30 November 2018 10:32 am
Former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen will plead guilty to a federal charge of lying to Congress on Thursday, according to news reports.
He will admit that he misled federal lawmakers about his contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign season.
Cohen has already testified in a Manhattan courtroom that he made an illegal hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, a pornographic actress who claims to have bedded Trump a decade ago, ‘in coordination with, and at the direction of’ Trump.
The latest twist in his saga will come with an attached string of dozens of hours of of testimony that could be criminally damaging to the president.
Cohen’s new charge comes from Special Counsel Robert Mueller. His previous ones, bank and tax charges to which he has already pleaded guilty, were lodged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
He is expected to be sentenced to between four and five years in prison in December for his first federal case. It’s unclear if the new guilty plea will involve more jail time.
Cohen has publicly turned against President Trump since the FBI raided his home and offices in April.
Prosecutors deemed the $130,000 Stormy Daniels payment illegal because it was intended to help Trump avoid an embarrassing electoral loss to Hillary Clinton – and was therefore an ‘in-kind’ political contribution far in excess of the limits of the law.
US, (Daily Mail), 29 November 2018 -