Donald´s ex-lawyer pleads guilty
President Donald Trump's personal ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty on Tuesday for violating the campaign financing and other charges, and claimed that he and Trump arranged to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy ex-model Karen McDougal to influence the presidential election, reported El Nuevo Herald in its digital site.
Cohen's claim seems to implicate Trump in a crime, although the question of whether the president can be prosecuted and when it could be prosecuted remains a matter of debate.
The guilty plea came about at the same time that Trump's former chief of staff, Paul Manafort, was found guilty of eight financial crimes in Alexandria, Virginia, in which he was the first trial to come out of the special prosecutor Robert Mueller's probe into the interference of Russia in the electoral process.
As part of his agreement, Cohen, 51, pleaded guilty to eight charges, including tax evasion and making a false statement to a financial institution. You could receive a sentence of four to five years in prison at your sentencing hearing scheduled for December 12.
In the guilty plea, Cohen did not mention the two women or Trump by name, and instead indicated that he worked with an "unidentified candidate." However, the amounts and dates match the payments made to Daniels and McDougal weeks and months before the 2016 presidential election.
With a trembling voice, Cohen answered the questions of a federal judge and said that the first payment was made "in coordination and by instruction of a candidate for federal office" and that the second payment was made "by instruction of the same candidate".
While the television stations showed simultaneous coverage of the trials of two ex-Trump members, the president was boarding the presidential plane and heading to a rally in West Virginia. He did not answer reporters' questions about his former collaborators and retired to his private room on the plane.
Cohen left the court and went to a black truck with tinted windows. A couple of people who were outside shouted: "Lock him up!", while recording the scene with their phones.
Cohen's declaration came after months of federal investigations and distance from the president, who, he once said, "would receive a bullet."
In April, the FBI raided his hotel room, his home and office and seized more than 4 million objects. The authorities sought bank records, communications with Trump's presidential campaign and information about a $ 130,000 payment made to Daniels and another $ 150,000 payment to McDougal.
Both women claim to have maintained an affair with Trump, which the president denies. Trump denied before the reporters in April that he knew something about the payments that Cohen made to Daniels, although the explanation of the president and his current lawyer Rudy Giuliani have changed several times since then.
The president has publicly annoyed himself about what he considered to be an overreach of the government, although he was privately concerned about what material Cohen might have had after working for the Trump Organization for a decade. Trump called the raid a "witch hunt" and said it was an assault on client-attorney privilege and an attack politically motivated by his enemies of the FBI.
