Ex-Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen Ends Home Confinement, Takes Swipe at Former Boss
Michael Cohen, the lawyer of former President Donald Trump until his 2018 arrest, has completed his three-year prison and home confinement sentence.
The former lawyer announced the news at a federal court in Manhattan after signing documents. Cohen was previously sentenced to prison in December 2018 after pleading guilty to multiple charges, including tax evasion and excessive campaign contributions.
When being interviewed by the press, Cohen maintained that his release "in no way negates the actions [he] took at the direction of and for the benefit of Donald J. Trump." He also said that he would continue to cooperate with authorities regarding his charges.
"I will continue to provide information, testimony, documents and my full cooperation on all ongoing investigations to ensure that others are held responsible for their dirty deeds and that no one is ever believed to be above the law," Cohen said.
After a year in prison, he was released in May 2020 and resentenced to home confinement amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Weeks later, he was sent back to prison and subsequently released. Cohen speculated that the move was an attempt at retaliation by Trump for his memoir Disloyal: The True Story of Michael Cohen, Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump. However, the Trump administration at the time did not confirm this.
With this sentence complete, Cohen will soon undergo a three-year term of supervised release.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below:
"I feel great today. It's been long overdue," Cohen said to a collection of camera crews alerted to his presence by a tweet he had sent Sunday.
In all, he spent about 13 1/2 months behind prison walls and a year and a half in home confinement. His time was further reduced through good behavior.
The campaign finance charges came after he helped arrange payouts during the 2016 presidential race to keep the porn actor Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal from making public claims of extramarital affairs with Trump. Trump has denied the affairs.
Before his sentencing, Cohen tried to win leniency, saying he had cooperated fully with prosecutors, including with the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into possible foreign influence in the 2016 election.
One of Mueller's prosecutors, Jeannie Rhee, said in court that Cohen has "provided consistent and credible information about core Russia-related issues under investigation." But Manhattan federal prosecutors said he never fully committed to cooperating with them and did not earn a substantial sentence reduction.
"How can I take any other inference than that it's retaliatory?" Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said. Prosecutors had insisted that Probation Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen's public communications.
