Free Michael Cohen
Now that the New York Attorney General has opened a criminal probe into Donald Trump, in addition to the existing criminal probe being run by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, Michael Cohen is becoming the man of the hour. It’s difficult to turn on MSNBC without seeing him appearing on the network or being mentioned, and for good reason. After all, his years-long, ongoing cooperation has been the linchpin of the criminal case against Trump. Yet most people aren’t aware that Cohen is still under house arrest.
In the American system of justice, if you cooperate against a bigger fish, you’re supposed to get leniency. This is so ingrained in our system that even an underage sex trafficker like Joel Greenberg is getting a reduced sentence because he’s cooperating against Matt Gaetz.
Yet Michael Cohen, whose crimes are merely financial, has gotten no leniency at all. Why? Instead of dragging things out in the name of trying to get a leniency deal, Cohen simply pleaded guilty in 2018 and gave up all the evidence and testimony he had against Donald Trump, the Trump family, the Trump Organization, Allen Weisselberg, and others. In return, prosecutors ran with that evidence and built a comprehensive criminal case against Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, but never did go back and grant Cohen any leniency.
Instead Cohen has been given the runaround. Shortly after he was transferred from prison to house arrest due to COVID protocols, Bill Barr’s DOJ had Cohen thrown back in prison, in an attempt at preventing Cohen from publishing his tell-all book Disloyal. Then a judge intervened and transferred Cohen back to house arrest. This kind of attempted retaliation alone is an argument for why Cohen should now be freed entirely.
Given that Michael Cohen’s cooperation is about to result in Donald Trump’s criminal indictment, and that prosecutors have reportedly met with him at least eight times and counting, he’s proven his value as a cooperator. If Cohen had held out for a deal, he’d likely be a free man by now. To that end, there is no real argument for why he should still be under house arrest.
Cohen isn’t the only one. Reality Winner is in prison because she did something illegal while trying to expose then-President Donald Trump’s ongoing crime spree. The fact that Trump is about to be criminally indicted is proof that Reality Winner was trying to do the right thing. Yet she wasn’t let out of prison even when COVID protocols suggested she should have been.
In addition to Michael Cohen and Reality Winner, thousands of other Americans without recognizable names are serving overly lengthy sentences for nonviolent crimes. The pandemic forced the start of a reckoning, when unsafe COVID conditions led to numerous inmates being freed – an acknowledgement that there was no reason for them to still be in prison to begin with. Now it’s time for that reckoning to be driven all the way home. President Joe Biden has an opportunity for bold criminal justice reform at the federal level. Here’s hoping he seizes it.
