Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former fixer, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to breaking campaign finance laws and other charges. He made the extraordinary admission that he arranged payments to two women “at the direction of the candidate,” referring to Trump, to secure their silence about affairs they said they had with Trump. (NYT)
In doing so, he directly implicated his former boss for the first time in a scheme to violate campaign-finance laws. (WSJ)
Cohen pleaded guilty to five counts of tax evasion, one count of making a false statement to a bank and two campaign finance violations: willfully causing an illegal corporate contribution and making an excessive campaign contribution. (WaPo)
Cohen said he and the CEO of a media company made a payment to stop an individual from releasing information damaging to a federal campaign in the summer of 2016. While Cohen did not name them, this matches up with the circumstances around former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who settled a lawsuit with American Media, Inc., the parent company of the National Enquirer. (NPR)
The admission dealt a blow to Trump, especially as it came just as a jury in Virginia found his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty of tax and bank fraud charges. (Bloomberg)