Donald Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen implicates Trump in criminal activity.

Cohen pleaded guilty in US District Court in Manhattan to eight tax evasion, fraud, and campaign finance charges.

On two of the charges — campaign finance violations with payments to women to silence them over claims of sexual encounters with Trump — Cohen said Trump directed him to arrange the “hush money”.

The payments were made “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” Cohen told the judge. “I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the [2016 Presidential] election.”

Just after Cohen’s plea, another bombshell dropped as Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was found guilty on eight charges of fraud.

Cohen’s implication of Trump concerns a $130,000 payment in October 2016 to the porn star Stormy Daniels, and $150,000 to former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who says she had 10-month affair with Trump in 2016-2017.

Trump has repeatedly denied knowledge of either payment over the encounters, which came just over a year after his marriage to Melania Knaus and a few months after the birth of their son Barron.

But the claims were put in jeopardy when Cohen was arrested early this year by Federal prosecutors in New York State over his financial affairs. Reports circulated that he was cooperating with both the prosecutors and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, and last month a tape was released of a Cohen-Trump conversation in which Trump appeared to discuss the forthcoming payoff to Daniels.

Cohen’s attorney Lanny Davis pressed the case against Trump, in comments to reporters and on TV after the court session:

[Cohen] stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election. If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?

Prosecutors said Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels was effectively a donation to Trump’s campaign, by securing her silence less than two weeks before the 2016 vote. Campaign finance law prohibits donations of more than $2,700 in a general election.

The $150,000 to McDougal came through American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, which purportedly was paying her to print her story of the affair with Trump. But AMI — whose CEO David Pecker is a Trump friend — effectively buried the account by refusing to pbublish.

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