Michael Cohen’s Last Days of Freedom

These days, the President’s former lawyer, and the fall guy in his web of misconduct, looks like a victim as well as a perpetrator.
Illustration of Michael Cohen behind bars
As prison looms, Cohen seems a complicated mix of perpetrator and victim.Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn

It takes some time for Michael Cohen to work his way to a table at the grillroom of the Loews Regency Hotel, on Park Avenue. He’s been a regular at the hotel’s famous power breakfasts for more than two decades, and on several recent visits staff members reached out to him for handshakes and bro hugs. These days, the restaurant, with its twenty-seven-dollar pancakes and sumptuously upholstered banquettes, represents a welcome refuge for the erstwhile “Personal Attorney to the President,” as Cohen used to describe himself. Outside the friendly cocoon of the hotel, he has attracted a bipartisan coalition of adversaries—Democrats who remember his years of service as Donald Trump’s fierce and profane fixer, and Republicans who abhor Cohen’s transformation into a vocal Trump critic. Robert Mueller, the special counsel, apparently has a different view of him. Cohen pleaded guilty, last year, to campaign-finance and financial-fraud crimes in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, and Mueller got Cohen to plead guilty to lying to Congress. But Mueller referred to Cohen’s testimony more than a hundred times in the recently released report of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he used Cohen’s testimony to establish one of his central conclusions: that Trump and his allies may have obstructed justice, by attempting to steer Cohen into protecting the President.

On May 6th, Cohen will begin serving a three-year sentence at the federal prison in Otisville, New York, seventy-five miles north of Manhattan, leaving in his wake a grieving family, vanishing wealth, and gloating enemies. In hostile tweets, the President has called him a “rat” who “makes up stories,” and insinuated that Cohen’s family members had committed other crimes. Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, told me last week, about Cohen, “I think he is a pathological, dumb liar.” Prosecutors in the Southern District have rebuffed Cohen’s attempts to offer evidence against Trump and others, thwarting his hope of reducing his sentence or delaying his surrender date. Congressional committees continue to demand his time. Cohen, who is fifty-two, has an unlined face, more or less permanently set in a hangdog scowl, and a voice that retains the unmistakable trace of his childhood on Long Island. In conversation, he jumps from topic to topic in a jittery staccato. To sit with him today is to listen to a fugue of self-pity and rage, from a man who also exhibits some understandable bewilderment at his plight. “I now have congressional committees asking me for more information based upon information that I had already given,” he told me at the Regency. “I’m not going to take another minute out of my family’s time with me in order to do anything anymore without knowing what benefit there is now to me.”

Cohen is one of only two people to receive a substantial prison sentence in the investigation that arose out of the 2016 election. In August of last year, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted of financial fraud and avoiding taxation on millions of dollars in income, among other crimes, and he is currently serving seven and a half years. Unlike Manafort, Cohen wasn’t the principal beneficiary of most of his crimes; Donald Trump was. Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign-finance law by orchestrating a payment of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to the porn actress Stormy Daniels “at the direction” of Trump. Cohen also acknowledged violating banking laws to obtain the money to pay Daniels; he admitted to a campaign-finance charge regarding a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar payment to silence the former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, to benefit Trump’s Presidential campaign; and he pleaded guilty to making a false statement to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump tower in Moscow, so that he could align his account with Trump’s own false public statements on the subject. In charges unrelated to Trump, Cohen also pleaded guilty to tax evasion.

Cohen chose to do Trump’s bidding for a decade, and that included lying to reporters and others as well as committing felonies on his boss’s behalf. In pleading guilty to all the counts against him, he surrendered his right to contest the charges before a jury. In the light of all this, Cohen has at best a modest claim on our sympathies. And yet there can be little doubt that he is a fall guy in Trump’s web of misconduct, and these days he looks like a victim as well as a perpetrator.

For many years, Michael Cohen’s life amounted to a realization of the American Dream: personal happiness and financial success on a grand scale. His father, Maurice, escaped from Poland during the Holocaust, and found his way to Canada, where he went to medical school. A head-and-neck surgeon, he moved to New York, met Sondra, a nurse, whom he married, and settled with her in Lawrence, one of the Five Towns, on Long Island. There, the couple raised four children, all of whom became lawyers. Michael graduated from American University in 1988, and from Thomas M. Cooley Law School, in Michigan, in 1991. In New York, he worked at a negligence-and-malpractice law firm for five years, until his fortunes turned when he became acquainted with the Shusterman family.

Fima Shusterman and his family emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in the early seventies, and, in New York, he first made ends meet by driving a cab. He did a stint in the garment business and started buying taxi medallions when they were rapidly appreciating in value. Shusterman’s rise was only slightly slowed when he pleaded guilty, in 1993, to participating in a tax-evasion scheme. After he testified against his accountant, in Brooklyn federal court, he received a sentence of probation. Around this time, Cohen met Laura Shusterman, Fima’s daughter, and the two were married. Cohen ultimately joined forces with the Shusterman family in the medallion business.

Cohen prospered during the post-9/11 recession, which particularly affected the New York City taxi industry. Many Sikh drivers, who wore turbans and beards, felt threatened by anti-Muslim sentiment and left the business. Cohen picked up more medallions at depressed prices, and he and his father-in-law came to control almost three hundred of them. In time, Cohen was worth some ninety million dollars on paper. In the early two-thousands, Cohen and his in-laws bought apartments in Trump World Tower, at 845 United Nations Plaza. The families later bought other Trump apartments as investments, and Cohen met and became friendly with Donald Trump, Jr.

At the time, the Trump Organization was dealing with a rebellion of the condominium board at Trump World Tower, and Don, Jr., suggested to his father that Cohen, who was still practicing law, might help to resolve it. Cohen told me, “They wanted to take his name off the building, and we quietly got enough votes where we got rid of that board and inserted our own. That’s how I got to meet Mr. Trump, and then he asked me to do some other things for him.” Trump never paid Cohen for resolving the board controversy, but, in 2007, he hired Cohen to work for the Trump Organization. Cohen’s title—executive vice-president and special counsel—reflected his unique position at the company. “My role was specifically for him, as his special counsel—anything that came up, that upset him, that related to him, that others wouldn’t be able to deal with or needed special handling,” Cohen said. He was to take care of any matters, personal or professional, that Mr. Trump, as Cohen still always refers to him, wanted him to address.

In the decade before Trump became President, Cohen used intimidation, threats, and bluster to do his bidding. Cohen frequently dealt with the press. On one oft-recounted occasion, Tim Mak, then a reporter for the Daily Beast, asked him about the allegation by Trump’s first wife, Ivana, which she later recanted, that Trump had raped her. Cohen told Mak, “I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting.” Cohen earned a reputation for extreme devotion, even sycophancy, toward Trump, who repaid him, on occasion, with disdain. In 2009, when Trump was dissatisfied with Cohen’s performance, he cut his salary from four hundred thousand dollars per year to two hundred thousand. (Two years later, he restored the salary.) Notwithstanding the slights, Cohen remained loyal to Trump. As he told me, “I actually enjoyed him, interestingly enough. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s horrible, he’s the worst human being on the planet. I mean it. He has no heart and no soul when he’s mean.”

In 2016, Cohen helped arrange the payments of hush money to Daniels and McDougal. In his efforts to keep their stories under wraps, Cohen and Trump had an important ally—David Pecker, a longtime friend of Trump’s, who was the chief executive of American Media, Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer. The government’s charging document states that Pecker committed to “assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.” Cohen was the go-between connecting Trump and Pecker. (Pecker declined to comment.)

In June, when McDougal began attempting to sell the story of her months-long relationship with Trump, which had taken place a decade earlier, Cohen urged Pecker to buy her account and then bury it—a practice, in the argot of tabloids, known as “catch and kill.” Cohen promised Pecker that Trump would reimburse A.M.I. for the cost of McDougal’s silence. As Cohen told me, “Trump was supposed to pay them back.” In August, 2016, A.M.I. bought McDougal’s story for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, with the understanding that the Enquirer would never publish it.

According to Cohen, he worked on the plan with Allen Weisselberg, the long-tenured chief financial officer of the Trump Organization. Cohen’s version of the payment plan to McDougal is backed up by an audio recording that he made of a conversation with Trump at the time. On the recording, Cohen says to Trump, “I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg about how to set the whole thing up with—” Trump interrupts: “So, what do we got to pay for this? One-fifty?” Cohen answers, “Yes.”

A.M.I. bought the rights to publish McDougal’s fitness columns and to feature her on the covers of two of its fitness magazines, and so Cohen and Pecker said that Trump would be liable for only a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars of the company’s payment to her. But Trump never paid anything to A.M.I. According to Cohen, McDougal’s appearance on the cover of one of the magazines, Muscle & Fitness Hers, led to a sizable increase in sales, and Trump decided that A.M.I. had received its money’s worth in the deal. Cohen told me, “It sold over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of print, which was the highest for the whole year. So you invest a hundred and fifty, you make two hundred and fifty, you still have her for another cover, and for two years on the blog. It was a good deal.” Pecker didn’t pursue Trump for failing to pay, but, Cohen said, he used to yell at Cohen about it. Cohen told me that he would say to Pecker, “David, why are you yelling at me? Go yell at Trump.” Other sources suggested that A.M.I. stopped asking for reimbursement on the advice of its lawyers. In any event, the National Enquirer never disclosed Trump’s relationship with McDougal.

Cohen stepped into the Stormy Daniels story in September, 2016, just weeks before Election Day. Daniels’s attorney was demanding that Trump himself pay to suppress her account of a one-night stand with him, which took place in 2006, shortly after his wife, Melania, gave birth to the couple’s son. Cohen took charge of the negotiations, protecting Trump from making a direct payment to Daniels. Cohen told me that he worked through a series of possible scenarios with Weisselberg. “He was involved right from the very beginning,” Cohen said. “I wanted Allen to pay the money—I didn’t want to take it from my account. He wanted me to find somebody who wanted to become a member of a golf club or was going to have a party at one of the functions and they could take the hundred and thirty off of the bill that way and then they could pay me—I mean, he came up with a hundred different ideas.” (Weisselberg, through his attorney, declined to comment.)

In the end, Cohen put up a hundred and thirty thousand dollars of his own to buy Daniels’s silence, and set up a shell company called Essential Consultants L.L.C. to disguise the source of the money. He withdrew the funds from a home-equity line of credit. “I didn’t want my wife to know that I was taking a hundred and thirty thousand dollars out of the account,” he explained. “She’s going to say, ‘Michael, what’s a hundred and thirty thousand dollars out of the account for?’ ‘Well, I really can’t tell you.’ That’s not something that she would accept. That’s not something that any wife would accept.”

Cohen said that Trump promised to reimburse him for the payment to Daniels, and that Weisselberg would take care of the logistics: “The amount of money that they were going to pay back was created by him. How they were going to pay me the money back was created by him. And then the two of us went, as we did throughout the entire process, to Trump’s office, and he approved it.” Cohen put a hundred and thirty thousand dollars from his home-equity line into the shell entity on October 26th, and, on November 1st, a week before Election Day, Daniels signed an agreement not to talk. Trump got what he wanted.

It’s easy to see why the prosecutors in the Southern District regarded the money paid to the two women as unlawful campaign contributions. The purpose of both payments was to help Trump win the election. Each payment exceeded the twenty-seven-hundred-dollar maximum contribution allowed by any individual, and neither payment was reported to the Federal Election Commission as a campaign contribution. But, if that was the crime, who were the criminals? Pecker put up his company’s money, so he would be a suspect. And Weisselberg, according to Cohen’s testimony and his recording with Trump, helped design both schemes, so he would be one, too. Later, when Cohen testified before Congress, he produced copies of the checks that were used to reimburse him for his payment to Daniels. The checks were signed by Weisselberg, Donald Trump, Jr., and the President. Cohen’s recording proved that Trump knew of the McDougal payment as well, and he alone was the beneficiary of the entire arrangement. For this reason, he, too, might be implicated.

The Southern District prosecutors declined to comment, but one can speculate about why they gave passes to Pecker, Weisselberg, Don, Jr., and the President. The prosecutors were clearly trying to pressure Cohen into coöperating, and they needed a witness who could tie him to a scheme to make illegal campaign contributions. Pecker fit that bill, so the prosecutors were willing to give him immunity. Weisselberg had much to offer prosecutors about the full range of the President’s financial life, so they may have wanted to avoid charging him, too. Don, Jr.,’s role may have been too minor to merit prosecution.

When we met, Cohen remained outraged that he was prosecuted and Trump was not. “You are going to find me guilty of campaign finance, with McDougal or Stormy, and give me three years—really?” Cohen said. “And how come I’m the only one? I didn’t work for the campaign. I worked for him. And how come I’m the one that’s going to prison? I’m not the one that slept with the porn star.”

The Southern District prosecutors did acknowledge that Trump orchestrated the hush-money operation. As they wrote in advance of Cohen’s sentencing, “In particular, and as Cohen himself has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1”—that is, Donald Trump. Under Justice Department policy, a sitting President cannot be indicted, though it is possible that Trump could be charged in the hush-money case after he leaves office.

After Trump was elected, Cohen did not go to work for his Administration. In his testimony before Congress earlier this year, he said that this was his choice. “I did not want to go to the White House,” Cohen told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. But, in an interview with CNN in November, 2016, he said that he would go to Washington if he were asked. In any event, Cohen agreed to represent Trump as an outside lawyer, and he opened a law and consulting practice in New York in which he sold himself as the President’s personal attorney. At first, Cohen cashed in on his proximity to Trump. In the mordant words of the prosecutors in the Southern District, “Cohen also secured a substantial amount of consulting business for himself throughout 2017 by marketing to corporations what he claimed to be unique insights about and access to Individual-1. But while Cohen made millions of dollars from these consulting arrangements, his promises of insight and access proved essentially hollow. Documents obtained by the Government and witness interviews revealed that Cohen performed minimal work, and many of the consulting contracts were ultimately terminated.”

On May 17, 2017, eight days after Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, appointed Robert Mueller to be special counsel. Mueller turned his attention to Cohen almost immediately. On July 18th, before Mueller had finished assembling a staff, he obtained a search warrant for Cohen’s personal e-mails during 2016 and 2017. Under Mueller’s direction, the F.B.I. began an extraordinarily meticulous examination of Cohen’s life and finances. Later that year, Cohen had to face the crucible of sworn testimony before the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees.

The committees were investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, specifically Trump’s connections to business and government leaders in Moscow. During the campaign, Trump said that he had no business interests in Russia, and, in 2017, Cohen told Congress that, by the time of the Iowa caucuses, in February, 2016, he and Trump were no longer in negotiations for a Trump tower in Moscow. On August 28, 2017, Cohen wrote a letter to Congress about the Moscow project, stating, “The proposal was under consideration at the Trump Organization from September 2015 until the end of January 2016. By the end of January 2016, I determined that the proposal was not feasible for a variety of business reasons and should not be pursued further. . . . I did not ask or brief Individual-1 or any of his family, before I made the decision to terminate further work on the proposal.”But Cohen had continuing discussions about the project well into 2016 and had kept Trump fully informed. Indeed, Cohen had discussed the Moscow project extensively in e-mails, which Mueller’s prosecutors had in their possession.

“You’re lucky that your parents donated a building to Heaven.”

Cohen told me the same set of lies in early 2018, when I was working on a story about the 2013 Miss Universe contest, which took place in Moscow. Trump co-owned the beauty pageant from 1996 to 2015, and, in 2015 and 2016, he spoke to local oligarchs about plans to build a tower in Moscow; Cohen was his point person for the Trump Organization at the time. I spoke with Cohen while I was on vacation with my family in Arizona, and I could arrange a phone call only while we were driving to the Grand Canyon. During the call, my wife and son were in the front of the car, and I was in the back, and, when I asked about Trump’s building plans in Moscow, Cohen defended Trump so loudly that they could hear him even though the phone was pressed against my ear. He also displayed the gangsterish belligerence that was his hallmark, saying of Eric Swalwell, the California congressman who is a persistent critic of Trump, “That lunatic Swalwell deserves a beating and a half.”

In February, 2018, without Cohen’s knowledge, Mueller’s office began sharing evidence with the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Cohen learned the magnitude of his legal problems on April 9, 2018, when federal agents executed search warrants at his law office, his apartment, and a suite at the Regency, where his family was living at the time. (Their apartment was being renovated.) In order to obtain the warrants, the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney’s office submitted an affidavit of more than two hundred pages describing Cohen’s potential criminal liability for bank fraud and illegal campaign contributions. The affidavit made it obvious that Cohen would likely be subject to criminal charges. So Cohen was presented with a dilemma familiar to every underling facing pressure to coöperate with law enforcement—whether or not to flip.

In the aftermath of the raid on Cohen’s property, the Southern District’s investigation of Cohen intersected with Mueller’s investigation of Trump. The President and his allies had a strong interest in persuading Cohen not to coöperate with law enforcement, and Mueller’s report raises the question of whether Trump broke the law in that effort. This kind of Presidential misconduct has a clear history. The first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon, which was passed by the House Judiciary Committee, before his resignation, accused him of “endeavouring to cause prospective defendants . . . to expect favoured treatment and consideration in return for their silence or false testimony, or rewarding individuals for their silence or false testimony.”

Trump’s behavior after the raid on Cohen’s property was an important focus in Mueller’s investigation. On the day of the search, Trump told reporters that Cohen was a “good man” and called the investigation “a real disgrace.” A few days later, according to the Mueller report, the President called Cohen and told him to “hang in there” and “stay strong.” Trump followed those conversations with a tweet that said, “Michael is a businessman for his own account/lawyer who I have always liked & respected. Most people will flip if the Government lets them out of trouble, even if it means lying or making up stories. Sorry, I don’t see Michael doing that despite the horrible Witch Hunt and the dishonest media!”

Cohen sought advice from several lawyers, and he established a frequent e-mail correspondence with Robert Costello, who was an especially persistent provider of guidance. In their conversations, Costello emphasized that he was a good friend and a former colleague of Rudolph Giuliani, who had just been retained as one of President Trump’s personal lawyers. As Costello put it in an April 19th e-mail to Cohen, “I told you my relationship with Rudy which could be very very useful to you.” Two days later, Costello told Cohen that he had just spoken with Giuliani “and told him I was on your team. Rudy was thrilled and said this could not be a better situation for the President or you.”

Costello’s e-mails to Cohen, which are now in the hands of congressional investigators, raise the question of whether Costello was doing the bidding of his putative client or that of Giuliani and his client, Trump. Was Costello trying to keep Cohen in the President’s camp because that was in Cohen’s interest, or in Trump’s? In another e-mail, on April 21st, Costello wrote, “I spoke with Rudy. Very Very Positive. You are ‘loved.’ . . . They are in our corner.” He went on, “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places. Bob. P.S. Some very positive comments about you from the White House.” As Cohen told me, about his dealings with Costello and Giuliani, “It meant that I was still within the circle, that I was being protected. I should stay on message, part of the team, and we’re going to get through this, together, as a group.”

Costello and Giuliani insist that they were simply trying to calm someone who was on the verge of suicide because he so feared alienating the President. “There was no dual loyalty. The loyalty was to our client,” Costello told me. Giuliani called the Mueller report “totally unfair about the President and Michael.” He said, “We all told him we couldn’t discuss pardons. We were nice to him because he was suicidal and telling people he was going to jump out a window. He thought the President was angry with him, and we told him that wasn’t true, that we saw him as a victim, that Michael is still loved. That’s not obstruction of justice.”

Mueller, it appears, disagrees. He concluded that the efforts of Trump and his allies did represent a potential obstruction of justice. The possible dangling of a Presidential pardon if Cohen stayed on the team was at the heart of Mueller’s evidence. The report states that, based on several conversations that Cohen had about pardons with Trump’s lawyers, Cohen understood “that as long as he stayed on message, he would be taken care of by the President, either through a pardon or through the investigation being shut down.” According to Mueller, there is evidence that “could support the inference that the President intended to discourage Cohen from cooperating with the government because Cohen’s information would shed adverse light on the President’s campaign-period conduct and statements.”

Still, Mueller acknowledged weaknesses in a possible case against the President. He said that Trump’s status as the President gave him unique powers to involve himself in law-enforcement investigations, that the evidence did not establish that there was an underlying crime that Trump might be covering up, and that many of Trump’s actions, such as his tweets, occurred in public view, which might suggest the difficulty of proving criminal intent.

Nonetheless, Mueller noted one key factor in favor of a finding that Trump obstructed justice. His office concluded that, taken together, various discrete acts by the President—his firing of Comey, his attempts to remove Mueller as special counsel, his overtures to Cohen—may have constituted obstruction. Mueller wrote that “it is important to view the President’s pattern of conduct as a whole. That pattern sheds light on the nature of the President’s acts and the inferences that can be drawn about his intent. Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations.”

Throughout the summer of 2018, Cohen worried that those close to Trump weren’t really standing behind him. Trump’s company and his campaign had paid approximately $1.5 million in Cohen’s attorneys’ fees, but they stopped paying in June. Costello wrote to Cohen on June 14th, “It seems clear to me that you are under the impression that Trump and Giuliani are trying to discredit you and throw you under the bus to use your phrase. I think you are wrong because you are believing the narrative promoted by the left wing media.”

In July, Costello gave up representing Cohen. He sent him an itemized bill for $43,857.85 in legal services, which included thirteen phone calls and one meeting with Giuliani. (Cohen refused to pay the bill, on the ground that he had never signed a retainer agreement with Costello.) When the news broke, on July 20th, that Cohen had recorded the phone call with Trump about the McDougal payment, the breach with the President was all but final. By this point, Cohen had hired as his criminal-defense attorney Guy Petrillo, a former Southern District prosecutor with no ties to Giuliani. He also retained Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer best known for his work for the Clinton Administration. Through his lawyers, Cohen began exploring the possibility of coöperating with the Southern District.

But there was a hitch. The U.S. Attorney’s office has a rule that it will accept only total coöperation from witnesses; if a witness wants to put any subjects off limits, the prosecutors will refuse to talk to him. When Cohen offered to coöperate, he said he wouldn’t promise to answer every question. The Southern District rejected Cohen’s offer of partial coöperation and raised the pressure, giving immunity to Pecker and Weisselberg, who could be witnesses against Cohen in a prosecution for campaign-finance violations.

And Cohen had another problem. Prosecutors had discovered that, between 2012 and 2016, he had understated his income by more than four million dollars, thus avoiding $1.4 million in federal taxes during those five years. Worse yet, the tax returns had also been signed by his wife, potentially exposing her to prosecution as well. Petrillo tried to dissuade the prosecutors from filing charges, pointing out that Cohen had made no effort to hide this income—there were no foreign bank accounts or cash transactions. Cohen asserted that he had provided accurate information to his accountant, and that the error was his. (The government disputed this.) Petrillo pointed to other cases with even larger tax deficiencies than $1.4 million over five years in which the government decided to proceed civilly rather than criminally. But the prosecutors were unmoved.

Protecting his wife was uppermost in Cohen’s mind, he told me. “If they would have asked me to plead guilty to the Lufthansa heist, I would have pled guilty to that, too,” he said, referring to the notorious robbery at John F. Kennedy International Airport, in 1978. “She’s the love of my life. What am I going to do? You think I’m going to let them bring her into this craziness? Not a chance.” His temporizing had led him into disaster. On August 21st, he pleaded guilty to multiple charges. In doing so, he passed up the opportunity of winning an acquittal; by failing to coöperate fully, he lost any hope of receiving a significant reduction in his sentence.

When the news leaked that Cohen was thinking of coöperating, Trump reacted with fury. On July 27th, he tweeted, “Sounds to me like someone is trying to make up stories in order to get himself out of an unrelated jam (Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee, I wonder if they helped him make the choice!” On August 22nd, Trump contrasted Cohen’s guilty plea with Paul Manafort’s refusal to coöperate, tweeting, “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’—make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!” (Manafort later pleaded guilty and attempted to coöperate with Mueller’s prosecutors, who subsequently voided the deal, saying that Manafort had lied to them.)

In a series of tweets, Trump wrote of Cohen, “He makes up stories to get a GREAT & ALREADY reduced deal for himself, and get his wife and father-in-law (who has the money?) off Scott Free.” He added later, “Remember, Michael Cohen only became a ‘Rat’ after the FBI did something which was absolutely unthinkable & unheard of until the Witch Hunt was illegally started.” In an interview with Fox News, Trump said that Cohen “should give information maybe on his father-in-law, because that’s the one that people want to look at because where does that money—that’s the money in the family.” (Except for his father-in-law’s guilty plea twenty-six years ago, there is no evidence that Cohen’s family is involved in criminal activity.)

Mueller regarded Trump’s tirades against Cohen, and especially his implications about Cohen’s family, as further evidence that the President could have obstructed justice. “The President’s statements insinuating that members of Cohen’s family committed crimes after Cohen began cooperating with the government could be viewed as an effort to retaliate against Cohen and chill further testimony that might be damaging to the President by Cohen or others,” Mueller wrote. “The timing of the statements supports an inference that they were intended at least in part to discourage Cohen from further cooperation.”

As Cohen approached his sentencing date before Judge William H. Pauley III, the true cost of his failure to cut a deal with the Southern District became apparent. When the Probation Department set Cohen’s sentencing-guideline range at fifty-one to sixty-three months, Petrillo sought a sentence of probation. The Southern District prosecutors responded with a scathing memorandum, writing that Cohen “committed four distinct federal crimes over a period of several years. He was motivated to do so by personal greed, and repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends. Now he seeks extraordinary leniency—a sentence of no jail time—based principally on his rose-colored view of the seriousness of the crimes; his claims to a sympathetic personal history; and his provision of certain information to law enforcement.”

Mueller’s team gave Judge Pauley a much more benign portrait of Cohen’s behavior, saying that he “has taken significant steps to mitigate his criminal conduct” and provided “credible and consistent” coöperation. On December 12th, Pauley gave Cohen some credit for his dealings with the government and imposed a sentence of thirty-six months. He ordered Cohen to pay $1.39 million in restitution, five hundred thousand dollars in forfeitures, and a hundred thousand dollars in fines. Parole has been abolished in the federal system, so even with good behavior Cohen will be obliged to serve at least eighty-five per cent of his sentence.

Abandoned and ridiculed by Trump, Cohen decided to exact a very public form of revenge. On February 27th of this year, he gave a full day of dramatic testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. In his opening statement, he denounced Trump as passionately as he had once defended him, calling him a racist, a con man, and a cheat. Democrats embraced him and Republicans disparaged him as a turncoat and a liar. During one exchange, Cohen said, “I’m responsible for your silliness because I did the same thing that you’re doing now for ten years. I protected Mr. Trump for ten years.” Cohen offered tantalizing clues about other misconduct by Trump, including possible bank and insurance fraud. (He said that Trump had submitted false financial statements to a bank in connection with an application for a loan in order to buy the Buffalo Bills, and to insurance companies in order to lower his rates.) But Giuliani asserted that Cohen had undermined his credibility by failing to acknowledge that he had sought a job in the Trump Administration, and by refusing to admit that he had discussed pardons. Giuliani told me, “He gave an interview on CNN when he said that he wanted a job in the Administration. The Mueller report says he talked about pardons. Those are the lies of someone who can’t help himself.” Cohen’s testimony, for all the attention it received, didn’t have any effect on his legal predicament, or on his prison sentence.

Cohen’s legal problems have been compounded by financial setbacks. The rise of Uber and other ride-sharing services has caused the value of his taxi medallions to plummet, just when he needs to raise funds to pay his debts to the government and to provide for his family while he is in prison. (After his guilty pleas, his law license was revoked.) In the months following Cohen’s congressional testimony in February, his lawyers offered to bring him in to the Southern District to assist in its ongoing investigations, but prosecutors refused to meet with him. Under the federal criminal rules, the only way Cohen’s sentence can be reduced or delayed now is if the prosecutors ask for it—and this, it has become clear, is not something they are going to do. The prosecutors may regard Cohen as unreliable, or they may believe that there are few outstanding issues left to resolve. The Southern District, on which so many of the President’s adversaries have pinned their hopes, may have limited potential to bring him down.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, about the fictional Buchanan family, that they “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” For a decade, Michael Cohen cleaned up Donald Trump’s messes. He embraced Trump so uncritically that he wound up committing crimes on his behalf. Thus far, Trump, like the Buchanans, has escaped the wreckage he leaves behind. ♦