As recently as last year, Michael Cohen was a deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee and a prominent employee of the Trump Organization. As of this afternoon, however, Donald Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” is a federal prison inmate.
Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer who pleaded guilty last year to an array of white-collar crimes, arrived at a federal prison in upstate New York on Monday to begin serving his three-year sentence Monday.
Cohen gave a brief statement to reporters outside his New York City apartment Monday morning before jumping in a waiting car to travel to the Federal Correctional Institution, Otisville, a large federal prison complex in the Catskills region.
Cohen, of course, was convicted of a variety of crimes, including two counts related to hush-money payments he made to the president’s alleged former mistresses.
And with that in mind, it was curious to see Trump declare on Twitter this morning, in an all-caps message, “All the crimes are on the other side.”
The president’s timing could’ve been better.
For one thing, there’s no evidence that suggests the Democrats on “the other side” committed any crimes, at least not with regard to the allegations surrounding Trump and his operation.
For another, “all” was probably a poor choice of words. The same day as Trump’s declaration, his former personal attorney will report to a federal prison. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is already in federal prison. Trump’s former White House national security advisor, Michael Flynn, is awaiting sentencing, and may yet be sent to federal prison. George Papadopoulos, Trump’s former campaign foreign policy adviser, has already served a prison sentence, and Roger Stone will soon go on trial, his fate uncertain. What’s more, when it comes to Cohen, let’s also not forget that Trump was directly implicated in one of his fixer’s felonies. Trump even received a handy little nickname for his trouble: “Individual 1.” What was that the president was saying about “all the crimes” being committed by those “on the other side”?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
