Tonight’s bombshells mean Michael Cohen is officially toast. Here’s what happens next.
If there was even a small chance when the week began that Michael Cohen might somehow survive all this, those odds dropped to nearly zero when Rudy Giuliani opened his mouth, and they’ve officially dropped to zero thanks to tonight’s bombshells. Cohen is now officially toast. His life as he knows it is over, and perhaps more importantly, it’s now so painfully clear that even he can see it. So what happens next?
This evening the WSJ reported that Michael Cohen took a home equity line of more than three quarter million dollars right around the time Donald Trump was racking up Republican primary wins, meaning that he was looking to pay off those with dirt on Trump throughout the election, and that the $130,000 to Stormy Daniels was just a small part of it. Cohen also reportedly falsely inflated the value of his assets in order to secure the loans, and he misled lenders about what he intended to do with the money he was borrowing. This means he’s screwed when it comes to election laws, and financial fraud laws.
These are the kinds of things that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were allegedly doing when they were trying to keep Manafort’s financial empire afloat, and these are serious crimes. It’s a big part of the reason Manafort is facing more than three hundred years in prison. Michael Cohen is now looking at a similar fate. The difference is that Manafort can afford the kind of high priced lawyers who specialize in using technicalities to give clients a slim chance of surviving the mountain of evidence against them, and by all accounts, Cohen can’t come close to affording it.
So Michael Cohen now has precisely two options. He can either go to trial knowing he’ll lose, knowing he’ll die in prison, and hoping for a pardon that he knows will never come. Or he can cut a plea deal against Donald Trump and end up only serving a few years in prison. If Cohen does flip, it’ll give federal prosecutors inside access to the financial crimes that Trump has been committing for decades, and it’ll help expose every scandal Trump has tried to keep quiet with hush money. That’s far more valuable than anything Manafort or Michael Flynn could give up about Trump. Cohen is toast. If he flips, so is Trump.
