Michael Cohen, Staring Down Prison: 'Wait, There's More!!!'

President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen will report to jail on May 6th for a three year sentence, his punishment for crimes that include campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.

Cohen, understandably, is not psyched about the idea of spending years in prison. His new plan to avoid this fate seems to be to make himself useful to various investigations of Trump and his team for as long as possible, according to CNN.

Cohen lawyers Lanny Davis and Michael Monico wrote Congress in a letter today that their client recently discovered a bunch of files on a hard drive that could be of use to their investigations. Cohen is asking for more time to prove to the Southern District of New York that these files are important.

Incredibly, after everything Cohen has admitted to, he’s now asking Democrats in Congress to bail him out, calling on committee members in front of whom he testified to write letters for him that could help him secure a lighter sentence.

Davis and Monico wrote in their letter that they’re hoping to both reduce Cohen’s sentence and have the date he reports to prison “substantially postponed while he is fully cooperating with prosecutors and Congress.”

“We hope that this memorandum demonstrates that Mr. Cohen needs to be readily accessible and immediately available to provide ongoing assistance to Congress in order for it to fulfill its executive branch oversight responsibilities. Mr. Cohen was only recently able to access a hard drive with important documents,” his lawyers wrote.

“However, with 30 days left before he surrenders to prison, time is no longer a luxury he is capable of,” the lawyers added.

This is a little sketchy, to say the least. It’s hard to believe that Cohen has anything he wasn’t aware of earlier this year, when he testified to Congress that he was a reformed man. It’s not like he didn’t know what was coming back then.

But who knows! Perhaps Cohen really has helped Trump with so many crimes that he forgot about a few of them. Maybe he really didn’t have access to the hard drive. More likely, he just really doesn’t want to go to prison.

On the other hand, Cohen’s lawyers say the new hard drive contains 14 million additional files. Cohen was Trump’s personal lawyers for years, and it’s not hard to imagine that there’s some good shit in there.

“Working alone, Mr. Cohen has only had the time to go through less than 1 percent of the drive, or approximately 3,500 files,” his attorneys wrote. “Mr. Cohen needs time, resources, and assistance to separate out privileged and personal documents from these 14 million files to make the rest available for review by various congressional committees.”

For reasons unknown, Cohen never fully cooperated with the Manhattan US Attorney during his case in New York. The prosecutors in that case made clear that Cohen wasn’t a cooperating witness, despite his work with the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. New York prosecutors said Cohen “repeatedly declined to provide full information about the scope of any additional criminal conduct in which he may have engaged or had knowledge.”

Now that he’s staring down years in prison, it seems his willingness to cooperate might be changing. To that, we say: bring it on, Michael.