Michael Cohen is pleading with a Manhattan federal judge to reduce his three-year sentence to just a year and a day — citing his ongoing cooperation with probes into President Trump and even quoting Shakespeare.
In a Wednesday court filing, Cohen asks for the more lenient sentence because he’s spent “approximately 170 hours providing testimony to some eight different governmental agencies, in furtherance of their duties and obligations.”
In the sworn statement, Trump’s former personal lawyer also states he’s spent around 10 hours with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance to help with his probe of Trump’s financial dealings.
The florid filing asks that Judge William Pauley schedule a hearing in order to “explore, evaluate, and quantify” Cohen’s cooperation since his 2018 guilty plea.
“All that Affirmant thought was important and valuable has been painfully revealed as derived, as if through a ‘Faustian bargain,'” Cohen writes, referencing himself. “Like former White House counsel John Dean observed in his book ‘Blind Ambition,’ affirment thought being Donald Trump’s lawyer made him a ‘big man.'”
Cohen goes on to say he became a blind “enabler” of Trump — who he says can “be both magnetic, powerful, and charismatic” — but that he now “sees what Iago meant in Shakepeare’s [sic] ‘Othello’ when he said ‘He who steals my purse steals trash, he who steals my good name steals all.'”
Cohen writes that his prosecution and cooperation have left him “(a) disbarred, (b) financially crushed, and (c) personally embarrassed and humiliated.”
Cohen, 53, suggests that if Pauley won’t give him a sentence reduction, he could also allow Cohen to serve out the remainder of his stint under home confinement.
He has been serving out his sentence in the upstate New York prison Otisville since May 9.
Cohen was sentenced in December 2018 after he pleaded guilty to crimes including violating US campaign finance laws during Trump’s 2016 presidential run.
As part of the plea, the now-disbarred lawyer admitted to arranging hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and onetime Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal in exchange for their silence. Both women have claimed they had affairs with Trump, which the commander-in-chief denies.
Should Pauley grant the request, Cohen could walk free as early as next year.
Neither prosecutors nor Pauley have responded to the filing.