NEW YORK—Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, told a federal judge that Donald Trump had directed him during the 2016 campaign to buy the silence of two women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen made the statement as he pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight criminal charges, including campaign-finance violations. He said he paid $130,000 to adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, and coordinated a $150,000 payment by the publisher of the National Enquirer to former Playboy model Karen McDougal.

Mr. Cohen, who has described himself as Mr. Trump’s “fixer,” said he made both payments “for the purpose of influencing the election” and acted at the direction of “the candidate,” referring to Mr. Trump. That was the first time Mr. Cohen has admitted to coordinating with the president on the hush-money deals with women, both of which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The surprising admission by Mr. Cohen directly implicated Mr. Trump in a federal crime, escalating pressure on the president. Three other Trump associates have been charged with felonies and a fourth was convicted by a jury on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump and his representatives previously denied that he knew about the payments at the time they were made.


Mr. Cohen “worked to pay money to silence two women who he believed would be detrimental to” Mr. Trump and his campaign, said Robert Khuzami, the deputy U.S. attorney in Manhattan, at a news conference. “For that, he is going to pay a very, very serious price.”

Mr. Cohen, 51 years old, pleaded guilty to a total of eight criminal counts: two counts of illegal campaign contributions related to payments to women; five counts of evading personal income taxes from 2012 to 2016; and one count of making false statements to a financial institution. The charges stem from a grand jury investigation led by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The plea agreement doesn’t require Mr. Cohen to cooperate with prosecutors. That doesn’t preclude him from providing information later on to the government, including to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s associates colluded with Russia in the 2016 campaign.

Under the plea deal, Mr. Cohen and the government agreed to a sentence of between about four years and five years in prison, with a fine of $20,000 to $1 million. Mr. Cohen was released on $500,000 bond.


Charging documents filed Tuesday revealed new details about the payments to the women, including disputes with the National Enquirer’s publisher over how to pay Ms. McDougal and a sham invoice Mr. Cohen filed with the Trump Organization to receive reimbursement for paying Ms. Clifford.

Under federal law, individual campaign contributions are limited to a total of $5,400 for each election cycle, including primary and general election votes, and corporate contributions are barred.

Conspiring to cause an excessive campaign contribution of more than $25,000 is an indictable offense and a felony. Sitting presidents cannot be indicted under Department of Justice policy.

Rick Hasen, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, said Mr. Cohen’s admission could amount to an “impeachable offense,” particularly if Democrats retake the majority in the House this fall.


Mr. Cohen, in a black suit and gold tie, left the courthouse Tuesday without speaking to reporters.

Lanny Davis, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen, said in a statement that Mr. Cohen “stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election.”

“If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?” he said.

In an MSNBC interview later Tuesday, Mr. Davis suggested his client was willing to keep talking. He said Mr. Cohen would be “more than happy” to tell the special counsel “all that he knows about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election.”


Mr. Davis said Mr. Cohen had knowledge of whether Mr. Trump had advance knowledge that Russia had hacked emails from Democratic servers that were later published by WikiLeaks, which Mr. Trump has said he didn’t.

The guilty plea cemented the break between the Republican president and his former longtime lawyer, who for years has touted his close relationship with Mr. Trump and once said he would “take a bullet” for the president. Mr. Cohen had said more recently he would seek to protect the interests of his own family and the country before those of the president.

Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said there was “no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president” in the charges against Mr. Cohen. Mr. Giuliani also attacked Mr. Cohen, adding: “It is clear that, as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen’s actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time.”

During the court hearing, neither Mr. Cohen nor prosecutors named Mr. Trump or the two women to whom payments were made. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Griswold said evidence at trial would have shown that the payments “were made in order to ensure” that the women “did not publicize their stories of alleged affairs with the candidate.”

In a statement read before U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, Mr. Cohen admitted to making an illegal campaign contribution a month before the 2016 election when he paid $130,000 to Ms. Clifford to prohibit her from publicly discussing an alleged sexual encounter with Mr. Trump. He said he worked “with and at the direction of the candidate” and was later repaid by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen also admitted to arranging an illegal $150,000 payment from American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, to Ms. McDougal, a former Playboy playmate, for her exclusive story of an alleged extramarital affair she had with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen said he coordinated the August 2016 payment with “the CEO of a media company,” referring to David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media who is a longtime friend of Messrs. Trump and Cohen. Mr. Cohen said the payment was made “at the request of the candidate” to keep Ms. McDougal from talking.

Mr. Pecker agreed to purchase Ms. McDougal’s story at Mr. Cohen’s “urging” and only after Mr. Cohen promised he would reimburse the company, prosecutors said. The publisher has previously said it purchased Ms. McDougal’s story for editorial reasons, not to benefit Mr. Trump’s campaign.

As early as August 2015, Mr. Pecker had offered to help the Trump campaign bury negative stories about Mr. Trump’s relationships with women, prosecutors said.

After American Media bought Ms. McDougal’s story, Mr. Cohen planned to buy the rights to the story for $125,000, according to Tuesday’s charging documents. An agreement was drawn up, but in October 2016, Mr. Pecker told Mr. Cohen “in substance, that the deal was off and that [he] should tear up the assignment agreement.” Federal agents retrieved the document from Mr. Cohen’s office during an April search, the document says.

The investigation into Mr. Cohen was unusual because parts of it played out publicly months before he was charged.

In an extraordinary move against a sitting president’s lawyer, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on April 9 raided Mr. Cohen’s home, office and hotel room to seize millions of files, including cellphones, hard drives, iPads and even the contents of a shredder. Prosecutors had obtained the search warrant after a federal magistrate judge found probable cause to believe Mr. Cohen’s materials contained evidence of a crime.

Four days after the raid, lawyers for Mr. Cohen appeared in a public court hearing to stop federal prosecutors from reviewing the seized materials, claiming attorney-client privilege. Their motion set off a series of court hearings that each became their own media spectacle, including one attended by Ms. Clifford.

Mr. Khuzami, the deputy U.S. attorney, said after the plea hearing that Mr. Cohen also failed to report more than $4 million in income, including from interest from a personal loan, his taxi business and consulting commissions. Mr. Cohen deprived the federal government of $1.4 million in taxes, he said.

Newsletter Sign-Up Notes on the News Today’s headlines, news in context, and good reads you may have missed, with Tyler Blint-Welsh. Subscribe Now

Those charges related to Mr. Cohen’s personal finances were used by federal investigators in recent weeks to apply pressure on Mr. Cohen, people familiar with the matter said. The Journal reported earlier this month that prosecutors were weighing tax- and bank-fraud charges against the lawyer, stemming from his taxi business and loan applications.

An open question is whether the president will move to pardon his former lawyer.

Mr. Trump has privately asked aides about his ability to issue pardons in the investigations of his associates, according to people familiar with the discussions, and he has declined to answer questions about whether he would pardon his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Mike Flynn.

Even if Mr. Trump pardons him, Mr. Cohen—like Mr. Manafort—could still face tax-related charges in New York state, although New York’s double-jeopardy laws could complicate any efforts at prosecution, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Trump was aboard Air Force One on his way to West Virginia, where he was set to hold a rally Tuesday evening, as Mr. Cohen entered his guilty plea and prosecutors announced the charges. At the same time, a jury in Alexandria, Va., returned a guilty verdict on eight charges against Mr. Manafort.

Disembarking Air Force One on Tuesday, the president defended Mr. Manafort, but declined to answer questions about his former lawyer.

—Aruna Viswanatha and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed to this article.

Write to Nicole Hong at nicole.hong@wsj.com, Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com, Rebecca Davis O’Brien at Rebecca.OBrien@wsj.com and Joe Palazzolo at joe.palazzolo@wsj.com