Eric former Deputy Assistant attorney Thomas Dupree will dig into all of it but we begin with rick leventhal. A stunning set of admissions in Lower Manhattan by a man who was one of the president s most trusted employees. He lied, paid women off he says to pay his boss. He walked out of the courthouse late yesterday free on 500,000 bond pled guilty to hiding income from his Taxi Cab Business and hiding debt to secure a Home Equity Loan and arranging payments to two women in the runup to the president ial election in coordination in and at the direction for a candidate to federal office to try to help him win. Mr. Cohen disregarded that training, that tradition and decided that he was above the law and for that he is going to pay a very, very serious price. He admitted he paid 130,000
to stephanie clifford, Stormy Daniels, because she was ready to go public with a claimed affair with mr. Trump. And he arranged to reimburse a tabloid to bury a story about Karen Mcdougal who also claimed
that s the problem with michael cohen as a witness. if what cohen said yesterday is true, then virtually everything he said for the prior year was a lie. and that makes him a very difficult fact witness to get a jury to believe. now, that doesn t mean that he can t be corroborated by other witnesses. but standing alone, this doesn t make out a particularly strong case. having said that, if people don t think this is not a serious development, they haven t been paying attention. you have the president s lawyer implicating him in a federal crime. even if that lawyer is michael cohen. that s a serious matter. now, how the president responds to that is going to be very key because the justice department by putting these charges into these that the allegations are true and the narrative is