Noah Feldman, Columnist

Cohen’s Guilty Plea Puts Trump in a Perilous Spot

The prospect of a criminal prosecution will loom over the rest of his presidency.

August 21, 2018 at 10:27 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Probably headed to prison.
Photographer: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

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It’s happened: Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, admitted in open court Tuesday to violating federal campaign finance laws — at the direction of a candidate who told him to do so. Cohen is saying that Trump was a principal of the crime he admits to having committed. Under federal law, that makes Trump criminally liable as an accomplice.

The closest historical analogy is when Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski named President Richard Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. That was based in part on testimony by John Dean, who had implicated Nixon in congressional testimony while Nixon was still in office. But even Dean’s 1973 guilty plea in court to obstruction of justice did not state that he had committed his crimes at the direction of the president.