NEW YORK _ Michael Cohen, the prison-bound former personal attorney to President Donald Trump, recently denied responsibility for some of the crimes he pleaded guilty to, insisting on a secretly recorded phone call that he only copped to them because he was worried about his wife.
Cohen, who is set to start serving a three-year sentence May 6, made the lament to comedian Tom Arnold, who provided a recording of the call to The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. Arnold told the newspaper that Cohen wasn't aware he recorded their March 25 chat.
Specifically, Cohen denied committing tax evasion and a financial crime related to his home equity line of credit _ both of which were included in his plea agreement with the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan.
"There's no tax evasion. And the HELOC?" Cohen says on the call, using an acronym for home equity line of credit. "I have an 18 percent loan to value on my home. How could there be a HELOC issue? How? Right? It's a lie."
The former Trump fixer suggested to Arnold that he only pleaded to those crimes because he didn't want his wife to possibly get caught up in the matter.
"I love this woman, and I am not going to let her get dragged into the mud of this crap," Cohen said.
He also expressed disbelief at the sentence he was given.
"I never thought the judge was going to throw a three-year frigging sentence," he said.
Cohen, 52, acknowledged on the call that he committed the campaign finances crimes he pleaded guilty to for paying off porn star Stormy Daniels on Trump's behalf after she threatened to go public with allegations she had sex with the president over a decade ago.
However, Cohen argued that shouldn't mean he had to lose "everything."
"I mean everything," Cohen told Arnold. "My family's happiness, my law license. I lost my business, my insurance, my bank accounts, all for what? All for what? Because Trump, you know, had an affair with a porn star."
Cohen's guilty plea implicated Trump in the campaign finance crimes stemming from the $130,000 pre-2016 election payoff. Trump denies ever having sex with Daniels.
Lanny Davis, Cohen's attorney, told the New York Daily News that "nothing" Cohen told Arnold contradicts what the former Trump fixer's attorney Guy Petrillo said in his sentencing memo to Manhattan Federal Court Judge William Pauley last year.
Davis declined to comment when asked to clarify how Cohen's phone call denial doesn't contradict his guilty plea. Instead, Davis pointed to special counsel Robert Mueller.
"I would also add the important words used by special counsel Robert Mueller, and others, in describing Michael Cohen's cooperation and testimony as 'credible' addressing the 'core' issues involved in his investigation," Davis said.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan did not return a request for comment.
