new tonight, michael cohen claiming the so-called taxi king is of not threat to him. he is avoiding up to 100 years in prison by cooperating with feds, but today, cohen denied he and friedman were partners. he tweeted we are fot partners and have never been partners in this business or any other. the problem b is that cohen is claiming that friedman is responsible for cohen s unpaid back taxes. extremes, right, if you have nothing to do with each other and there s no relationship. just who is he? the russian immigrant known as the taxi king. my business is only three thipg. excellent, very good or just good. his rise in the new york city taxi business earned him the nickname, the taxi king. the russian immigrant is a long time business associate of the president s personal attorney, michael cohen. friedman is now the latest to be linked to robert mueller s investigation after reaching a plea deal with new york s
presidential tweet so we don t know. it wasn t just about hillary clinton s campaign. it was most importantly the information they got was about russia interfering in our elections. but it sounds good. it sounds god for the president. so let s talk about this. michael cohen s business partner, his name is evgeny freidman. he is known as the taxi king, taking a plea so he doesn t go to jail. so he is going to help prosecutors. how much pressure does this put on cohen? my understanding of his cooperation deal is it s for both state and federal investigations, right? federal investigation involves a man named robert mueller. this guy was facing $5 million in legal penalties, four on counts crimes that have sentences up to 25 years. i mean, he wouldn t get 100 years, but still, he was facing a number of years in prison and a lot of money. bumped down to $50,000 and much less prison. when you have that, that s not good for the guy on the other end. jack knows this better than me.
the times reports his cooperation will keep him out of prison. this follows another plea deal made with paul manafort s former son-in-law. more reporting now on this from cnn s reporter who joins us from washington. what do we know about this deal that the michael cohen s tax partner made? reporter: we know that jane friedman, known as new york s taxi king, pleaded guilty to state tax fraud charges. he was facing multiple charges for evading $5 million in taxes in new york state. so today, his plea deal is that he s going to plead guilty to this one count for just $50,000 in taxes. so that s a significant reduction in what he could be facing. also as part of this plea agreement, he s not going to face jail time. the new york times is report thing is a cooperation agreement, which means he will be he s agreeing to cooperate with new york state and federal authorities about any investigations that they have ongoing. and friedman was a long-time
and just another point i would make. so the president s lawyer, michael cohen, long-time lawyer is now facing the possibility of severe charges. the president s lawyers partner was already charged multiple times. he didn t pay $5 million in taxes. there is just a lot of messiness so to speak around the president. laura, this taxi king, it seems like he got a pretty generous offer. what does that tell you about the value of his cooperation? the sweeter the deal, the sweeter the information they have to give you there is no incentive if you re a prosecutor to give someone a generalious allocution and deal here unless they re going to give you some information. normally speaking you would hang somebody on that hook long enough to be able to secure the information you want before you actually give the person the final sentence. once it s given to this, they there is no incentive to cooperate. michael flynn had a sentence that is elongated now because they want to have more information
i think it was reduced to 3 million. the idea here is to get cohen to start cooperating because he s the big kahuna that s going to have information they really want. and the taxi king is going to be the canary king. he s going to start singing like a canary. the judge said to him specifically, do you understand the nature of the benefit your attorneys have provided for you? he said, yes, i do. because for him to be able to get away from such a long term to now basic probation, he s going to say anything and everything they know about cohen, they know exactly what he knows and that s going to put pressure on cohen to say anything he knows about trump. i m afraid this will be really harmful. we don t know, kirsten, that this could lead anywhere to the president. yes, it could very easily lead to cohen but it could actually