Here’s a potential plot twist worthy of 2018: After nearly two years of frenzied speculation about the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia, wouldn’t it be wild if the thing that brought him down was the porn star payoff after all?
That prospect reasserted itself in a Manhattan courthouse Tuesday, when President Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen struck a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion and bank fraud related to his personal business and campaign finance violations stemming the $130,000 payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to buy her silence about an alleged affair she had conducted years before with Trump.
The campaign finance charges aren’t what got Cohen in the most serious legal trouble, but they’re the ones likely to cause headaches for the president: Cohen is asserting that Trump knew about and authorized the illegal payment “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” Trump has previously insisted he had no knowledge of the Daniels payment before to the election.
The writing has been on the wall for months for Cohen’s break with Trump, for whom he long served as a personal fixer. On April 9, FBI agents raided the lawyer’s home and office, seizing business records related to the Daniels payment. At that time, Trump erupted in his attorney’s (and his own) defense, tweeting that the FBI had done “the unthinkable” and that “attorney-client privilege is now a thing of the past!” A day later, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders couldn’t answer whether Cohen still represented Trump. As late as April 21, he was calling Cohen “a fine person with a wonderful family.”
But all that changed when it became evident Cohen was likely to cooperate with prosecutors to shorten his own sentence. Last month, he made the shocking move of releasing a muddy recording of a conversation he had with the president, in which he alleged he and Trump had discussed the Daniels payment. “What kind of lawyer would tape a client? So sad!” Trump tweeted then. “Totally unheard of & perhaps illegal.”
