MICHAEL COHEN/RUSSIA INVESTIGATION/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/WOMEN: “President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was sentenced to three years in prison Wednesday [12-12-18] for crimes that included arranging payments during the 2016 election to silence women who claimed affairs with Trump after the President’s onetime ‘fixer’ attributed his offenses to ‘my duty to cover up his dirty deeds.’ Cohen’s sentence is the longest imposed to date on anyone connected to the President or stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election — a probe that has consumed much of Trump’s presidency and is poised to continue into the coming year. Before a packed Manhattan courtroom, Cohen, who once pledged to ‘take a bullet’ for Trump, professed to accept blame for his actions…Cohen’s sentence resulted from two cases. In August, he pleaded guilty in a Manhattan US attorney’s case to two campaign-finance violations tied to payments he made or orchestrated to women during the campaign — adult-film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — to stay silent about alleged sexual encounters with Trump.”
–Erica Orden, Sophie Tatum and Kara Scannell, “Michael Cohen sentenced to three years in prison after admitting he covered up Trump’s ‘dirty deeds’,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, December 12, 2018 9:02 pm