- Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer, has reportedly reached a plea deal with prosecutors, multiple outlets reported Tuesday.
- Cohen is the focus of a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York into whether he violated campaign-finance laws, committed bank fraud or wire fraud, engaged in illegal lobbying, or participated in other crimes.
President Donald Trump’s former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen has reportedly surrendered himself to the FBI after reaching a deal with prosecutors, multiple outlets reported Tuesday.
Cohen is the focus of a criminal investigation in the Southern District of New York into whether he violated campaign-finance laws, committed bank fraud or wire fraud, engaged in illegal lobbying, or participated in other crimes.
The New York Times reported that the plea agreement was over the payments he made to women on behalf of Trump, a person familiar with the deal told The Times, reporting that the deal does not include Cohen cooperating with prosecutors as a witness in any future cases. NBC News reported the deal includes charges of tax fraud, bank fraud, and of a campaign-finance violation.
CNN reported that Cohen surrendered to the FBI ahead of a 4 p.m. hearing before US District Judge William H. Pauley in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The government is expected to disclose the deal after the hearing, CNN reported.
A person close to Lanny Davis, an attorney for Cohen, told Business Insider they could not comment on the NBC News report that Cohen was about to reach a plea deal. Davis told NBC News he could not comment on advice of counsel because of the ongoing nature of the investigation.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
How we got here
The FBI raided Cohen’s home, hotel room, and office in April, seizing more than 4 million documents from Trump’s longtime lawyer.
Those documents then underwent an extensive, months-long review for claims of attorney-client privilege, a process that recently concluded. Only a fraction of the documents were protected by privilege, while the rest were handed over to the government for use in a potential prosecution of Cohen.
At the center of the investigation is the $130,000 payment that Cohen facilitated to the porn star known as Stormy Daniels just before the 2016 presidential election to keep her quiet about her allegation of having a 2006 affair with Trump – an allegation Trump has denied. The FBI sought documents related to that payment and similar arrangements with other women.
Investigators have also taken interest in some of Cohen’s business dealings, particularly as they related to his once sprawling taxi business, The New York Times reported Sunday.
The Times reported that the Cohen investigation reached “the final stage,” with prosecutors weighing whether to file charges before the end of August.
Mitchell Epner, an attorney at Rottenberg Lipman Rich who previously served as a federal prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, told Business Insider in a Tuesday email that if Cohen reached a plea deal, “the most important question is whether it is a ‘cooperating’ plea deal.”
Epner later added that even if cooperation is not a part of this plea deal, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of him acting as a cooperating witness in the future.
“If Michael Cohen is not cooperating now, he likely will continue to try to get a cooperating plea agreement by providing substantial assistance to any prosecutor who will take it, SDNY or Special Counsel,” Epner told Business Insider in a subsequent email after news broke of the plea deal later on Tuesday.
Roland Riopelle, a partner at Sercarz & Riopelle who was formerly a federal prosecutor with the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, told Business Insider in an email Monday that the brief five-month delay between the FBI’s raids and potential charges signaled to him that “this may be a cooperation plea agreement.”
“If the matter was contested, the delay could be longer before charges were returned,” he said, adding that the recent “silence from Cohen and his lawyers is also something that weighs in favor of a cooperation deal.”
Michael Avenatti, Daniels’ attorney, tweeted Tuesday afternoon that the day’s developments “will permit us to have the stay lifted in the civil case & should also permit us to proceed with an expedited deposition of Trump under oath about what he knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it.”
“We will disclose it all to the public,” he tweeted.
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