ILYA MARRITZ:

Michael Cohen has sentencing memos in two separate matters. One is in the Southern District of New York and that concerns hush money payments to women who allegedly had affairs with Donald Trump and some of his own financial dealings — tax avoidance and stuff like that — and then a separate sentencing memo from Robert Mueller's team, and that concerns his lies to Congress.

On the surface these two memos appear to be pretty different. Robert Mueller saying Michael Cohen has cooperated, he's given us good information, and we recommend a sentence that takes that into account. The Southern District prosecutors say that Cohen has not fully acknowledged his crimes. He looks at them with rose-colored glasses and seems to be minimizing his role. But really I think they're not that far apart, because both of these memos have a lot to say about Individual 1. Individual 1 is Donald Trump. And both of these memos implicate Donald Trump and the Trump campaign in some of Michael Cohen's misdeeds. So one example, these hush money payments to actresses who said they had affairs with Donald Trump, Michael Cohen was the man who arranged those hush money payments, but it was the Trump Organization at the direction of Donald Trump, according to some of these filings, that made this happen.