By Aaron Miller-
Donald Trump’s fomer lawyer, Michael Cohen has admitted in court, that he acted with Trump and his allies, including David Pecker, the CEO of the National Enquirer’s publisher, American Media Inc., to suppress potentially damaging claims against the now-President.
Trump himself wasn’t named in the court filing, but the fact Cohen was employed by Trump at the time is being seen as implicating him.
The counts against Cohen are damning and included tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump, including payments Cohen made or helped put together to silence women who claimed to have had extramarital affairs with Donald Trump
Though not named in the plea deal filed in court, the women whom Cohen silence have since gone public with their claims of sexual encounters or affairs with Trump: a porn star named Stephanie Clifford, who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels, and a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal. Trump has denied the claims.
Cohen claimed he arranged a nondisclosure agreement for which he paid her $130,000, and for that Cohen was charged with making an excessive campaign contribution, since the payment was made in service of the campaign and exceeded the federal limit.
For McDougal, Cohen and the CEO of a media company “worked together to keep an individual from publicly disclosing” information that would have been harmful to a candidate, saying the individual received $150,000. In the summer of 2016, American Media Inc. paid McDougal $150,000 for a contract that effectively silenced her claims of an affair with Trump.
“In or about August 2015, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Corporation-1 (“Chairman-1″), in coordination with Michael Cohen, the defendant, and one or more members of the campaign, offered to help deal with negative stories about Individual-l’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided,” the criminal information says. “Chairman-1 agreed to keep COHEN apprised of any such negative stories.”
Though the corporation and its chairman are not named, court filings desribe the corporation as “a media company that owns, among other things, a popular tabloid magazine.”
The court filings in which AMI is linked to Clifford, reveal events in October 2016, in which an agent for an adult film actress contacted the company and said she was willing to go public with her allegations of an affair with Trump. Pecker reportedly contacted Cohen, and Cohen negotiated with the woman’s attorney to “purchase [her] silence” for $130,000.The woman then threatened Cohen to take the story to another publication in late October , forcing Cohen to move quickly to seal the deal to prevent things looking awfully bad for everyone,” according to court filings. Cohen then agreed to make the payment and finalize the deal.
Assistant US Attorney Andrea Griswold described the payments as evidence of its aim to conceal the affairs from the public.
“The proof on these counts at trial would establish that these payments were made in order to ensure that each recipient of the payments did not publicize their stories of alleged affairs with the candidate,” she said.
The charges against Cohen also covered a range of his activity outside of his work for Trump. In the tax evasion scheme linked to his taxi medallion business, Cohen failed to report over $4 million in income, according to the criminal information filed against him, resulting in his avoidance of more than $1.4 million in taxes he would have had to owe the Internal Revenue Service.Cohen also pleaded guilty to making false statements to a bank by understating his medallion debt in order to secure loans to buy property.
He had omitted a $14 million line of credit on applications so that he could purchase properties, including a Park Avenue condominium and a summer home. He also got a $500,000 home equity line of credit in April 2016, a loan he never would have gotten if the bank knew of the $14 million debt, the court filings say.
The guilty plea from Cohen is a blow for Trump because Cohen given his close professional association with Trump as his personal attorney at the Trump Organization and even subsequent to his election as president. Cohen was once a die hard ally of Donald Trump, but the relationship between the two men has dwindled ever since an FBI raid in April at Cohen’s office, hotel room and home.It’s not clear how the plea deal with Cohen might affect other entities that have been under scrutiny by federal prosecutors as part of the Cohen investigation, including AMI or Pecker. This story has been updated to correct the name of the alcohol that Cohen said he drank on Monday night.