What Michael Cohen’s Guilty Plea Means for President Trump

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court in New York to campaign finance violations during the 2016 presidential election and a variety of other crimes.

Here’s what you need to know to understand how this might affect President Trump.

Cohen said he arranged payments to two different women who claimed they had affairs with Trump. The payments, which took place just weeks before the 2016 election and totaled $280,000, were intended to buy the women’s silence so that their stories wouldn’t be made public.

Cohen said Trump directed him to make the payments to the women. He also said the payments were made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”

Because the payments were intended to help Trump win the election and because they exceeded the maximum personal contribution of $2,700 allowed under federal law, they are considered illegal. Under his plea, Cohen faces between four and five years in prison for those illegal acts and others he admitted to, including five counts of tax evasion and one count of bank fraud.

According to Rudolph Giuliani, President Trump’s current lawyer, it doesn’t mean much. “There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen,” Giuliani said in a statement after Cohen’s guilty plea.

President Trump, who has denied knowing about the payments until after he was elected, appeared last night at a political rally in West Virginia, and he didn’t comment on Cohen’s plea. But this morning he tweeted, "Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime.” 

But many legal experts say the fact that Cohen told a federal court that Trump directed him to make these payments means that Cohen has implicated the president in a federal crime. 

“The plea, under oath, establishes that the president was a co-conspirator in the campaign violations to which Cohen pleaded guilty,” says Philip Allen Lacovara, who served as counsel to special prosecutors investigating President Richard Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal in the 1970s. 

If Trump were a regular person, prosecutors could use Cohen’s admission as evidence to indict him, legal experts say. But the fact that Trump is a sitting president makes matters more complicated.

Although there is no explicit prohibition in the Constitution against indicting a president, the Justice Department has long taken the position that sitting presidents are not subject to criminal prosecution. 

Prosecutors could choose to indict the president now if they think there’s enough evidence but postpone the legal proceedings until Trump is out of office. They also could wait until Trump is no longer president to pursue a legal case against him. 

The final possibility is that prosecutors could turn their evidence over to lawmakers and let members of the House of Representatives consider impeachment, the constitutional process by which a president can be removed from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” 

The plea agreement doesn’t require Cohen to cooperate with other pending investigations, such as that of the independent counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the election. But Cohen could choose to cooperate with the Mueller investigation, perhaps in return for a reduced sentence. 

“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,” Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, told MSNBC.

Trump has called Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt” and repeatedly denied that his campaign colluded with Russia.

Trump’s alleged role in the payments to the women could be seen as an impeachable offense. That could raise the stakes considerably for the midterm elections, with Democrats seen as having a reasonable chance of taking control of the House of Representatives.

If Democrats were to control the House, the possibility of impeachment proceedings is much more likely. 

For now, however, Republicans control both houses of Congress, and most Republicans continue to support the president.

With reporting by The New York Times