The president’s former right-hand man was tearful as he accepted his three-year sentence: ‘I deserve that pain’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Not long ago, Michael Cohen was the right-hand man to the most powerful person on earth. In a few months, he’ll be a federal inmate, sentenced to three years in prison for crimes committed at Donald Trump’s side.

The fall from grace was fast and hard, and the toll on the 52-year-old lawyer was evident as he stood in a lower Manhattan courtroom on Wednesday to learn his fate. Face drawn, he shook his head in disbelief as Judge William Pauley handed down the sentence for a “veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct”.

To hear Cohen tell it – breaking down in tears – he was a man undone by loyalty to Trump.

“The irony is, today is the day I am taking my freedom back,” said Cohen, who joined the Trump Organization in 2006 and spent the next decade dedicated to cleaning up Trump’s messes, first as a real estate mogul known for his chronic womanizing and then as a candidate and finally, improbably, president of the United States.

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He had been living, he said, in a state of “personal and mental incarceration” ever since the day he signed up to work for a man whose business acumen, at the time, he admired. “I now know there is little to admire,” he said.

Since turning on the boss he once promised to take a bullet for, Cohen has come under attack from the president, who called him a “weak person” and a liar for his cooperation with Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into Russian election interference.

In a sense, Cohen conceded, Trump was right.

“My weakness can be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump,” he said. “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.”

That meant paying off a porn actor and a former model who said they had sexual encounters with Trump. Cohen tapped his own home equity line to get $130,000 to pay Stormy Daniels, a transaction that was complex and as it turned out, completely illegal.

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“Most of all, I want to apologize to the people of the United States. You deserve to know the truth, and lying to you was unjust,” Cohen said in his mea culpa.

Cohen showed up 45 minutes early for the hearing where he would learn his fate, joined in the courtroom by his wife, his son and daughter, his father who uses a wheelchair, his mother, his in-laws, his brother and sister and a niece and cousin, all listed off for the judge by his lawyer in a bid for sympathy.

It was while apologizing for the shame he had brought upon his family that the one-time mover and shaker lost his composure.

“I deserve that pain. They do not,” he said, before closing with the words: “I am truly sorry, and I promise I will be better.”

Indeed, the world was watching as the president’s fixer was brought low, the courtroom packed with dozens of reporters, with folding chairs in the aisles to accommodate the crowd, and three overflow rooms for onlookers who couldn’t fit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In this courtroom sketch, Michael Cohen, second from left, listens as his attorney Guy Petrillo, right, addresses the court. Photograph: Elizabeth Williams/AP

In a back row sat Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Daniels, whose alleged one-time tryst with Trump was at the center of the campaign finance crimes. He said he didn’t buy Cohen’s sympathy act.

“Michael Cohen is no hero. He is no patriot,” Avenatti said. “He deserves every day of the 36-month sentence he will serve.”

Pauley, the judge, while more measured, did not heed the argument that Cohen deserved to stay out of prison because of his honest regret and, more importantly, substantial cooperation with authorities.

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His faults were not limited to loyalty, in Pauley’s telling; he was “motivated by personal greed and ambition”.

Cohen, the judge noted, enjoyed a comfortable childhood as the son of well-off parents in a Long Island suburb, and went on to graduate from law school. “As a lawyer, he should have known better,” Pauley said.

While his professional life centered on the Trump Organization, he did business on his own as a landlord and owner of taxi medallions.

“He thrived on his access to wealthy and powerful people. And he became one himself,” Pauley said. “Somewhere along the way, he appears to have lost his moral compass.”

In the process, Pauley said, Cohen did “insidious harm to our democratic institutions”.

Then came the sentence: 36 months imprisonment, served concurrently with a two-month sentence for lying to Congress, along with substantial fines and restitution.

Cohen sat at the defense table with his head in hand, before exchanging hugs with his emotional family members. He left the courthouse, got into a waiting black SUV and drove off, with just under three months left as a free man.