildly, a complicated relationship with women, from his serial marriages to the names he calls them.
But if Trump is found to have run afoul of the rules in an attempt to hush up women whose stories could have hurt his campaign, legal analysts say it won’t be repeated trips down the aisle or Twitter insults that end up being the president’s real problem.
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