If you were an unscrupulous tycoon looking for a fixer—someone to clean up or “fix” your legal and business troubles—you might have done worse than Michael Cohen. He was loyal to his client and willing to lie for him. He was ready to use just about any legal or at least quasi-legal means to clean up his client’s messes. He had no trouble intimidating and threatening anyone whom his client saw as a threat.
The relationship probably would have worked if his client, Donald Trump, had remained in the world of show business and Manhattan real estate. But he ran for president and won, and the rules at the very top of American public life are very different from the ones Trump and Cohen were used to. Not necessarily better or more virtuous, but different.
If Trump had never run for president, federal investigators may never have had reason to raid Cohen’s office, apartment, and hotel room, as they did last April. Those investigators were reportedly seeking, among other things, evidence related to payments of $130,000 and $150,000 made to pornographic actress Stephanie Clifford and one-time Playboy model Karen McDougal, respectively, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. But Cohen’s client was no longer just a show-biz playboy and a real-estate mogul; he was the president of the United States. And so, at least partly through a referral from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, FBI investigators came calling.
It has been clear for several weeks that Cohen was not in a position of strength vis-à-vis federal investigators. In July his attorney Lanny Davis released a secret recording in which Trump seemed to acknowledge and approve of a plan to pay off McDougal—strongly suggesting that the fixer was no longer willing to protect his one-time boss.
On Tuesday in a federal court in Manhattan, Cohen pleaded guilty to multiple counts of tax fraud and bank fraud. More important, for the purposes of the presidency anyway, was his guilty plea to campaign finance charges. Without directly naming the porn actresses or Trump, Cohen admitted to acting “in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office” for the purpose of paying two “individuals” to keep quiet about “information that would be harmful to the candidate and to the campaign.” He named the amounts—$150,000 and $130,000—making it clear he meant McDougal and Clifford.
The indictment alleges that Cohen made these two payments far in excess of federal campaign contribution limits (see paragraphs 42 and 44). Accordingly in his guilty plea Cohen conceded that the payments were campaign-related: “I participated in this conduct,” he said, “for the purpose of influencing the election.” What this means for the president is unclear, but the fact that both the indictment and Cohen’s plea pointedly note the president’s role in the payments suggests that Trump may be implicated, too—or at least that prosecutors have that in mind.
The plea deal doesn’t require Cohen’s cooperation with federal investigators or the Mueller inquiry, but he may cooperate anyway. On Tuesday night, Davis, Cohen’s attorney, told Rachel Maddow that “Mr. Cohen has knowledge on certain subjects that should be of interest to the special counsel, and is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows.” That may be the case, although Trump’s adversaries are best advised not to put all their hopes in Michael Cohen. Known liars tend to make bad witnesses.
Legal culpability aside, Cohen is a reflection of his boss. Both are unscrupulous, both are opportunists and profiteers—and both might still be thriving if they’d only remained in the world they knew best. But the presidency is very far from that world.
