Michael Cohen to Plead Guilty to Criminal Charges

Go Nakamura/ZUMA

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Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and longtime fixer, has agreed to plead guilty to charges, multiple news outlets reported Tuesday. He is scheduled to appear before a federal courtroom in Manhattan later this afternoon.

Breaking News: Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, reached a plea deal with prosecutors investigating payments he made to women for Trump https://t.co/RKnTBly2S6
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 21, 2018

The plea agreement with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York would come days after the New York Times reported that Cohen was being investigated for more than $20 million in fraud. 
In April, the FBI raided Cohen’s offices and seized documents related to financial records that revealed a complex money trail showing that a firm with ties to a Russian oligarch had paid Cohen a total of $500,000 starting in January 2017—just as the US intelligence community had definitively concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Trump.
Other documents seized in the raid were related to Cohen’s $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had an affair with Trump. Trump initially denied the relationship and any knowledge of the payment, only to officially acknowledge reimbursing Cohen on his financial disclosure form weeks later. 
In recent weeks, Cohen, who once claimed he would “take a bullet” for Trump, has publicly signaled that he could be willing to cooperate with federal prosecutors as part of a plea deal.
This is a breaking news post. We will update as more information becomes available.