Trump's Troubles Are Now Much Worse, With Impeachment On the Horizon

Michael Cohen was full of hope. He expected to lead Trump's election campaign, and when it didn't happen, he waited for a phone call from the U.S. President to be appointed White House Chief of Staff. None of this happened and, at the end, what Cohen decided to do mesmerized the entire world.

He told a New York federal judge on August 21 that he had engaged in a crime coordinated by the man who sits in the Oval Office.

Even in a presidency punctuated by surreal moments, it was a stunning scene. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felony counts, including arranging payments during the 2016 campaign to suppress two women’s accounts of alleged extramarital affairs with Trump. “I participated in this conduct,” Cohen avowed, “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump himself. With that extraordinary statement, he implicated the President of the United States in a federal crime–to be violating campaign-finance laws–the “principal purpose,” of which he said, was to influence an election that Trump won by only 78,000 votes in three states.

As Time pointed out in this piece, ''The courtroom drama brought all the President’s legal and political problems together in a single supernova.''

It highlighted Trump’s sordid history with women, his willingness to blur the lines between business and politics, and growing fallout from the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who referred the Cohen case to federal prosecutors. Worse, the explosion came minutes after Trump’s onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted on eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud in a case prosecuted by Mueller’s deputies. 

Trump denies any criminal wrongdoing. Where did those payments come from? "They didn't come out of the campaign," Trump told Fox TV. But NPR in this factcheck exposes all his arguments as false, in five points.

And, as the Time story explains in detail, the gates to his impeachment are now opening, albeit slowly.