Cohen, moreover, has indicated that he has no loyalty to the president and does not want or expect a presidential pardon. He has also not been sharing information with the president’s legal team throughout the course of his cooperation with Mueller, as Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been. Whereas Manafort has kept one foot in the door of Trumpworld, Cohen severed his ties to the president months ago. “The real wild card for Trump is Cohen,” said a veteran Washington lawyer who requested anonymity because he represents a client involved in the Russia probe. “It’s obvious that Cohen knows more about Trump’s business activities over the last decade than just about anyone.”

Cohen admitted on Thursday that he lied to Congress about how often he and Trump had spoken about the Trump Tower deal in 2016, and acknowledged that he had tried to organize a trip for Trump to Russia in 2016 to scope out the potential project after Trump clinched the Republican nomination. He lied both to minimize Trump’s link to the Moscow project and to limit “the ongoing Russia investigations,” according to Mueller’s team. The criminal information filed by Mueller’s office on Thursday makes clear that Cohen contacted the Kremlin “asking for assistance in connection with the Moscow Project” in January 2016.

Dan Goldman, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where he focused on organized crime, said he believes that the plea agreement is “a prelude to forthcoming indictments and other investigative steps. Before using information from a cooperating witness, prosecutors generally like to ‘lock in’ the witness through a guilty plea,” Goldman said. “So I would expect more to come arising out of, at least in part, Michael Cohen’s cooperation.”

It isn’t just Trump who may be in legal danger now that Cohen is cooperating—it’s also his family members, who Cohen admitted to briefing on the Trump Tower Moscow deal in 2016. According to the criminal information, filed by Mueller on Thursday, Cohen discussed the Moscow deal with Trump’s family members “within” the Trump Organization. Donald Trump Jr., an executive vice president of the Trump Organization, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year that he was only “peripherally aware” of the Moscow deal in 2016. It is not clear what he told the House Intelligence Committee, which has not yet released the transcripts of the closed-door interview. But Representative Adam Schiff, the committee’s incoming chairman, said in a statement that the Cohen plea “highlights concern over another issue—that we believe other witnesses were also untruthful before our committee.”

While the extent of Cohen’s communications about the project with Trump’s family members is not laid out in the court filings, he has undoubtedly described those interactions to Mueller. “This sends a message that if you have lied to Congress, or plan to do so in the future, the special counsel will charge you for those lies,” Goldman said. “And the case is not simply a he-said, he-said: Mueller brings documentary proof to every one of his charges and allegations.” Indeed, the criminal information that Mueller filed against Cohen included emails that directly contradicted Cohen’s written statement to Congress. Goldman added that if he were Donald Trump Jr., “I would be more worried today than I was yesterday.”