President Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen begged a federal judge not to lock him up after pleading guilty to crimes allegedly involving the man he once said he would “take a bullet’’ for.
In a sentencing memo filed by Cohen’s legal team, the disgraced attorney promised to continue cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose probe Trump has dismissed as a “witch hunt.”
Cohen’s legal filings, released late Friday, include praise from associates and relatives, including his father Maurice.
The 83-year-old Holocaust survivor wrote that his son “is the oxygen in the air that I breathe,” the New York Times reported. “I pray and beg, beg and pray that you won’t take my oxygen away from me.”
Cohen’s lawyers said that instead of keeping quiet and risking prison in the hope he’d get a presidential pardon, their client decided to work with prosecutors.
Cohen, 52, is scheduled to be sentenced Dec. 12 in Manhattan federal court after pleading guilty to lying to Congress and to campaign finance law violations involving alleged hush money payments to two women.
In Cohen’s latest confession, he indicated Trump was more involved in discussions for a proposed hotel in Moscow than previously acknowledged.
Trump responded by describing his ex-attorney as “very weak.”
“He was convicted with a fairly long-term sentence with things unrelated to the Trump Organization,” Trump said before leaving for the G-20 conference in Buenos Aires on Friday. “What he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence.”
On Saturday, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed that Cohen had reached out to him about the hotel project–which never materialized.
“We told them that the presidential administration isn’t involved in construction projects, and if they are interested in making investments we will be glad to see them at St. Petersburg’s economic forum,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, according to the AP.