Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman

“Basically he needs a little loving and respect booster,” one of Cohen’s legal advisers at the time, Robert Costello, wrote in a text message to Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lead lawyer. “He is not thinking clearly because he feels abandoned.”

That was in June. The “booster” from Trump never arrived. And by August, Cohen’s relationship with him had gone from fraught to hostile, casting a shadow on the Trump presidency and helping drive multiple criminal investigations into the president’s inner circle, including some that continued after the special counsel’s work ended.

In the biggest blow to the president personally, federal prosecutors in Manhattan effectively characterized Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case against Cohen involving hush money payments to a pornographic film actress. Cohen, and evidence gathered by prosecutors, implicated the president.

Now, as Cohen prepares to head to prison in two weeks, dozens of previously unreported emails, text messages and other confidential documents reviewed by The New York Times suggest that his falling out with Trump might have been avoidable.

Missed cues, clashing egos, veiled threats and unaddressed money worries all contributed to Cohen’s halting decision to turn on a man he had long idolized and even once vowed to take a bullet for, according to the documents and interviews with people close to the events. Some of the documents have been turned over to prosecutors in Manhattan, and a small number were mentioned in the special counsel’s report released Thursday, which dealt extensively with Cohen and referred to him more than 800 times.

Cohen held out hope for a different outcome until the very end, when he pleaded guilty and confessed to paying the illegal hush money to avert a potential sex scandal during the presidential campaign. Just hours earlier, wracked with indecision, he was still seeking guidance, looking, as one informal adviser put it, “for another way out.”

Cohen’s anxiety, on display in the documents, played a role in the undoing of his relationship with Trump, as did Costello’s lack of success in serving as a bridge to the White House. But also looming large were Giuliani’s and Trump’s failures to understand the threat that Cohen posed, and their inability — or unwillingness — to put his financial and emotional insecurities to rest.

After the FBI raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room in April 2018, two of Cohen’s advisers explored whether the president might be open to a pardon, but Giuliani offered no assurances.

In June, Costello proposed that he and Giuliani, who have been friends for decades, meet urgently with Cohen to address his grievances and ease his anxieties. “Are we going to meet Thursday or Friday?” Costello texted Giuliani on a Monday. “I would like to get back to Michael with a response.”

But Giuliani did not respond. And when Costello followed up, “Can I get a response on the possible meeting?” Giuliani hesitated, replying, “Not yet because haven’t talked to President,” who was out of the country.

The next day, Cohen’s private admission to friends that he was open to cooperating with prosecutors suddenly appeared in the news. And Cohen relayed his growing displeasure with the Trump camp to Costello, sending the lawyer an article that suggested the president and his allies intended “to discredit Michael Cohen” and commenting in the email that “they are again on a bad path.” He also complained to Costello that the president had stopped covering his legal expenses.

Costello, who spoke with The Times after Cohen waived attorney-client privilege in February, said that without Cohen’s team and the president’s lawyers in sync, it was impossible to navigate the tumultuous relationship.

“What we had here was a failure to communicate,” said Costello, who was never formally retained by Cohen. “My mission was to get everyone tuned in to the same channel. My thought was a face-to-face meeting among all the lawyers together with Cohen would put everyone on the same channel. The meeting never happened, and the rest is history.”

In an interview, Giuliani acknowledged that the Trump team had pulled back from Cohen, saying it did so because prosecutors might have viewed friendly overtures as witness tampering, and because Cohen’s legal problems extended beyond his relationship with the president.

“It seemed like an unfortunate but sensible decision,” he said of the Trump team’s reticence toward Cohen. “The more I look back at it, the more I wonder if it was inevitable that Michael was going to crack.”

Cohen declined to comment, but his spokesman, Lanny Davis, suggested that the Trump team had made an effort to keep Cohen in “the liar’s club” of people covering for the president.

After pleading guilty in August, and hoping to reduce his three-year prison sentence, Cohen told federal prosecutors about Trump’s role in the hush-money scheme, as well as other aspects of the president’s company, where he had worked for a decade. He also suggested Trump’s team had dangled a pardon to keep him loyal, according to Davis, who described the effort as more an attempt “to keep Cohen in the tent of those lying and protecting Trump than anything else.”

Giuliani denied that a pardon had been offered. Costello told prosecutors in a recent meeting that the pardon discussion had been initiated by Cohen and rejected by Giuliani.

Unencumbered by the restraints on the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, the prosecutors are now scrutinizing a wider swath of the president’s associates. About a dozen investigations are underway, including an inquiry into the Trump inaugural committee, which Cohen had assisted. Cohen also delivered congressional testimony that accused Trump of being a racist and a “con man.”

— ‘Blowing This Whole Thing’

The relationship between Cohen and Trump was looking up, at least for a brief period, in April 2018.

Just days after FBI agents searched his hotel room on Park Avenue, Cohen received a phone call from the president. “Stay strong,” Trump told him, according to the Mueller report and a person with knowledge of the call.

Cohen thanked Trump repeatedly, and later told people the message was clear: The president, who had a history of treating Cohen poorly, wanted to keep him on his team.

As federal prosecutors in Manhattan built a criminal case against Cohen, he set out to find a lawyer who had experience with the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, known as the Southern District of New York. That’s when an acquaintance at a local law firm emailed him to pitch the services of his colleague, Costello. The firm was eager to become associated with such a high-profile case, and quickly embraced Cohen.

“I am really sorry to read about your troubles,” the acquaintance, Jeffrey Citron, wrote. “My partner Bob Costello was formerly the deputy chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District.” He said that if Cohen wanted to connect with Costello and obtain “his insight into your situation, it would be my pleasure to arrange.”

Cohen jumped at the offer: “I do. Can you connect me to him?”

Cohen met that day with Citron and Costello in a conference room at the Loews Regency Hotel, where he had been staying while his home underwent renovations. After drawing the curtains, Cohen revealed the depths of his despair.

“I was up on the roof. I was thinking of jumping,” Cohen told the two men, according to Costello.

Over the course of the two-hour meeting, Cohen and Costello discussed options for digging out of the mess, including possibly seeking immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation. They also talked about whether state prosecutors could charge Cohen even if the president pardoned him, Costello said. And they discussed, in passing, Costello’s friendship with Giuliani.

When Giuliani was hired by the president a few days later, Costello emailed Cohen: “I told you my relationship with Rudy which could be very very useful for you.”

The next day, after speaking to Giuliani by phone, Costello wrote in an email to Citron that the president’s lead lawyer had been “thrilled that I reached out to him about Cohen.” He added that Giuliani was “calling the president tonight.”

Costello also shared his upbeat assessment with Cohen. “I just spoke to Rudy Giuliani and told him I was on your team,” he wrote in an email sent late that night. “Rudy was thrilled and said this could not be a better situation for the president or you.” He continued, “He said thank you for opening this back channel of communication and asked me to keep in touch.”

Trump praised Cohen on Twitter the next day, calling him “a fine person” and predicting he would not flip. After another conversation with Giuliani, Costello sent Cohen an update: “They are in our corner,” he wrote in an email. “You have friends in high places.”

Cohen believed at the time that “he had the support of the White House if he continued to toe the party line,” according to the special counsel’s report. “He determined to stay on message and be part of the team.”

The glow faded quickly, however, as a series of developments stoked Cohen’s suspicions about Trump’s intentions toward him.

First, later in April, Giuliani rebuffed Costello’s question about whether Trump might entertain the idea of a pardon, according to Costello. Cohen also asked his Washington-based lawyer, Stephen Ryan, to make a similar inquiry, and Giuliani was noncommittal. Ryan had been working at the time with the president’s legal team to prevent prosecutors from reviewing materials seized in the FBI raids that were protected by attorney-client privilege.

Next, Trump called in to the television program “Fox &amp; Friends” and tried to minimize the legal work that Cohen had performed for him — “a tiny, tiny little fraction,” he said. Those comments appeared to undermine Cohen’s argument that many of the seized materials might be privileged.

A week after that, in early May, it was a television appearance by Giuliani that upset Cohen.

Under an information-sharing agreement among the lawyers, Ryan had discussed with Giuliani that the Trumps had reimbursed Cohen for the hush money he paid to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels. Without notifying Cohen or his representatives, Giuliani then delivered the revelation on Fox News. Cohen became concerned that the Trump team was disseminating information about him gleaned from the agreement, and that it was being done with Trump’s knowledge.

As the president’s lead lawyer continued to publicly discuss the hush-money scheme in the days and weeks that followed, Cohen told associates that Giuliani was “blowing this whole thing.”

— ‘Keep on Punching’

Days after Giuliani appeared on Fox News, Costello confided to Citron, his partner, about his mounting concerns that Cohen was stringing them along.

“There are simply too many facts that he is not sharing with us to give me a level of comfort,” Costello wrote to Citron. He suggested that Cohen’s distrust of Giuliani was also a factor. “I do not think that Rudy doing his Press Tour is helping us in our relationship with Michael Cohen,” he wrote.

Soon after, Cohen was dealt another blow when confidential financial records were leaked, showing that he had collected more than $1 million in consulting fees from major corporations and from a New York private equity firm tied to a Russian oligarch. With the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, Cohen was suddenly back in the discussion about Trump’s ties to Russia.

Costello emailed him words of encouragement — “keep on punching” — but Cohen did not reply. Costello doubled down, later emailing Cohen in all caps that Mueller had “REACHED THE CONCLUSION THAT THERE IS NO RUSSIAN ANGLE TO THE MICHAEL COHEN INVESTIGATION OTHERWISE HE WOULD HAVE KEPT THE CASE FOR HIMSELF.”

Costello made the same point in a text message to Giuliani, who “thought it was very important to get that message out there,” Costello recounted in an email to Citron. But, Costello said, Giuliani suggested he could not make that case himself, “because it will look like he is defending Michael Cohen.”

The challenge, Costello continued, was “to get Cohen on the right page without giving him the appearance that we are following instructions from Giuliani or the president.”

By mid-June, despite warning signs that Cohen might turn on the president, some members of Trump’s team concluded that he did not pose a real threat, interviews show. Giuliani never met with Cohen, though Costello had suggested it might help. And the same day that ABC News reported that Cohen was “likely to cooperate” with prosecutors, Giuliani appeared on Fox News and played down the possibility of Cohen’s flipping, saying he had “checked into this last night” and it was not true.

The next day, Costello sent Cohen a link to Giuliani’s interview. And when Cohen asked, “Why send this to me?” Costello explained, “You are under the impression that Trump and Giuliani are trying to discredit you.” He continued, “I think you are wrong because you are believing the narrative promoted by the left-wing media.”

Costello also texted Giuliani a note praising the interview, adding that he had sent a YouTube clip of it to Cohen in hopes that it would calm him down.

But that month, any good will dissipated when The Times reported that the FBI had seized in its raid a tape recording of Cohen and Trump from 2016. The two men were discussing hush money paid to another woman, Karen McDougal, who claimed to have had an affair with Trump.

Each side blamed the other for the explosive revelation, pushing the relationship to a near breaking point.

— ‘Is He Totally Nuts?’

Later in June, Vanity Fair reported that Cohen had hired a new lawyer — not Costello, but Guy Petrillo, a former federal prosecutor who had worked in the Southern District alongside James Comey, the former FBI director and a Trump foil.

Costello raised concerns with Giuliani. “Does Cohen really want a friend of Comey as his lawyer?” he asked in a text message.

At the same time, Cohen’s concerns about money were reaching a crisis, according to court records. Trump’s business and campaign had paid about $1.7 million of Cohen’s legal bills, but stopped paying in June, around the time Ryan finished reviewing the documents seized in the FBI raid and withdrew from the case. An official with Ryan’s firm declined to comment.

Cohen wanted the Trump Organization to also help pay Petrillo, which never happened.

In the interview with The Times, Giuliani said he was new to the issue of the legal fees at the time, having just been hired by Trump a couple of months earlier. He said the decision was made by the Trump Organization to pay for legal work only if it was expressly connected to Trump or the company.

A lawyer for the Trump Organization said Cohen’s criminal problems were of his own making. “He should quit lying and take responsibility for his actions,” said the lawyer, Marc Mukasey. “The idea that the Trump Organization should have paid his legal fees and expenses is a total crock.”

Distrust between the two sides only grew in June when comedian Tom Arnold tweeted a selfie with Cohen and later claimed that they were teaming up to take down the president. Giuliani, sounding alarmed, phoned Costello while he was having lunch at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse — the president wanted to know what this was about.

After lunch, Costello tried to reach Cohen, who was slow to reply. “Is he totally nuts???” Costello wrote in frustration to his law partner. “He is playing with the most powerful man on the planet.”

When Cohen finally sent along a clarification from Arnold, Costello texted Giuliani. “Make sure your client knows this,” he wrote. “He will sleep better.”

Cohen then asked Costello to make things right with Giuliani, Costello recalled, and assure Trump that he remained loyal. So Costello had lunch in late June with Giuliani at the Grand Havana Room on the top floor of 666 Fifth Ave. Afterward, he assured Cohen in an email that he had “conveyed all of your expressed concerns” to Giuliani “for transmission to his client” — the president. Cohen replied, thanking him for “speaking to your friend.”

Still, Cohen heard nothing from the Trump legal team, and no additional legal fees were paid by the Trump Organization.

By early July, Cohen was making overtly hostile moves toward the president. He appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and declared, “My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will.” He deleted the line in his Twitter biography about working for Trump. And he hired Davis, a Democrat and a friend of the Clintons, as a spokesman.

Davis said he asked Cohen at the time why he wanted to hire him. “I now fear for my family and my country,” Davis recalled Cohen’s saying. “So I decided to turn and tell the truth — and ask you to announce I wouldn’t accept a pardon if I was offered one.”

A person who was familiar with Cohen’s decision-making at the time said the moves might have been a cry for help, but Costello and others saw them as evidence that he had “chosen a different path,” as Costello wrote to Cohen in an email.

“We will not be involved in that journey and therefore Jeff Citron asked me to let you know that he will be sending you a bill,” the email said.

Within weeks, Giuliani, who had previously referred to Cohen as “an honest, honorable lawyer,” was instead casting him as a “pathological liar.”

— A Scotch on the Rocks

His bond with Trump all but broken, Cohen decided to cooperate with law enforcement officials. And so he traveled to Washington to meet Aug. 7 with Mueller’s team for the first of many discussions.

The next week, his lawyer, Petrillo, arranged to talk with prosecutors in Manhattan, interviews show. The prosecutors had been putting him off but suddenly agreed to meet a couple of days later, Friday, an indication that criminal charges against Cohen were imminent.

Petrillo asked for a deferred prosecution agreement relating to the hush money, a lighter punishment that might have spared Cohen from prison so long as he stayed out of trouble. That weekend the prosecutors signaled there would be no such deal, but they were willing to consider a guilty plea.

Over the next day, Cohen and his wife huddled in Petrillo’s office debating their options. And throughout the day Monday, his lawyers went back and forth with prosecutors over the details of the plea to campaign finance, banking and tax crimes.

But that evening, Cohen was still unsure whether to plead guilty at all. He poured a glass of 12-year-old Glenlivet Scotch on the rocks and debated his future.

Early Tuesday, he was still having second thoughts, but ultimately stuck to the plan. Standing at the defense table, Cohen said he had worked with Trump to cover up two potential sex scandals, including the one involving Daniels. He confessed that he had arranged the hush money “in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office,” implicating the president publicly for the first time in a federal campaign finance crime.

“Time and time again,” Cohen later told the judge at his sentencing, “I felt it was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/us/politics/michael-cohen-trump.html" id="19d91db8-ef6b-32f0-a62b-013af06d2c48">The New York Times</a>.

How Trump's Trusted Fixer Came to Turn Against Him

Michael Cohen was at a breaking point. He told friends he was suicidal. He insisted to lawyers he would never go to jail. Most of all, he feared that President Donald Trump, his longtime boss, had forsaken him.

After pleading guilty in August, and hoping to reduce his three-year prison sentence, Cohen told federal prosecutors about Trump’s role in the hush-money scheme, as well as other aspects of the president’s company, where he had worked for a decade. He also suggested Trump’s team had dangled a pardon to keep him loyal, a claim denied by Giuliani.

In a recent meeting requested by the prosecutors, Costello said, he told them the pardon discussion was initiated by Cohen and rejected by Giuliani.

How Michael Cohen Turned Against President Trump

After pleading guilty in August, and hoping to reduce his three-year prison sentence, Cohen told federal prosecutors about Trump’s role in the hush-money scheme, as well as other aspects of the president’s company, where he had worked for a decade. He also suggested Trump’s team had dangled a pardon to keep him loyal, a claim denied by Giuliani. In a recent meeting requested by the prosecutors, Costello said, he told them the pardon discussion was initiated by Cohen and rejected by Giuliani.

The lawyer, Robert Costello, had about a dozen conversations with Trump’s lead lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, according to emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with people involved in the matter. In one email, the discussions were characterized as a “back channel of communication.”

During one of the conversations last April, Costello said in an interview, he asked whether Trump might put a pardon “on the table” for Cohen, who was under federal investigation for a variety of possible crimes, including arranging hush-money payments to two women who had said they had affairs with Trump. Giuliani told Costello that the president was unwilling to discuss pardons at that time, Costello said in the interview, and they did not discuss it again.

Now federal prosecutors have requested the emails and documents from Costello, according to a copy of the request, which cited an investigation into “possible violations of federal criminal law” but offered no further detail. The request, sent last week, was for any documents related to Cohen as well as any bills Costello had sent him.

In one email, sent by Costello in April 2018 after a conversation with Giuliani, he assured Cohen, “Sleep well tonight, you have friends in high places.” He added, in a postscript: “Some very positive comments about you from the White House. Rudy noted how that followed my chat with him last night.”

A spokesman for the federal prosecutors, from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan, declined to comment.

There was no indication prosecutors suspected Costello of wrongdoing, and the focus of their inquiry is not clear.

Before calling Giuliani to ask about a pardon, Costello — a former federal prosecutor who had worked with Giuliani — warned Cohen that it was premature to broach the subject, but raised it anyway, he said Wednesday.

“He got a little annoyed,” Costello said, referring to Giuliani, his friend for decades. “I got the message. You only have to tell me once, Rudy.”

Giuliani insisted Wednesday that the discussions had primarily been about Cohen’s concerns that Trump “was very mad at him” and the fact that the investigation into Cohen had been assigned to the Manhattan prosecutors. Speaking by telephone, Giuliani said Costello and others in touch with Cohen had described him at the time as deeply distressed.

Last month, Cohen told the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony about his dealings with Costello, which took place between April and July of last year, before he was charged with any crimes, according to two people familiar with his testimony.

He told the committee that Costello had raised the concept of a “pre-pardon” in his discussions with Cohen, the people said. In his public testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, however, Cohen did not mention conversations about a pardon, and insisted he had never requested one.

By late last summer, after Giuliani had publicly discussed aspects of the case related to Cohen and the Trump organization had balked at paying some of his legal fees, Cohen had taken a new approach to his legal difficulties: turning on Trump and speaking with federal prosecutors and with Robert Mueller, the special counsel.

In August, he pleaded guilty to an array of crimes, including arranging the hush-money payments. And in testimony to Congress last month, he described Trump as a con man and a cheat, and said he was “ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts.” He is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison term in May.

Less than a year ago, Cohen remained firmly entrenched in the Trump camp, and his extensive exchange with Costello suggested that he — and they — expected things would turn out differently.

In an email sent the day Giuliani was named as Trump’s lawyer, Costello told Cohen, “I am sure you saw the news that Rudy is joining the Trump legal team.” He added that he had told Cohen about his “relationship with Rudy, which could be very very useful for you.” Cohen wrote back, in part saying, “Great news.”

Within a day, Costello spoke by phone with Giuliani to tell him that Cohen was planning to hire Costello’s law firm. Soon after that call, Costello emailed Cohen to say, “Rudy was thrilled and said this could not be a better situation for the President or you,” noting that Giuliani knew and trusted Costello. Giuliani, he added, “said thank you for opening this back channel of communication.”

Later the same weekend, Costello sent the email about “friends in high places.”

The Times reported last week that Cohen had described to the prosecutors how Costello had spoken with Giuliani. Costello declined to comment at the time, citing attorney-client privilege, but has since learned that Cohen waived the privilege, freeing him to discuss his experience with Cohen.

In the interview, Costello accused Cohen of smearing him to the prosecutors as part of a bid to reduce his sentence. He also said Cohen repeatedly told him that he had committed no crimes and misled Costello’s law firm about his intentions to hire them.

“Cohen lied to us from day one,” Costello said, adding that neither he nor Giuliani dangled a pardon in front of Cohen.

A lawyer for Cohen, Lanny J. Davis, said he could not comment on the documents requested by prosecutors, but suggested it was “impossible to deny or try to spin your way out of what documents say.” He added that Cohen had clarified his testimony about pardons in a letter to the House committee this week, and that Cohen stood by his statement to the committee about not having sought a pardon. Davis said after the testimony that Cohen had inquired about Trump’s intentions after the president’s legal team “dangled” the possibility of pardons.

In an email sent to Cohen on June 13, Costello suggested Giuliani was about to speak with the president, “his client,” and asked if he had a message to convey.

“Michael, Since you jumped off the phone rather abruptly, I did not get a chance to tell you that my friend has communicated to tell me that he is meeting with his client this evening and he added that if there was anything you wanted to convey, you should tell me and my friend will bring it up for discussion this evening. I would suggest that you give this invitation some real thought.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/politics/cohen-giuliani-pardon.html" id="812a7e06-1d5d-3d77-ac73-c4131cee14be">The New York Times</a>.

Files Show Cohen Sought 'Back Channel' to Giuliani

Before he pleaded guilty and began assisting federal prosecutors last summer, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former fixer, spoke with a lawyer who agreed to reach out to the president’s legal team on his behalf.

Cohen, who worked at the Trump Organization for a decade, spoke with prosecutors about insurance claims the company had filed over the years, said the people, who did not elaborate on the nature of the possible irregularities.

While it was not clear whether the prosecutors found Cohen’s information credible and whether they intended to pursue it, the meeting suggests that they are interested in broader aspects of the Trump Organization, beyond their investigation into the company’s role in the hush money payments made before the 2016 election to women claiming to have had affairs with Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty last summer to arranging those payments.

The prosecutors also questioned Cohen about a donor to the president’s inaugural committee, Imaad Zuberi, a California venture capitalist and political fundraiser, according to the people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to discuss the confidential meeting. Around the time that Zuberi contributed $900,000 to the committee, he also tried to hire Cohen as a consultant and wrote him a substantial check, one of the people said.

Although Cohen did not go through with the arrangement, he was building a consulting business at the time with clients who sought to understand and have access to the Trump administration.

A spokesman for Zuberi, Steve Rabinowitz, confirmed the check Friday, saying it was for $100,000 and never cashed. Zuberi, the only person directly referenced in a recent subpoena prosecutors sent the inaugural committee, had previously denied having any dealings with Cohen beyond a few conversations.

There was no indication that Cohen, who is scheduled to begin serving a three-year prison sentence in May, implicated Trump in the possible irregularities discussed during the meeting last month. If prosecutors concluded that Cohen’s information was truthful and valuable, they could ask the judge who sentenced him to reduce his prison term.

The White House referred questions to the Trump Organization. A spokeswoman at the company did not respond to requests for comment. In the past, the president has accused Cohen of lying to try to reduce his sentence.

Lanny Davis, a lawyer and adviser to Cohen, would not comment on the investigations beyond saying that his client was “interested in cooperating with and assisting” the prosecutors “in any way they believe is helpful.”

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, known as the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.

The prosecutors recently sought to interview Trump Organization executives, according to a person briefed on the request, which was previously reported by CNN. The nature of the questions they were seeking to ask was not known.

Cohen is the only person sentenced to significant prison time in various investigations connected to Trump.

In August, Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws for his role in the hush money payments, as well as tax and bank crimes. In a separate case brought by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress about the timing of negotiations to build a Trump skyscraper in Moscow, and about the extent of Trump’s involvement in the plans.

In a memo to the court before he was sentenced in December, Cohen’s lawyers wrote that he was being disproportionately punished for “conduct that is routinely pursued through noncriminal enforcement,” referring to his admission of tax evasion. His lawyers drew a comparison to celebrities who received either fines or far less time after being charged with extensive tax fraud.

The session with the Southern District prosecutors was not the first time Cohen provided information that could possibly lead to a reduced sentence. Earlier, Cohen met twice with the prosecutors to assist their investigation of the payments to women, including the Trump Organization’s decision to reimburse Cohen for $130,000 he paid to pornographic film actress Stormy Daniels.

In an interview in December, Cohen told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that he was “done with the lying.” He went on: “I am done being loyal to President Trump, and my first loyalty belongs to my wife, my daughter, my son and this country.

Federal law allows prosecutors to seek — and a judge to grant — a reduced prison term for a defendant who offers “substantial assistance in investigating or prosecuting another person” within a year of being sentenced. The same rule would also allow the judge to consider assistance Cohen provided, before his sentencing, to the special counsel. Last year, he met seven times with prosecutors from Mueller’s office.

The continued scrutiny of the Trump family business and inaugural committee from the Southern District comes as Mueller is said to be wrapping up his investigation. Once he completes a report with his findings, various aspects of his investigation are expected to live on in the Southern District and other U.S. attorneys offices.

Cohen declined to seek a formal cooperation deal with the Southern District, which would have required him to disclose any crimes he had committed or had been aware of, and would have delayed his sentencing. His decision to forgo such an agreement most likely contributed to the severity of his sentence; his lawyer had argued for no prison time.

Trump had offered a different view, saying late last year that Cohen should serve a “full and complete” prison sentence. And as Cohen remained in the spotlight as a likely witness before Congress, Trump intensified his attacks on his former employee, urging prosecutors and the media to scrutinize Cohen’s family.

The attacks led Cohen to postpone a planned appearance before the House oversight committee this month. But this week, the committee announced that the testimony was back on for Wednesday and that Democrats planned to question Cohen about “the president’s business practices.”

Cohen has also agreed to testify behind closed doors before the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Cohen was originally scheduled to begin his prison term next month, but his lawyers cited the congressional testimony — as well as recent shoulder surgery — as a reason for a two-month delay. The judge overseeing Cohen’s case granted the request Wednesday.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/politics/michael-cohen-prosecutors-trump-organization.html" id="a795ff70-fecf-3f40-a8dc-220c9a5017b6">The New York Times</a>.

Cohen Gave Prosecutors New Information on the Trump Family Business

NEW YORK — Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, met last month with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, offering information about possible irregularities within the president’s family business and about a donor to the inaugural committee, according to people familiar with the matter.

<h1>Before he pleaded guilty and began assisting federal prosecutors last summer, Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former fixer, spoke with a lawyer who agreed to reach out to the president’s legal team on his behalf.</h1>

In a email sent to Cohen on June 13, Costello suggested Giuliani was about to speak with the president, “his client,” and asked if he had a message to convey.

This article originally appeared in <a id="67ddf865-24fb-4911-b7de-168d5c8af605" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/politics/cohen-giuliani-pardon.html">The New York Times</a>.

Prosecutors seek records on Cohen's 'back channel' with Giuliani

The lawyer, Robert Costello, had about a dozen conversations with Trump’s lead lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, according to emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with people involved in the matter.

He told the committee that Costello had raised the concept of a “pre-pardon” in his discussions with Cohen, the people said. In his public testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, however, Cohen did not mention conversations about a pardon, and insisted he had never sought one from Trump.

Later the same weekend, Costello sent the email about “friends in high places." Those two emails were first reported by CNN.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c9b1d180-c41f-4d69-9666-8828b012656f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/politics/cohen-giuliani-pardon.html">The New York Times</a>.

Files show Cohen sought 'back channel' to Giuliani

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Ben Protess, William K. Rashbaum and Maggie Haberman

Articles written by the author

How Trump's Trusted Fixer Came to Turn Against Him

How Michael Cohen Turned Against President Trump

How Michael Cohen Turned Against President Trump

Files Show Cohen Sought 'Back Channel' to Giuliani

Cohen Gave Prosecutors New Information on the Trump Family Business

Prosecutors seek records on Cohen's 'back channel' with Giuliani

Files show Cohen sought 'back channel' to Giuliani