Michael Cohen, the former personal attorney to American President, Donald Trump on Tuesday pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court to eight criminal counts.

In his plea, Cohen admitted that he acted to keep information that would have been harmful to Trump’s candidacy and campaign from becoming public during the 2016 election cycle ‘in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office’.

The charges against Cohen, an attorney for Trump until earlier this year and a member of his inner circle throughout his presidential campaign, brings to an end,  months-long investigation by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

According to the criminal information filed against Cohen in court, he acted with Trump and his allies, including David Pecker, the CEO of the National Enquirer’s publisher, American Media Incorporated, to suppress potentially damaging claims against the President.

Although Trump himself was not named in the suit, the court filing referred to an Individual -1, who by January 2017 had become president of the United States.

The counts against Cohen included tax fraud, false statements to a bank and campaign finance violations tied to his work for Trump, including payments Cohen made or helped orchestrate that were designed to silence women who alleged they had had affairs with the then candidate.

 

Though not named in the plea deal filed in court, the women whom Cohen helped silence were Stephanie Clifford, a porn star who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels and a former Playboy model named Karen McDougal. Trump has denied the claims.

In the case of Clifford, Cohen arranged a nondisclosure agreement for which he paid her $130,000 and for that Cohen was charged with making an excessive campaign contribution, since the payment was made in service of the campaign and exceeded the federal limit.

For McDougal, Cohen and the CEO of a media company ‘worked together to keep an individual from publicly disclosing’ information that would have been harmful to a candidate, saying the individual received $150,000.

In the summer of 2016, American Media Inc. paid McDougal $150,000 for a contract that effectively silenced her claims of having had an affair with Trump.

Assistant US Attorney Andrea Griswold said prosecutors would have been prepared to present evidence during a trial that the two disbursements were so-called hush payments.

“The proof on these counts at trial would establish that these payments were made in order to ensure that each recipient of the payments did not publicize their stories of alleged affairs with the candidate,” Griswold said.

The charges against Cohen also covered a range of his activity outside of his work for Trump. In the tax evasion scheme linked to his taxi medallion business, Cohen failed to report more than $4 million in income.

Cohen also pleaded guilty to making false statements to a bank by understating his medallion debt in order to secure loans to buy property. He had omitted a $14 million line of credit on applications so that he could purchase property, including a Park Avenue condominium and a summer home.

According to the court filings, he also got a $500,000 home equity line of credit in April 2016, a loan he never would have gotten if the bank knew of the $14 million debt.