Rachel Maddow takes a look at the days top political news stories. Charge of grand larceny, a big stack of charges involving a large amount of money and potentially a large amount of jail time. The story they uncovered at the courthouse that day, for some reason, friedman had gotten this huge Criminal Liability he was facing winnowed down to almost nothing. All the prison time and felonies evaporated. Instead of being tried for evading 5 million in taxes, prosecutors let him plead guilty to one count of evaluating 50,000 worth of taxes. Not 5 million, 50,000. Instead of decades in potential prison time the deal he cut with prosecutors got him zero prison time. People do plea deals all the time they offer their testimony for prosecutors letting them off the hook and going easier on
them. This was like the mother of all plea deals. The amount he offered must have been very very valuable to the government given how sweet the deal was he got from them in return. That happened in late may.
heading. in this list of charges he pled guilty from you see where all the stuff may have been leading, the tax charges cohen pled guilty to yesterday are in large part the work in the taxi business, personal loans, tax transfers, illegal banking tricks can be boring to describe if you re looking for a cops and robbers story but easy for prosecutors to prove, once they have the paperwork to prove it, if they re really lucky, have the testimony of an accountant or business partner to explain whatever documentation they can get from the banks. for obvious reasons, there has been intense national and political focus on the final two charges michael cohen pled guilty to yesterday, the campaign finance charges in which he remarkably directly implicated the president of the united states as his criminal co-conspirator, the person who