title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: "Metro" writer James Baldock found that the trailer was "so gut-wrenchingly bad" and that "if the movie lives up to its two-minute preview – [it] is set to be the greatest abomination to grace the big screen since "The Emoji Movie"." He finished by writing, "Listen carefully, and you can just about hear the sound of Beatrix Potter, turning furiously in her grave." On November 7, a new trailer for the United Kingdom was released.


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: "Peter Rabbit" grossed $115.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $235.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $351.2 million, against a production budget of $50 million.


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: In the United States and Canada, the film was released alongside "Fifty Shades Freed" and "", and was projected to gross around $16 million from 3,725 theaters in its opening weekend, with some estimates as high as $25 million. It ended up making $25 million over the weekend, finishing second at the box office behind "Fifty Shades" ($38.8 million). The film dropped 30% in its second weekend to $17.5 million ($23.4 million over the four-day Martin Luther King Jr. weekend), finishing second behind newcomer "Black Panther".


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: In the UK, "Peter Rabbit" became the biggest family film of 2018, overtaking Pixar's "Coco" with $56.3 million. Totals from other markets include China ($26.5 million), Australia ($20.2 million), France ($12.3 million) and Germany ($12.1 million).


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: The film was released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on digital platforms on April 20, 2018. A Blu-ray, DVD and 4K Ultra HD followed on May 1, 2018. The Blu-ray extra features include "Shake Your Cotton-Tail Dance Along" (a dance-along to the song "I Promise You"), "Peter Rabbit: Mischief in the Making" (a seven-minute behind-the-scenes video), and "Flopsy Turvy" (a mini-movie focusing on Peter's triplet sisters). In the United States, a Special Garden Edition Blu-ray & DVD was released as a Target exclusive with a bonus disc featuring a seventeen-minute featurette titled "Make Your Own Garden".


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, ""Peter Rabbit" updates Beatrix Potter's classic characters with colourfully agreeable results that should entertain younger viewers while admittedly risking the wrath of purists." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 51 out of 100 based on 26 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: Olly Richards at "Empire" gave the film 3 out of 5 stars, praising the "splendid" animation and Gleeson's performance, though he felt that Corden had been miscast. Chris Nashawaty at "Entertainment Weekly" gave the film a 'B' grade, saying it was "clever, and funny, and moves as fast as a tyke on a sugar bender", noting its differences with the source material. Robbie Collin at "The Daily Telegraph" gave it 2 out of 5 stars, praising the "appealing double act" of Gleeson and Byrne but comparing the film unfavourably to "Paddington" and criticising the characterisation of Peter Rabbit. Susan Wloszczyna on "RogerEbert.com" gave it 2 out of 4 stars, agreeing that Peter "goes from likably cheeky chap to sneering sadist".


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: Mark Kermode was critical of the film associating itself with the books, saying, "If you've read the books you will be appalled," and adding, "I think if you can read you're likely to be appalled." James Corden's father, Malcolm, complained about the review and the description of his son as "appallingly irritating".


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: In the first week after the film's release, groups in multiple countries criticized it for "allergy bullying" and called for an apology from Sony. The accusations focused on a scene where Thomas McGregor, who is known to be allergic to blackberries, is pelted with them until one lands in his mouth, causing him to suffer an allergic reaction requiring the use of his Epipen. In response, Sony published a statement saying, "We sincerely regret not being more aware and sensitive to this issue, and we truly apologize". In his review, Robbie Collin said, "...it is a horrible scene – not because allergies are comedically untouchable, but because it makes Peter an irredeemably nasty piece of work."


title: Peter Rabbit (film)

text: Sony Pictures released a sequel entitled "Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway" in Australia on March 25, 2021, then in the United Kingdom on May 21, and in the United States on June 11. It was initially set to be released in the United States on April 3, 2020, in Australia on March 19, 2020, and in the United Kingdom on March 27, 2020. The film was delayed multiple times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, before moving to its final release dates. Gluck returned to write and direct the film.


title: Chimichanga

text: A chimichanga (; ) is a deep-fried burrito that is common in Tex-Mex and other Southwestern U.S. cuisine. The dish is typically prepared by filling a flour tortilla with various ingredients, most commonly rice, cheese, beans, and a meat such as "machaca" (dried meat), "carne adobada" (marinated meat), "carne seca" (dried beef), or shredded chicken, and folding it into a rectangular package. It is then deep-fried, and can be accompanied by salsa, guacamole, sour cream, or carne asada.


title: Chimichanga

text: The origin of the chimichanga is uncertain. From the Mexican term , one account adduces that Sonoran immigrants brought the dish with them to Arizona, but Mexicans almost universally disavow that scenario. Instead, most researchers agree that the chimichanga was created by accident at a Mexican restaurant in Arizona, United States, although they disagree over precisely where. The words and come from two Mexican Spanish terms: (past participle of the verb ), which means seared or singed, and , related to (third-person present tense form of the vulgar verb ), a rude expression for the unexpected or a small insult.


title: Chimichanga

text: According to one source, Monica Flin, the founder of the Tucson, Arizona, restaurant El Charro, accidentally dropped a burrito into the deep-fat fryer in 1922. She immediately began to utter a Spanish profanity beginning "chi..." (chingada), but quickly stopped herself and instead exclaimed , a Spanish equivalent of "thingamajig". Knowledge and appreciation of the dish spread slowly outward from the Tucson area, with popularity elsewhere accelerating in recent decades. Though the chimichanga is now found as part of the Tex-Mex cuisine, its roots within the U.S. are mainly in Tucson, Arizona.


title: Chimichanga

text: Woody Johnson, founder of Macayo's Mexican Kitchen, claimed he had invented the chimichanga in 1946 when he put some burritos into a deep fryer as an experiment at his original restaurant Woody's El Nido, in Phoenix, Arizona. These "fried burritos" became so popular that by 1952, when Woody's El Nido became Macayo's, the chimichanga was one of the restaurant's main menu items. Johnson opened Macayo's in 1952. Although no official records indicate when the dish first appeared, retired University of Arizona folklorist Jim Griffith recalls seeing chimichangas at the Yaqui Old Pascua Village in Tucson in the mid-1950s.


title: Chimichanga

text: According to data presented by the United States Department of Agriculture, a typical 183-gram (6.5-ounce) serving of a beef and cheese chimichanga contains 443 calories, 20 grams protein, 39 grams carbohydrates, 23 grams total fat, 11 grams saturated fat, 51 milligrams cholesterol, and 957 milligrams of sodium.


title: Static electricity

text: Static electricity is an imbalance of electric charges within or on the surface of a material or between materials. The charge remains until it is able to move away by means of an electric current or electrical discharge. Static electricity is named in contrast with current electricity, where the electric charge flows through an electrical conductor or space, and transmits energy.


title: Static electricity

text: A static electric charge can be created whenever two surfaces contact and have worn and separated, and at least one of the surfaces has a high resistance to electric current (and is therefore an electrical insulator). The effects of static electricity are familiar to most people because people can feel, hear, and even see the spark as the excess charge is neutralized when brought close to a large electrical conductor (for example, a path to ground), or a region with an excess charge of the opposite polarity (positive or negative). The familiar phenomenon of a static shockmore specifically, an electrostatic dischargeis caused by the neutralization of a charge.


title: Static electricity

text: Materials are made of atoms that are normally electrically neutral because they contain equal numbers of positive charges (protons in their nuclei) and negative charges (electrons in "shells" surrounding the nucleus). The phenomenon of static electricity requires a separation of positive and negative charges. When two materials are in contact, electrons may move from one material to the other, which leaves an excess of positive charge on one material, and an equal negative charge on the other. When the materials are separated they retain this charge imbalance.


title: Static electricity

text: Electrons can be exchanged between materials on contact; materials with weakly bound electrons tend to lose them while materials with sparsely filled outer shells tend to gain them. This is known as the triboelectric effect and results in one material becoming positively charged and the other negatively charged. The polarity and strength of the charge on a material once they are separated depends on their relative positions in the triboelectric series. The triboelectric effect is the main cause of static electricity as observed in everyday life, and in common high-school science demonstrations involving rubbing different materials together (e.g., fur against an acrylic rod). Contact-induced charge separation causes your hair to stand up and causes "static cling" (for example, a balloon rubbed against the hair becomes negatively charged; when near a wall, the charged balloon is attracted to positively charged particles in the wall, and can "cling" to it, appearing to be suspended against gravity).


title: Static electricity

text: Applied mechanical stress generates a separation of charge in certain types of crystals and ceramics molecules.


title: Static electricity

text: Heating generates a separation of charge in the atoms or molecules of certain materials. All pyroelectric materials are also piezoelectric. The atomic or molecular properties of heat and pressure response are closely related.


title: Static electricity

text: A charged object brought close to an electrically neutral conductive object causes a separation of charge within the neutral object. This is called electrostatic induction. Charges of the same polarity are repelled and move to the side of the object away from the external charge, and charges of the opposite polarity are attracted and move to the side facing the charge. As the force due to the interaction of electric charges falls off rapidly with increasing distance, the effect of the closer (opposite polarity) charges is greater and the two objects feel a force of attraction. Careful grounding of part of an object with a charge-induced charge separation can permanently add or remove electrons, leaving the object with a global, permanent charge.


title: Static electricity

text: A similar effect occurs in electrical insulating materials. In an insulator the internal charges (electrons) are bound to atoms and can not move freely around as in a conductor. However they can move a little within the atoms. In the presence of a nearby charge the negative electrons and positive nucleus move slightly toward opposite sides of the atom, causing a similar separation of charge and a slight attraction toward the external charge. This process is integral to the workings of the Van de Graaff generator, a device commonly used to demonstrate the effects of static electricity.


title: Static electricity

text: Removing or preventing a buildup of static charge can be as simple as opening a window or using a humidifier to increase the moisture content of the air, making the atmosphere more conductive. Air ionizers can perform the same task.


title: Static electricity

text: Items that are particularly sensitive to static discharge may be treated with the application of an antistatic agent, which adds a conducting surface layer that ensures any excess charge is evenly distributed. Fabric softeners and dryer sheets used in washing machines and clothes dryers are an example of an antistatic agent used to prevent and remove static cling.


title: Static electricity

text: Many semiconductor devices used in electronics are particularly sensitive to static discharge. Conductive antistatic bags are commonly used to protect such components. People who work on circuits that contain these devices often ground themselves with a conductive antistatic strap.


title: Static electricity

text: In the industrial settings such as paint or flour plants as well as in hospitals, antistatic safety boots are sometimes used to prevent a buildup of static charge due to contact with the floor. These shoes have soles with good conductivity. Anti-static shoes should not be confused with insulating shoes, which provide exactly the opposite benefit some protection against serious electric shocks from the mains voltage.


title: Static electricity

text: The spark associated with static electricity is caused by electrostatic discharge, or simply static discharge, as excess charge is neutralized by a flow of charges from or to the surroundings.


title: Static electricity

text: The feeling of an electric shock is caused by the stimulation of nerves as the neutralizing current flows through the human body. The energy stored as static electricity on an object varies depending on the size of the object and its capacitance, the voltage to which it is charged, and the dielectric constant of the surrounding medium. For modelling the effect of static discharge on sensitive electronic devices, a human being is represented as a capacitor of 100 picofarads, charged to a voltage of 4,000 to 35,000 volts. When touching an object this energy is discharged in less than a microsecond. While the total energy is small, on the order of millijoules, it can still damage sensitive electronic devices. Larger objects will store more energy, which may be directly hazardous to human contact or which may give a spark that can ignite flammable gas or dust.


title: Static electricity

text: Lightning is a dramatic natural example of static discharge. While the details are unclear and remain a subject of debate, the initial charge separation is thought to be associated with contact between ice particles within storm clouds. In general, significant charge accumulations can only persist in regions of low electrical conductivity (very few charges free to move in the surroundings), hence the flow of neutralizing charges often results from neutral atoms and molecules in the air being torn apart to form separate positive and negative charges, which travel in opposite directions as an electric current, neutralizing the original accumulation of charge. The static charge in air typically breaks down in this way at around 10,000 volts per centimeter (10 kV/cm) depending on humidity. The discharge superheats the surrounding air causing the bright flash, and produces a shock wave causing the booming sound. The lightning bolt is simply a scaled-up version of the sparks seen in more domestic occurrences of static discharge. The flash occurs because the air in the discharge channel is heated to such a high temperature that it emits light by incandescence. The clap of thunder is the result of the shock wave created as the superheated air expands explosively.


title: Static electricity

text: Many semiconductor devices used in electronics are very sensitive to the presence of static electricity and can be damaged by a static discharge.


title: Static electricity

text: Further precautions can be taken by taking off shoes with thick rubber soles and permanently staying with a metallic ground.


title: Static electricity

text: Discharge of static electricity can create severe hazards in those industries dealing with flammable substances, where a small electrical spark might ignite explosive mixtures.


title: Static electricity

text: The flowing movement of finely powdered substances or low conductivity fluids in pipes or through mechanical agitation can build up static electricity.


title: Static electricity

text: The flow of granules of material like sand down a plastic chute can transfer charge, which can be easily measured using a multimeter connected to metal foil lining the chute at intervals, and can be roughly proportional to particulate flow. Dust clouds of finely powdered substances can become combustible or explosive. When there is a static discharge in a dust or vapor cloud, explosions have occurred. Among the major industrial incidents that have occurred due to static discharge are the explosion of a grain silo in southwest France, a paint plant in Thailand, a factory making fiberglass moldings in Canada, a storage tank explosion in Glenpool, Oklahoma in 2003, and a portable tank filling operation and a tank farm in Des Moines, Iowa and Valley Center, Kansas in 2007.


title: Static electricity

text: The ability of a fluid to retain an electrostatic charge depends on its electrical conductivity. When low conductivity fluids flow through pipelines or are mechanically agitated, contact-induced charge separation called flow electrification occurs.


title: Static electricity

text: Fluids that have low electrical conductivity (below 50 picosiemens per meter), are called accumulators. Fluids having conductivity above 50 pS/m are called non-accumulators. In non-accumulators, charges recombine as fast as they are separated and hence electrostatic charge accumulation is not significant. In the petrochemical industry, 50 pS/m is the recommended minimum value of electrical conductivity for adequate removal of charge from a fluid.


title: Static electricity

text: Kerosines may have conductivity ranging from less than 1 picosiemens per meter to 20 pS/m. For comparison, deionized water has a conductivity of about 10,000,000 pS/m or 10 µS/m.


title: Static electricity

text: Transformer oil is part of the electrical insulation system of large power transformers and other electrical apparatus. Re-filling of large apparatus requires precautions against electrostatic charging of the fluid, which may damage sensitive transformer insulation.


title: Static electricity

text: An important concept for insulating fluids is the static relaxation time. This is similar to the time constant τ (tau) of an RC circuit. For insulating materials, it is the ratio of the static dielectric constant divided by the electrical conductivity of the material. For hydrocarbon fluids, this is sometimes approximated by dividing the number 18 by the electrical conductivity of the fluid. Thus a fluid that has an electrical conductivity of 1 pS/m has an estimated relaxation time of about 18 seconds. The excess charge in a fluid dissipates almost completely after four to five times the relaxation time, or 90 seconds for the fluid in the above example.


title: Static electricity

text: Charge generation increases at higher fluid velocities and larger pipe diameters, becoming quite significant in pipes 8 inches (200 mm) or larger. Static charge generation in these systems is best controlled by limiting fluid velocity. The British standard BS PD CLC/TR 50404:2003 (formerly BS-5958-Part 2) Code of Practice for Control of Undesirable Static Electricity prescribes pipe flow velocity limits. Because water content has a large impact on the fluids dielectric constant, the recommended velocity for hydrocarbon fluids containing water should be limited to 1 meter per second.


title: Static electricity

text: Bonding and earthing are the usual ways charge buildup can be prevented. For fluids with electrical conductivity below 10 pS/m, bonding and earthing are not adequate for charge dissipation, and anti-static additives may be required.


title: Static electricity

text: The flowing movement of flammable liquids like gasoline inside a pipe can build up static electricity. Non-polar liquids such as gasoline, toluene, xylene, diesel, kerosene and light crude oils exhibit significant ability for charge accumulation and charge retention during high velocity flow. Electrostatic discharges can ignite the fuel vapor.


title: Static electricity

text: When the electrostatic discharge energy is high enough, it can ignite a fuel vapor and air mixture. Different fuels have different flammable limits and require different levels of electrostatic discharge energy to ignite.


title: Static electricity

text: Electrostatic discharge while fueling with gasoline is a present danger at gas stations. Fires have also been started at airports while refueling aircraft with kerosene. New grounding technologies, the use of conducting materials, and the addition of anti-static additives help to prevent or safely dissipate the buildup of static electricity.


title: Static electricity

text: The flowing movement of gases in pipes alone creates little, if any, static electricity. It is envisaged that a charge generation mechanism only occurs when solid particles or liquid droplets are carried in the gas stream.


title: Static electricity

text: Due to the extremely low humidity in extraterrestrial environments, very large static charges can accumulate, causing a major hazard for the complex electronics used in space exploration vehicles. Static electricity is thought to be a particular hazard for astronauts on planned missions to the Moon and Mars. Walking over the extremely dry terrain could cause them to accumulate a significant amount of charge; reaching out to open the airlock on their return could cause a large static discharge, potentially damaging sensitive electronics.


title: Static electricity

text: A static discharge in the presence of air or oxygen can create ozone. Ozone can degrade rubber parts. Many elastomers are sensitive to ozone cracking. Exposure to ozone creates deep penetrative cracks in critical components like gaskets and O-rings. Fuel lines are also susceptible to the problem unless preventive action is taken. Preventive measures include adding anti-ozonants to the rubber mix, or using an ozone-resistant elastomer. Fires from cracked fuel lines have been a problem on vehicles, especially in the engine compartments where ozone can be produced by electrical equipment.


title: Static electricity

text: The energy released in a static electricity discharge may vary over a wide range. The energy in joules can be calculated from the capacitance ("C") of the object and the static potential "V" in volts (V) by the formula "E" = ½"CV". One experimenter estimates the capacitance of the human body as high as 400 picofarads, and a charge of 50,000 volts, discharged e.g. during touching a charged car, creating a spark with energy of 500 millijoules. Another estimate is 100–300 pF and 20,000 volts, producing a maximum energy of 60 mJ. IEC 479-2:1987 states that a discharge with energy greater than 5000 mJ is a direct serious risk to human health. IEC 60065 states that consumer products cannot discharge more than 350 mJ into a person.


title: Static electricity

text: The maximal potential is limited to about 35–40 kV, due to corona discharge dissipating the charge at higher potentials. Potentials below 3000 volts are not typically detectable by humans. Maximal potential commonly achieved on human body range between 1 and 10 kV, though in optimal conditions as high as 20–25 kV can be reached. Low relative humidity increases the charge buildup; walking 20 feet (6 m) on vinyl floor at 15% relative humidity causes buildup of voltage up to 12 kV, while at 80% humidity the voltage is only 1.5 kV.


title: Static electricity

text: As little as 0.2 millijoules may present an ignition hazard; such low spark energy is often below the threshold of human visual and auditory perception.


title: Static electricity

text: A relatively small energy, often as little as 0.2–2 millijoules, is needed to ignite a flammable mixture of a fuel and air. For the common industrial hydrocarbon gases and solvents, the minimum ignition energy required for ignition of vapor–air mixture is lowest for the vapor concentration roughly in the middle between the lower explosive limit and the upper explosive limit, and rapidly increases as the concentration deviates from this optimum to either side. Aerosols of flammable liquids may be ignited well below their flash point. Generally, liquid aerosols with particle sizes below 10 micrometers behave like vapors, particle sizes above 40 micrometers behave more like flammable dusts. Typical minimal flammable concentrations of aerosols lay between 15 and 50 g/m. Similarly, presence of foam on the surface of a flammable liquid significantly increases ignitability. Aerosol of flammable dust can be ignited as well, resulting in a dust explosion; the lower explosive limit usually lies between 50 and 1000 g/m; finer dusts tend to be more explosive and requiring less spark energy to set off. Simultaneous presence of flammable vapors and flammable dust can significantly decrease the ignition energy; a mere 1 vol.% of propane in air can reduce the required ignition energy of dust by 100 times. Higher than normal oxygen content in atmosphere also significantly lowers the ignition energy.


Capital punishment in the United Kingdom predates the formation of the UK, having been used within the British Isles from ancient times until the second half of the 20th century. The last executions in the United Kingdom were by hanging, and took place in 1964; :capital punishment for murder was suspended in 1965 and finally abolished in 1969 (1973 in Northern Ireland). Although unused, the death penalty remained a legally defined punishment for certain offences such as treason until it was completely abolished in 1998; the last execution for treason took place in 1946. In 2004 the 13th Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights became binding on the United Kingdom; it prohibits the restoration of the death penalty as long as the UK is a party to the convention (regardless of the UK’s status in relation to the European Union).


title: Capital punishment in the United Kingdom

text: Capital punishment was historically used to punish inherently innocent things such as unemployment. In 16th-century England, no distinction was made between vagrants and the jobless; both were simply categorized as "sturdy beggars", who were to be punished and moved on. In 1547, a bill was passed that subjected vagrants to death for the second offense. During the reign of Henry VIII, as many as 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed.


text: Sir Samuel Romilly, speaking to the House of Commons on capital punishment in 1810, declared that "[there is] no country on the face of the earth in which there [have] been so many different offences according to law to be punished with death as in England". Known as the "Bloody Code", at its height the criminal law included some 220 crimes punishable by death, including "being in the company of Gypsies for one month", "strong evidence of malice in a child aged 7–14 years of age" and "blacking the face or using a disguise whilst committing a crime". Many of these offences had been introduced by the Whig Oligarchy to protect the property of the wealthy classes that emerged during the first half of the 18th century, a notable example being the Black Act of 1723, which created 50 capital offences for various acts of theft and poaching. Crimes eligible for the death penalty included shoplifting and stealing sheep, cattle, and horses, and before abolition of the death penalty for theft in 1832, "English law was notorious for prescribing the death penalty for a vast range of offences as slight as the theft of goods valued at twelve pence."


text: Whilst executions for murder, burglary and robbery were common, the death sentences for minor offenders were often not carried out. A sentence of death could be commuted or respited (permanently postponed) for reasons such as benefit of clergy, official pardons, pregnancy of the offender or performance of military or naval duty. Between 1770 and 1830, an estimated 35,000 death sentences were handed down in England and Wales, of which 7,000 executions were carried out.


text: In 1808, Romilly had the death penalty removed for pickpockets and lesser offenders, starting a process of reform that continued over the next 50 years. The death penalty was mandatory (although it was frequently commuted by the government) until the Judgement of Death Act 1823 gave judges the official power to commute the death penalty except for treason and murder. The Punishment of Death, etc. Act 1832 reduced the number of capital crimes by two-thirds. In 1832, the death penalty was abolished for theft, counterfeiting, and forgery except for the forgery of wills and certain powers of attorney. Gibbeting was abolished in 1832 and hanging in chains was abolished in 1834. In 1837, the death penalty for forging wills and powers of attorney was abolished. The death penalty for rape and some other offences was abolished by the Substitution of Punishments of Death Act in 1841. In 1861, several acts of Parliament (24 & 25 Vict; c. 94 to c. 100) further reduced the number of civilian capital crimes to five: murder, treason, espionage, arson in royal dockyards, and piracy with violence; there were other offences under military law. The death penalty remained mandatory for treason and murder unless commuted by the monarch.


text: The Royal Commission on Capital Punishment 1864–66 concluded (with dissenting Commissioners) that there was not a case for abolition but recommended an end to public executions. This proposal was included in the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868. From that date executions in Great Britain were carried out only in prisons. The punishment of beheading and quartering those executed for treason was abolished in 1870. The last application of that punishment had been in 1820 and the last sentence to the punishment had been in 1839.


text: In 1908, the Children Act 1908 banned the execution of juveniles under the age of 16. In 1922 a new offence of infanticide was introduced to replace the charge of murder for mothers killing their children in the first year of life. In 1930 a parliamentary select committee recommended that capital punishment be suspended for a trial period of five years, but no action was taken. From 1931 pregnant women could no longer be hanged (following the birth of their child) although in practice since the 18th century their sentences had always been commuted.


text: In 1933 the minimum age for capital punishment was raised to 18 under the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. The last known execution by the civilian courts of a person under 18 was that of Charles Dobell, 17, hanged at Maidstone together with his accomplice William Gower, 18, in January 1889. Harold Wilkins, at 16 years old, was the last juvenile sentenced to the death penalty in the United Kingdom, in 1932 for a sexually related murder, but he was reprieved due to age.


text: In 1938 the issue of the abolition of capital punishment was brought before parliament. A clause within the Criminal Justice Bill called for an experimental five-year suspension of the death penalty. When war broke out in 1939 the bill was postponed. It was revived after the war and to much surprise was adopted by a majority in the House of Commons (245 to 222). In the House of Lords the abolition clause was defeated but the remainder of the bill was passed as the Criminal Justice Act 1948. Popular support for abolition was absent and the government decided that it would be inappropriate for it to assert its supremacy by invoking the Parliament Act 1911 over such an unpopular issue.


text: Instead, then Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, set up a new Royal Commission (the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, 1949–1953) with instructions to determine "whether the liability to suffer capital punishment should be limited or modified". The commission's report discussed a number of alternatives to execution by hanging (including the electric chair, gas inhalation, lethal injection, shooting, and the guillotine), but rejected them. It had more difficulty with the principle of capital punishment. Popular opinion believed that the death penalty acted as a deterrent to criminals, but the statistics within the report were inconclusive. Whilst the report recommended abolition from an ethical standpoint, it made no mention of possible miscarriages of justice. The public had by then expressed great dissatisfaction with the verdict in the case of Timothy Evans, who was tried and hanged in 1950 for murdering his infant daughter. It later transpired in 1953 that John Christie had strangled at least six women in the same house; he also confessed to killing Timothy's wife. If the jury in Evans's trial had known this, Evans might have been acquitted. There were other cases in the same period where doubts arose over convictions and subsequent hangings, such as the notorious case of Derek Bentley.


text: The commission concluded that unless there was overwhelming public support in favour of abolition, the death penalty should be retained.


text: Between 1900 and 1949, 621 men and 11 women were executed in England and Wales. Ten German agents were executed during the First World War under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, and 16 spies were executed during the Second World War under the Treachery Act 1940.


text: By 1957 a number of controversial cases highlighted the issue of capital punishment again. Campaigners for abolition were partially rewarded with the Homicide Act 1957. The Act brought in a distinction between capital and non-capital murder.


text: The police and the government were of the opinion that the death penalty deterred offenders from carrying firearms and it was for this reason that such offences remained punishable by death.


text: In 1965 the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, who had committed himself to the cause of abolition for longer than 20 years, introduced a Private Member's Bill to suspend the death penalty for murder. It was passed on a free vote in the House of Commons by 200 votes to 98. The bill was subsequently passed by the House of Lords by 204 votes to 104. Silverman was opposed in the General Election 1966 in the Nelson and Colne constituency by Patrick Downey, the uncle of Lesley Anne Downey, a victim in the Moors murders case, who stood on an explicitly pro-hanging platform. Downey polled over 5,000 votes, 13.7%, then the largest vote for a genuinely independent candidate since 1945.


text: The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 suspended the death penalty in Great Britain (but not in Northern Ireland) for murder for a period of five years, and substituted a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment; it further provided that if, before the expiry of the five-year suspension, each House of Parliament passed a resolution to make the effect of the Act permanent, then it would become permanent. In 1969 the Home Secretary, James Callaghan, proposed a motion to make the Act permanent, which was carried in the Commons on 16 December 1969, and a similar motion was carried in the Lords on 18 December. The death penalty for murder was abolished in Northern Ireland on 25 July 1973 under the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973.


text: Following the abolition of the death penalty for murder, the House of Commons held a vote during each subsequent parliament until 1997 to restore the death penalty. This motion was always defeated, but the death penalty remained for other crimes until the dates mentioned below:


text: However, no executions were carried out in the United Kingdom for any of these offences after the abolition of the death penalty for murder.


text: Nevertheless, there remained a working gallows at HMP Wandsworth, London, until 1994, which was tested every six months until 1992. This gallows is now housed in the National Justice Museum in Nottingham.


text: England and in the United Kingdom: on 13 August 1964, Peter Anthony Allen, at Walton Prison in Liverpool, and Gwynne Owen Evans, at Strangeways Prison in Manchester, were executed for the murder of John Alan West on 7 April that year.


text: In 1955 Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain; for the murder of her lover David Blakely.


text: Scotland: Henry John Burnett, 21, on 15 August 1963 in Craiginches Prison, Aberdeen, for the murder of seaman Thomas Guyan.


text: Northern Ireland: Robert McGladdery, 26, on 20 December 1961 in Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, for the murder of Pearl Gamble.


text: Wales: Vivian Teed, 24, in Swansea on 6 May 1958, for the murder of William Williams, sub-postmaster of Fforestfach Post Office.


text: Northern Ireland: Liam Holden in 1973 in Northern Ireland, for the capital murder of a British soldier during the Troubles. Holden was removed from the death cell in May 1973. In 2012 his conviction was quashed on appeal on the grounds that his confession was obtained by torture.


text: England: David Chapman, who was sentenced to hang in November 1965 for the murder of a swimming pool nightwatchman in Scarborough. He was released from prison in 1979 and later died in a car accident.


text: The Naval Discipline Act 1957 reduced the scope of capital espionage from "all spies for the enemy" to spies on naval ships or bases. Later, the Armed Forces Act 1981 abolished the death penalty for espionage. (The Official Secrets Act 1911 had created another offence of espionage which carried a maximum sentence of fourteen years.)


text: Beheading was abolished as a method of execution for treason in 1973. Hanging, however, remained available until 30 September 1998 when, under a House of Lords amendment to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, proposed by Lord Archer of Sandwell, the death penalty was abolished for treason and piracy with violence, replacing it with a discretionary maximum sentence of life imprisonment. These were the last civilian offences punishable by death.


text: On 20 May 1998 the House of Commons voted to ratify the 6th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting capital punishment except "in time of war or imminent threat of war". The last remaining provisions for the death penalty under military jurisdiction (including in wartime) were removed when section 21(5) of the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force on 9 November 1998. On 10 October 2003, effective from 1 February 2004, the UK acceded to the 13th Protocol, which prohibits the death penalty in all circumstances.


text: As a legacy from colonial times, several states in the West Indies still had the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the court of final appeal; although the death penalty has been retained in these states, the Privy Council would sometimes delay or deny executions. Some of these states severed links with the British court system in 2001 by transferring the responsibilities of the Privy Council to the Caribbean Court of Justice, to speed up executions.


text: Although not part of the United Kingdom, the Isle of Man and the bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey are British Crown dependencies.


text: In the Channel Islands, the last death sentence was passed in 1984; the last execution in the Channel Islands was in Jersey on 9 October 1959, when Francis Joseph Huchet was hanged for murder. The Human Rights (Amendment) (Jersey) Order 2006 amends the Human Rights (Jersey) Law 2000 to give effect to the 13th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights providing for the total abolition of the death penalty. Both of these laws came into effect on 10 December 2006. Capital punishment was abolished in Guernsey in 2003, and the 13th Protocol was extended to Guernsey in April 2004. Sark (which is part of Guernsey but has its own laws) formally retained it until January 2004, when the Chief Pleas in a 14–9 vote removed it from the statutes.


text: The last execution on the Isle of Man took place in 1872, when John Kewish was hanged for patricide. Capital punishment was not formally abolished by Tynwald (the island's parliament) until 1993. Five persons were sentenced to death (for murder) on the Isle of Man between 1973 and 1992, although all sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. The last person to be sentenced to death in the UK or its dependencies was Anthony Teare, who was convicted at the Manx Court of General Gaol Delivery in Douglas for contract murder in 1992; he was subsequently retried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994. In 2004 the 13th Protocol was adopted, with an effective date of 1 November 2006.


text: Like the Crown dependencies, the British overseas territories are constitutionally not part of the United Kingdom. However, the British government's ultimate responsibility for good governance of the territories has led it over recent years to pursue a policy of revoking all statutory provision for the death penalty in those territories where it had up until recently been legal.


text: The last executions in an overseas territory, and indeed the last on British soil, took place in Bermuda in 1977, when two men, Larry Tacklyn and Erskine Burrows, were hanged for the 1973 murder of the territory's then Governor Sir Richard Sharples.


text: In 1991, the British government extended an Order in Council to its Caribbean territories the effect of which was to abolish capital punishment for murder in Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands.


text: The British government was unable to extend the abolition via Order in Council to Bermuda, the UK's most autonomous overseas territory with powers of almost total self-governance—but warned that if voluntary abolition was not forthcoming it would be forced to consider the unprecedented step of "whether to impose abolition by means of an Act of Parliament". As a result, the Bermudian government introduced its own domestic legislation in 1999 to rectify the problem.


text: Further measures were subsequently adopted to revoke technicalities in British overseas territories' domestic legislation as regards use of the death penalty for crimes of treason and piracy. In October 2002 the British government abolished the death penalty for treason and piracy in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Since then, the death penalty has been outlawed under all circumstances in all the UK's overseas territories.


text: Under section 94 of the Extradition Act 2003, it is unlawful for an extradition of an individual to take place if the individual is accused of a capital crime, unless the Home Secretary has received assurances that the death penalty would not be applied in that case. Regardless of this, in July 2018, the Government said it will not object to the United States seeking the death penalty for two suspected British members of ISIS captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Although not strictly an extradition case, in response to an urgent question in Parliament on the matter, the Government stated that they still held the policy "to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances as a matter of principle".


text: Since the death penalty's suspension in 1965, there have been continued public and media calls for its reintroduction, particularly prompted by high-profile murder cases.


text: At the same time, there have been a number of miscarriages of justice since 1965 where persons convicted of murder have later had their convictions quashed on appeal and been released from prison, strengthening the argument of those who oppose the death penalty's reintroduction. These include the Birmingham Six (cleared in 1991 of planting an IRA bomb which killed 21 people in 1974), the Guildford Four (cleared in 1989 of murdering five people in another 1974 IRA bombing), Stephen Downing (a Derbyshire man who was freed in 2001 after serving 27 years for the murder of a woman in a churchyard) and Barry George (who was freed in 2007 when his conviction for the 1999 murder of TV presenter Jill Dando was quashed on appeal).


text: Perhaps the first high-profile murder case which sparked widespread calls for a return of the death penalty was the Moors murders trial in 1966, the year after the death penalty's suspension, in which Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of two children and a teenager in the Manchester area (they later confessed to a further two murders). Later in 1966, the murder of three policemen in West London also attracted widespread public support for the death penalty's return. Other subsequent high-profile cases to have sparked widespread media and public calls for the death penalty's return include "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe, convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women and attacking seven others in the north of England; Roy Whiting, who murdered a seven-year-old girl in West Sussex in 2000; and Ian Huntley, a Cambridgeshire school caretaker who killed two 10-year-old girls in 2002.


text: A November 2009 television survey showed that 70% favoured reinstating the death penalty for at least one of the following crimes: armed robbery, rape, crimes related to paedophilia, terrorism, adult murder, child murder, child rape, treason, child abuse or kidnapping. However, respondents only favoured capital punishment for adult murder, the polling question asked by other organisations such as Gallup, by small majorities or pluralities: overall, 51% favoured the death penalty for adult murder, while 56% in Wales did, 55% in Scotland, and only 49% in England.


text: In August 2011, the Internet blogger Paul Staines—who writes the political blog "Guido Fawkes" and heads the Restore Justice Campaign—launched an e-petition on the Downing Street website calling for the restoration of the death penalty for those convicted of the murder of children and police officers. The petition was one of several in support or opposition of capital punishment to be published by the government with the launch of its e-petitions website. Petitions attracting 100,000 signatures would prompt a parliamentary debate on a particular topic, but not necessarily lead to any Parliamentary Bills being put forward. When the petition closed on 4 February 2012 it had received 26,351 signatures in support of restoring capital punishment, but a counter-petition calling to retain the ban on capital punishment received 33,455 signatures during the same time period.


text: Also in August 2011, a representative survey conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion showed that 65% of Britons support reinstating the death penalty for murder in Great Britain, while 28% oppose this course of action. Men and respondents aged over 35 are more likely to endorse the change.


text: In March 2015 a survey by the NatCen British Social Attitudes Report showed that public support for the death penalty had dropped to 48%.


text: In April 2021 a poll found that 54% of Britons said they would support reinstating the death penalty for those convicted of terrorism in the UK. About a quarter (23%) of respondents said they would be opposed.


text: After Royal Assent for the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, supporters in Parliament have made several attempts to reintroduce capital punishment. On 23 November 1966, Duncan Sandys was refused leave to bring in a Bill to restore capital punishment for the murder of police or prison officers, by a vote of 170 to 292. Motions to make the five-year suspension of capital punishment under the 1965 Act permanent were opposed, but agreed by 343 to 185 in the House of Commons; in the House of Lords, an amendment to continue with a temporary suspension of capital punishment until 31 July 1973 was rejected by 174 to 220. In April 1973, the House of Commons voted against reintroduction.


text: The deaths of civilians in several IRA bombings in 1974 prompted a renewed debate. On 11 December 1974 Brian Walden moved a motion declaring that "the death penalty would neither deter terrorists nor increase the safety of the public"; Jill Knight moved an amendment calling instead for introduction of legislation providing for death to be the penalty for acts of terrorism causing death. Her amendment was rejected by 217 to 369. A year later, Ivan Lawrence's motion "That this House demands capital punishment for terrorist offences causing death" was rejected by 232 to 361.


text: After the Conservatives' victory in the 1979 general election, Eldon Griffiths (Parliamentary adviser to the Police Federation of England and Wales) moved a motion "that the sentence of capital punishment should again be available to the courts" on 19 July 1979. While the motion was not expected to pass, the margin of its defeat (243 to 362) was much wider than expected. Later in the same Parliament, the Criminal Justice Bill provided an opportunity on 11 May 1982 for several new clauses to be proposed which would have reinstated capital punishment. The first, which simply declared that "A person convicted of murder shall be liable to capital punishment", was tabled by Edward Gardner, and rejected by 195 to 357. It was followed by an alternative under which capital punishment would be available "as the penalty for an act of terrorism involving the loss of human life"; this new clause was rejected by 176 to 332. A further new clause proposing capital punishment "as the penalty for murder by means of firearms or explosives" was rejected by 176 to 343. Then a new clause allowing for capital punishment "as the penalty for murder of a police or prison officer" was rejected by 208 to 332. Finally a new clause allowing capital punishment "as the penalty for murder in the course of robbery and burglary which involves the use of offensive weapons" was rejected by 151 to 331.


text: The new Parliament in 1983 again prompted supporters of capital punishment to put their case. Sir Edward Gardner's motion "That this House favours the restoration of the death penalty for murder" was debated on 13 July 1983, with several amendments moved to restrict capital punishment to certain categories of murder. The amendments were voted on first: capital punishment for murder "resulting from acts of terrorism" was rejected by 245 to 361, for murder "of a police officer during the course of his duties" by 263 to 344, for murder "of a prison officer during the course of his duties" by 252 to 348, for murder "by shooting or causing an explosion" by 204 to 374, and for murder "in the course or furtherance of theft" by 194 to 369. The main motion was then defeated by 223 to 368. Towards the end of the Parliament, a new clause proposed to the Criminal Justice Bill proposed to return the death penalty for "A person convicted by the unanimous verdict of a jury of the premeditated killing of another person or of knowingly and intentionally killing another person in a manner, or for a reason, or in circumstances which a reasonable person would consider to be evil" was rejected by 230 to 342 on 1 April 1987.


text: The Criminal Justice Bill in 1988 provided a further opportunity for a debate; the new clause proposed by Roger Gale allowed for the jury in a murder case to "have the power, upon reaching a verdict of guilt of murder, to recommend ... death in the manner authorised by law". It was rejected by 218 to 341.


text: On 17 December 1990 a new Criminal Justice Bill again saw amendments designed to reintroduce capital punishment. The first covered anyone over 18 "convicted of the murder of a police officer acting in the execution of his duty" and was rejected by 215 to 350; a general reintroduction of death as the penalty for murder (with special provision for the Court of Appeal to decide whether to substitute a life sentence) was then rejected by 182 to 367. Capital punishment for "murder committed by means of firearms, explosives or an offensive weapon, or for the murder of a police or prison officer" was rejected by 186 to 349.


text: A Parliamentary debate on a question proposing reintroduction of capital punishment came on 21 February 1994 when new clauses to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill were moved. The first, providing for death as the sentence for "the murder of a police officer acting in the execution of his duty", was rejected by 186 to 383; A new clause providing for general reintroduction with power for the Court of Appeal to substitute life imprisonment was rejected by 159 to 403. This would have been aimed at terrorists in the Northern Ireland conflict.


text: In June 2013 a new bill for capital punishment in England and Wales was introduced, sponsored by Conservative MP Philip Hollobone. This Bill was withdrawn.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Michael Dean Cohen (born August 25, 1966) is an American former lawyer who served as an attorney for U.S. president Donald Trump from 2006 to 2018. Cohen was a vice-president of the Trump Organization, and the personal counsel to Trump, and was often described by media as Trump's "fixer". He served as co-president of Trump Entertainment and was a board member of the Eric Trump Foundation, a children's health charity. From 2017 to 2018, Cohen was deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Trump employed Cohen until May 2018, a year after the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections began. The investigation led Cohen to plead guilty on August 21, 2018, to eight counts including campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Cohen said he violated campaign-finance laws at the direction of Trump and "for the principal purpose of influencing" the 2016 presidential election. In November 2018, Cohen entered a second guilty plea for lying to a Senate committee about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On December 12, 2018, he was sentenced to three years in federal prison and ordered to pay a $50,000 fine after pleading guilty to tax evasion and campaign-finance violations. On February 26, 2019, he was officially disbarred by the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division. He reported to the federal prison near Otisville, New York, on May 6, 2019.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On May 21, 2020, Cohen was released from prison early due to concerns regarding COVID-19, to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest. On July 2, 2020, Cohen was observed dining at a Manhattan restaurant, and on July 9, 2020, was taken back into federal custody after refusing to agree to conditions of home confinement that included a prohibition on communicating with the media. Cohen filed suit complaining his re-arrest was an attempt to prevent him from releasing a tell-all book about Donald Trump titled "". On July 23, a judge found in his favor and ordered that he be returned to home confinement. Cohen was released from home confinement and his sentence expired on November 22, 2021. Immediately following his release, Cohen said he would continue to "provide information testimony documents and my full cooperation on all ongoing investigations to ensure that others are held responsible for their dirty deeds and that no one is ever believed to be above the law."


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen was raised in the town of Lawrence on Long Island, New York. His mother was a nurse, and his father, a Holocaust survivor, was a surgeon. Cohen is Ashkenazi Jewish. He attended Woodmere Academy and received his BA from American University in 1988 and his JD from Thomas M. Cooley Law School in 1991.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen began practicing personal injury law in New York in 1992, working for Melvyn Estrin in Manhattan. As of 2003, Cohen was an attorney in private practice and CEO of MLA Cruises, Inc., and of the Atlantic Casino.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2006, Cohen was a partner at the law firm Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon. He practiced law at the firm for about a year before joining The Trump Organization. Following his 2018 felony convictions, Cohen was automatically disbarred in New York.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2003, Cohen was a candidate for New York City Council when he provided a biography to the New York City Campaign Finance Board for inclusion in its voters' guide. The guide listed him as co-owner of Taxi Funding Corp. and a fleet of New York City taxicabs numbering over 200. At the time, Cohen was a business partner in the taxi business with "taxi king" Simon Garber. As of 2017, Cohen was estimated to own at least 34 taxi medallions through 17 limited liability companies (LLCs). Until April 2017, another "taxi king", disbarred attorney and convicted felon Gene Freidman, managed the medallions still held by Cohen; this arrangement ended after the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission decided not to renew Freidman's licenses. Between April and June 2017, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance filed seven tax warrants against Cohen and his wife for $37,434 in unpaid taxi taxes due to the MTA.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen has been involved in real estate ventures in Manhattan, including the purchase and sale of four apartment buildings between 2011 and 2014. The total purchase price of the four buildings was $11 million and the total sales price was $32 million. Cohen sold the four properties at above their assessed values, in all-cash transactions, to LLCs owned by persons whose identities are not public. After this was reported by McClatchy DC in October 2017, Cohen said that all four properties were purchased by an American-owned "New York real estate family fund" that paid cash for the properties in order to obtain a tax deferred (Section 1031) exchange, but did not specifically identify the buyer.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen volunteered for the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. He was also an intern for Congressman Joe Moakley and voted for Barack Obama in 2008, although he later stated that he became disappointed with Obama.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2003, he unsuccessfully ran as a Republican for the New York City Council from the Fourth Council District (a Manhattan district). Cohen received 4,205 votes and was defeated by Democratic candidate Eva S. Moskowitz, who received 13,745 votes. In 2010, Cohen briefly campaigned for a seat in the New York State Senate. He was a registered Democrat until he officially registered as a Republican on March 9, 2017. On October 11, 2018, Cohen re-registered as a Democrat in an effort to distance "himself from the values of the current" administration.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen joined the Trump Organization in fall of 2006. Trump hired him in part because he was already an admirer of Trump, having read Trump's "Art of the Deal" twice. He had purchased several Trump properties and convinced his own parents and in-laws, as well as a business partner, to buy condominiums in Trump World Tower. Cohen aided Trump in his struggle with the condominium board at the Trump World Tower, which led Trump to obtain control of the board. Cohen became a close confidant to Trump, maintaining an office near Trump at Trump Tower.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen was named COO of mixed martial arts promotion company Affliction Entertainment in which Trump held a significant financial stake.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: While Cohen was an executive at the organization, he was known as Trump's "pit bull". In late 2011, when Trump was publicly speculating about running for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination, Cohen co-founded the website "Should Trump Run?" to draft Trump into entering the race.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In an interview with ABC News in 2011, Cohen stated, "If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn't like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump's benefit. If you do something wrong, I'm going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I'm not going to let you go until I'm finished."


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2013, Cohen sent an email to the satirical news website "The Onion", demanding that an article "The Onion" had published that mocked Donald Trump ("When You're Feeling Low, Just Remember I'll Be Dead In About 15 or 20 Years") be removed with an apology, claiming it was defamatory.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2015, in response to an inquiry by reporter Tim Mak of "The Daily Beast" concerning rape allegations (brought up in the 1980s but later recanted) by Ivana Trump about her then-husband Donald Trump, Cohen said, "I'm warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I'm going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting."


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In January 2016, according to "The Washington Post", Cohen sent an e-mail to Dmitry Peskov which was the "most direct outreach documented by a top Trump aide to a similarly senior member of Putin's government."


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: A video of an interview of Cohen by CNN's Brianna Keilar went viral, in which Cohen said "Says who?" several times in response to Keilar's statement that Trump was behind in all of the polls. Cohen defended Trump against charges of antisemitism.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2016, he was a co-founder, along with Darrell C. Scott, of the National Diversity Coalition for Trump. Peter J. Gleason, a lawyer who filed for protection of documents pertaining to two women with sexual abuse allegations against Eric T. Schneiderman, stated—without offering details or corroborating evidence—that Cohen told him that if Trump had been elected governor of New York in 2013, the latter would have helped bring the accusations to public attention.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: The Steele dossier, published in January 2017, alleges that Cohen met with Russian officials in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2016 with the objective of paying those who had hacked the DNC and to "cover up all traces of the hacking operation". The dossier contains raw intelligence, and is thought to be a mix of accurate and inaccurate information. Cohen denied the allegations against him,<ref name="Harding_5/10/2017"></ref><ref name="Borger_4/28/2017"></ref><ref name="Cormier_5/5/2017"></ref> stating that he was in Los Angeles between August 23 and 29, and in New York for the entire month of September.<ref name="Gray_1/10/2017"></ref> According to a Czech intelligence source, there is no record of him entering Prague by plane, but "Respekt" magazine and "Politico" pointed out that he could have theoretically entered by car or train from a neighboring country within the Schengen Area, for example Italy. In the latter case, a record of Cohen entering the Schengen zone from a non-Schengen country should exist, if it occurred.<ref name="RFE/RL_1/11/2017"></ref><ref name="Meyer_12/6/2017"></ref> However, on April 13, 2018, the DC Bureau of McClatchy Newspapers reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has evidence that Cohen did travel to Prague during the late summer of 2016, with two sources having confirmed this secret trip. The evidence is said to show that Cohen entered the Czech Republic from Germany, and since both countries are in the European Union's Schengen passport area, Cohen would not have needed to receive a passport stamp to enter Czech territory. The following day, Cohen again denied he has "ever been to Prague".<ref name="CBS_News_4/14/2018"></ref> Cohen also said that he didn't travel to the European Union in August 2016. McClatchy reported in December 2018 that a mobile phone traced to Cohen had "pinged" cellphone towers around Prague in late summer 2016. McClatchy also reported that during that time an eastern European intelligence agency had intercepted communications between Russians, one of whom mentioned that Cohen was in Prague. However, the "Mueller Report" states "Cohen had never traveled to Prague and was not concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably false"


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In late January 2017, Cohen met with Ukrainian opposition politician Andrey Artemenko and Felix Sater at the Loews Regency in Manhattan to discuss a plan to lift sanctions against Russia. The proposed plan would require that Russian forces withdraw from eastern Ukraine and that Ukraine hold a referendum on whether Crimea should be "leased" to Russia for 50 or 100 years. Cohen was given a written proposal in a sealed envelope that he delivered to then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in early February.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On April 3, 2017, Cohen was appointed as one of three national deputy finance chairmen of the Republican National Committee, along with Elliott Broidy and Louis DeJoy. In April 2017, Cohen also formed an alliance with Squire Patton Boggs for legal and lobbying counsel on behalf of Trump.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In May 2017, amidst expanding inquiries into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, two congressional panels asked Cohen to provide information about any communications he had with people connected to the Russian government. He was a subject of the Mueller investigation in 2018. Because of these investigations, Michael Cohen and Donald Trump signed a joint defense agreement allowing their attorneys to share information during the Mueller investigations and joint defense agreements were arranged between Donald Trump and both Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort. Cohen retained an attorney with Davidoff Hutcher & Citron who later represented Rudy Giuliani, too.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In May 2018, BBC News falsely reported that Cohen had received a secret payment of between $400,000 and $600,000 from intermediaries for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to arrange a meeting between Poroshenko and Trump, though Cohen was not registered as a foreign agent. Cohen and the Ukrainian president's office denied the allegations. The BBC ended up having to state the allegation was untrue, apologizing to Poroshenko, deleting the article from its website, paying legal costs, and paying damages to Poroshenko.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In May 2018, Rudy Giuliani announced that Cohen was no longer Trump's lawyer. In July, seized tapes secretly recorded by Cohen of his conversations with Trump about hush payments to Karen McDougal were disclosed to "The New York Times", seemingly contradicting earlier statements by Trump denying knowledge of the payments, and raising questions about campaign-finance ethics. Cohen also asserted that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between his son Donald Jr., and other Trump campaign officials with Russians who claimed to possess information damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign, contradicting the President's repeated insistence that he was not aware of the meeting until long after it had taken place.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In June 2018, Cohen resigned as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. His resignation letter cited the ongoing investigations and also criticized the Trump administration's policy of separating undocumented families at the border.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2015 president of Liberty University Jerry Falwell Jr. reached out to Cohen and asked him for a personal favor. Falwell had told Cohen that a third party had obtained compromising photos of Falwell's wife. Cohen met with the third party and after the meeting the person destroyed the photos.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In the fall of 2016, adult film actress Stormy Daniels (legal name Stephanie Clifford) was speaking to some reporters and said that she had had a sexual affair with Trump in 2006. In October, Cohen and Daniels' attorney Keith M. Davidson negotiated a non-disclosure agreement under which she was to be paid $130,000 hush money. Cohen created a Delaware LLC called Essential Consultants and used it to pay the $130,000. The arrangement was reported by "The Wall Street Journal" in January 2018.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen told "The New York Times" in February 2018 that he paid the $130,000 to Daniels from his own pocket; he also said that the payment was not a campaign contribution and he was not reimbursed by either the Trump Organization or the Trump campaign. "The Washington Post" later noted that, by stating that he used his own money to "facilitate" the payment, Cohen was not ruling out the possibility that Trump, as an individual, reimbursed Cohen for the payment. In April 2018, Trump acknowledged for the first time that Cohen has represented him in the Stormy Daniels case, after previously having denied knowledge of the $130,000 payment.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On March 5, "The Wall Street Journal" cited anonymous sources recounting Cohen as saying he missed two deadlines to pay Daniels because Cohen "couldn't reach Mr. Trump in the hectic final days of the presidential campaign", and that after Trump's election, Cohen had complained that he had not been reimbursed for the payment. Cohen described this report as "fake news".


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On March 9, NBC News reported that Cohen had used his Trump Organization email to negotiate with Daniels regarding her nondisclosure agreement, and that Cohen had used the same Trump Organization email to arrange for a transfer for funds that would eventually lead to Daniels' payment. In response, Cohen acknowledged that he had transferred funds from his home equity line of credit to the LLC and from the LLC to Daniels' attorney.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In a March 25, 2018, interview with "60 Minutes", Daniels said that she and Trump had sex once, and that later she had been threatened in front of her infant daughter and felt pressured to later sign a non-disclosure agreement.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On March 26, David Schwarz, a lawyer for Cohen, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that Daniels was lying in the "60 Minutes" interview. Cohen's lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter claiming Daniels' statements constituted "libel per se and intentional infliction of emotional distress" to Cohen.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen initiated a private arbitration case against Daniels in February 2018, based on an October 2016 non-disclosure agreement signed by Daniels in October 2016, in exchange for $130,000. Cohen obtained an order from an arbitrator barring Daniels from publicly discussing her alleged relationship with Trump. Daniels subsequently brought a lawsuit in federal court against Trump and Cohen, arguing that the non-disclosure agreement is legally invalid because Trump never signed it, Cohen responded by seeking to compel arbitration, which would avoid public proceedings. In April 2018, Cohen filed a declaration in the court saying that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself in the Daniels lawsuit.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On May 18, lawyers for Cohen filed an objection to Daniel's lawyer Michael Avenatti being allowed to represent her in a case involving Cohen, claiming it (the objection) was based on the violations of ethical rules and local court rules, among other issues. After Cohen's August 2018 conviction, Trump stated that the payment to Daniels came from him personally and not from the campaign during a Fox & Friends interview.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2016, Karen McDougal, a former "Playboy" model, claimed that she and Trump had an affair from 2006 until 2007, a claim that Trump has since denied. The "National Enquirer" paid McDougal $150,000 for her story but never published it, a practice known as catch and kill. On September 30, 2016, Cohen created Resolution Consultants LLC, a Delaware shell company, to purchase the rights to McDougal's story from the "National Enquirer", though the rights to the story were ultimately never purchased.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen had been known to record conversations and phone calls with other people. According to his lawyer Lanny Davis, "Michael Cohen had the habit of using his phone to record conversations instead of taking notes." Altogether the prosecutors have been given more than one hundred audio recordings from the material seized from Cohen in the April 2018 raid, after the Trump team withdrew their claims of privilege for those items; reportedly only one of them features a substantive conversation with Trump. The existence of that tape was revealed on July 20 and the actual recording was released on July 25.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On July 20, it was revealed that Cohen secretly recorded a conversation between Trump and him. The discussion involved a potential hush payment to the publisher of the "National Enquirer". The recording had been classified as a privileged attorney–client communication by the Special Master reviewing the Cohen material, but Trump's attorneys waived that claim, meaning that prosecutors can have it and use it. The conversation in that tape occurred in September 2016, two months before the election and weeks after the "Enquirer" paid McDougal the $150,000. In the conversation, Trump and Cohen discuss whether to buy the rights to her story from the "Enquirer", and Trump appears to approve the idea. Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, initially claimed that the tape shows Trump saying "make sure it's done correctly, and make sure it's done by check." Giuliani also noted that no payment was ultimately made, and asserted that Trump's team waived privilege and allowed the recording to be revealed because it shows no violation of law. The recording appears to contradict Hope Hicks, then Trump's spokeswoman, who said when the story of the "Enquirer" payment came out a few days before the election that the Trump campaign had "no knowledge of any of this".


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On July 25, Cohen's attorney Lanny Davis released the actual recording to CNN, which played it on the air on the "Cuomo Prime Time" program. On it, Trump can be heard concluding a telephone conversation with an unidentified person and then discussing several items of business with Cohen. Cohen mentions that he needs to "open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David", interpreted as meaning David Pecker, the head of American Media, which publishes the "National Enquirer". Later when they discuss financing, Trump is heard saying something about "pay with cash", to which Cohen responds "no, no, no", but the tape is unclear and it is disputed what is said next; the word "check" can be heard. A transcript provided by Trump's attorneys has Trump saying "Don't pay with cash ... check." The tape cuts off abruptly at that point. A lawyer for the Trump Organization said that any reference to "cash" would not have meant "green currency", but a one-time payment ("cash") vs. extended payments ("financing"), in either case accompanied by documents. According to Aaron Blake at "The Washington Post", "the tape provides the first evidence that Trump spoke with Cohen about purchasing the rights to women's stories—apparently to silence them—before the 2016 election." He also notes that Cohen speaks in "somewhat coded language", which Trump understands, suggesting that he is already familiar with the issue.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Despite the taped conversation, on August 23, in a Fox News interview Trump stated that he was not aware of the hush-money payments until "later on": "Later on I knew. Later on. What he did—and they weren't taken out of the campaign finance, that's the big thing." He added: "In fact, my first question when I heard about it was, did they come out of the campaign, because that could be a little dicey. And they didn't come out of the campaign and that's big. But they weren't ... that's not even a campaign violation." According to U.S. election rules, any payments intended to influence an election vote must be reported.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In April 2018, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that Shera Bechard, a former "Playboy" Playmate, had an affair with married Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy. She became pregnant by him, had an abortion, and was to be paid $1.6 million hush money. Broidy, a Republican fundraiser, was a deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee along with Cohen and DeJoy.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In a 2018 court proceeding, Cohen said he had given legal advice to only three clients in 2017: Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, and Elliott Broidy. In late 2017, Cohen arranged the $1.6 million payment by Broidy to Bechard as part of a nondisclosure agreement requiring Bechard to keep silent about the matter. Cohen was Broidy's attorney and Keith M. Davidson represented Bechard. Davidson had previously been the attorney for Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. The Bechard nondisclosure agreement used the same pseudonyms—David Dennison for the man and Peggy Peterson for the woman—as in the Daniels agreement. The payments were to be made in installments.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On July 6, 2018, Bechard filed a lawsuit against Broidy, Davidson, and Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti, claiming the three had breached the agreement in relation to the cessation of the settlement payments.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Essential Consultants LLC is a Delaware shell company created by Cohen in October 2016 to facilitate payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels. For many months thereafter, Cohen used the LLC for an array of business activities largely unknown to the public, with at least $4.4 million moving through the LLC between Trump's election to the presidency and January 2018. In May 2018, Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti posted a seven-page report to Twitter detailing what he said were financial transactions involving Essential Consultants and Cohen. Avenatti did not reveal the source of his information, which was later largely confirmed by "The New York Times" and other publications. The data showed that hundreds of thousands of dollars were given to Cohen, via Essential Consultants, from Fortune 500 firms such as Novartis and AT&T, which had business before the Trump administration. It was also revealed that Essential Consultants had received at least $500,000 from a New York-based investment firm called Columbus Nova, which is linked to a Russian oligarch. The firm's largest client is a company controlled by Viktor Vekselberg, a Ukrainian-born Russian oligarch. Vekselberg is a business partner of Soviet-born billionaire and major Republican Party donor, Leonard Blavatnik. A spokesperson for Columbus Nova said that the payment was a consulting fee that had nothing to do with Vekselberg.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Questions were raised about many of the payments, such as four totaling $200,000 that AT&T paid to the LLC between October 2017 and January 2018, while at the same time the proposed merger between the company and Time Warner was pending before the Justice Department. AT&T claimed that the money was paid to the LLC and other firms that were used to provide insights into understanding the new administration, and that the LLC did no legal or lobbying work for AT&T.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On May 11, 2018, the CEO of AT&T stated that in early 2017 it was approached by Cohen to provide "his opinion on the new president and his administration". Cohen was paid $600,000 ($50,000 per month) over the year, which its CEO described as "a big mistake". Novartis was also approached by Cohen and was offered similar services.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Novartis, a Switzerland–based pharmaceutical giant paid the LLC nearly $1.2 million in separate payments. Novartis released a statement May 9, 2018, that it hired the LLC to help the company understand the "health care policy" of the new administration, but it actually did not receive benefit for its investment. The statement continued that Novartis made a decision to not engage Essential Consultants further, but it could not terminate the contract for "cause", raising concerns on why the company did not pursue reimbursement.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Franklin L. Haney agreed to pay Cohen $10 million if he successfully lobbied for the United States Department of Energy to finance the Bellefonte Nuclear Generating Station, or a reduced fee if the funding targets were only partially met.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: As of April 2018, Cohen was under federal criminal investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY).


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On April 9, 2018, the FBI raided Cohen's office at the law firm of Squire Patton Boggs, as well as his home and his hotel room in the Loews Regency Hotel in New York City, pursuant to a federal search warrant. The warrant was obtained by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the SDNY, whose public corruption unit was conducting an investigation. Seeking the warrant required high-level approval from the Department of Justice. The Interim U.S. Attorney, Geoffrey Berman, was recused. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray—both of whom are Trump appointees—had supervisory roles. The FBI obtained the warrant after a referral from Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, although underlying reasons for the raid were not revealed. Following the raid, Squire Patton Boggs law firm ended its formal working relationship with Cohen.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Agents seized emails, tax records, business records, and other matter related to several topics, including payments made by Cohen to Stormy Daniels, and records related to Trump's "Access Hollywood" controversy. Recordings of phone conversations Cohen made were also obtained. According to Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti and civil rights attorney Lisa Bloom, some of the recordings may have included participants located in California, which would make the recordings illegal, as California is a "two party consent" state.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Since Cohen is an attorney, the search included the seizure of materials normally protected by attorney–client privilege, which is subject to a crime-fraud exception if a crime is suspected. Some legal scholars opined that Trump's denial that he had knowledge of the Daniels payment, combined with denials by Cohen and his lawyer David Schwartz, meant both sides had effectively said that matter did not involve attorney–client communications. Cohen and his lawyers argued that all of the thousands of items seized during the FBI raid should be protected by attorney–client privilege and thus withheld from the prosecutors. U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood, appointed a special master, former federal judge Barbara S. Jones, to review all of the seized materials for attorney–client privilege. She found that only 14 of the 639 paper documents were privileged, and out of the 291,770 electronic files seized, only 148 files were withheld from the prosecution. The search warrant itself has been sealed, making it unavailable to the public. The FBI also sought documents pertaining to Cohen's ownership of taxi medallions. Cohen's taxi fleet is operated by Gene Freidman, who is facing legal trouble for alleged tax evasion.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: A few days after the raid, McClatchy reported that the Mueller investigation was in possession of evidence that Cohen traveled to Prague in August or September 2016. If true, the report bolsters similar claims in 3 of 17 reports from the Steele dossier. According to McClatchy's confidential sources, Cohen traveled to Prague via Germany, a passage that would not have required use of a passport due to both countries being within the Schengen Area.<ref name="Stone_Gordon_4/13/2018"></ref> In reaction, Cohen denied having ever been to Prague, as he had done in his January 2017 denial following the dossier's release. "Mother Jones" reported that Cohen had told them "I was in Prague for one afternoon 14 years ago," contradicting later statements that he had never visited.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In May 2018, NBC reported that Cohen's phone calls had been monitored by pen register, which logs the origins and destinations of calls but not the contents.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: "The Wall Street Journal" reported on July 26, 2018, that longtime Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg had been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury regarding the Cohen investigation.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In August 2018, it was reported that investigators were in the final stages of their investigation. Cohen officially surrendered to the FBI on August 21, 2018. That afternoon, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges: five counts of tax evasion, one count of making false statements to a financial institution, one count of willfully causing an unlawful corporate contribution, and one count of making an excessive campaign contribution at the request of a candidate (Trump) for the "principal purpose of influencing [the] election".


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: After Cohen's conviction, his personal lawyer Lanny Davis stated that Cohen was ready to "tell everything about Donald Trump that he knows". Davis alluded to Cohen's knowledge that could be used against Trump, and hinted that Cohen had knowledge of whether Trump knew in advance about the computer hacking that was detrimental to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, as well as knowledge of the meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016. He later added that he believed Cohen would agree to testify before Congress, even without immunity.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Responding to speculation that President Trump might issue a pardon for Cohen, lawyer Davis said on NPR, "I know that Mr. Cohen would never accept a pardon from a man that he considers to be both corrupt and a dangerous person in the oval office. And [Cohen] has flatly authorized me to say under no circumstances would he accept a pardon from Mr. Trump." In his interview to Sky News, Davis said the turning point for his client's attitude toward Trump was the Helsinki summit in July 2018, which caused him to doubt Trump's loyalty to the U.S.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: "The New York Times" reported on August 22, 2018, that Cohen court documents revealed that two senior Trump Organization executives were also involved in the hush money payments, and that Cohen "coordinated with one or more members of the campaign, including through meetings and phone calls" about the payments.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: By mid-October 2018, Cohen had sat for at least 50 hours of interviews with Mueller's investigators and other investigators, although he had no formal cooperation agreement with prosecutors. Cohen also cooperated in a separate investigation by New York State investigators regarding the Trump Organization and Trump Foundation.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On December 12, 2018, U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III sentenced Cohen to three years in prison and a $50,000 fine, and additionally ordered Cohen to pay $1.4 million in restitution and to forfeit $500,000.<ref name="BBC 12/12/2018"></ref> At his sentencing hearing, Cohen stated: "I take full responsibility for each act that I pled guilty to: The personal ones to me and those involving the president of the United States of America." Cohen said Trump was "the man that caused me to choose the path of darkness" and do "dirty deeds". Before passing sentence, Judge Pauley said, "each of these crimes is a serious offense against the United States. Mr. Cohen pled guilty to a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct." In March 2019, Cohen sued the Trump Organization to cover the $1.9 million in financial penalties plus an additional $1.9 million in his unpaid defense costs. Cohen argued that the Trump Organization—which had already paid $1.7 million for his defense—had agreed to indemnify him. Subsequently, more than half of Cohen's outstanding legal bills were paid by the Trump Organization or canceled. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in November 2021, partly on the grounds that Cohen's relevant work had been done for Donald Trump personally rather than for the Trump Organization.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On November 29, 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee and House Intelligence Committee in 2017 regarding the proposed Trump Tower Moscow deal that he spearheaded in 2015 and 2016. Cohen had told Congress that the deal ceased in January 2016 when it actually ended in June 2016, and that he had not received a response about the deal from the office of a senior Russian official when he actually had. Cohen said that he had given the false testimony in order to be consistent with Trump's "repeated disavowals of commercial and political ties between himself and Russia" and out of loyalty to Trump. Cohen received a two-month sentence, to be served concurrently with his three-year sentence for tax fraud, for the false testimony.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: This charge was brought directly by Robert Mueller's investigation, rather than the United States Attorney for the SDNY, who brought the previous charges against Cohen. In a sentencing memorandum filed the following day, Cohen's attorneys stated he kept Trump "apprised" of the "substantive conversation" Cohen had in January 2016 with a Russian official, and discussed with Trump traveling to Russia to advance the project during the summer of 2016. The filing also stated Cohen "remained in close and regular contact with White House-based staff and legal counsel" as he prepared to provide false testimony to Congress.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: According to a BuzzFeed report on January 17, 2019, President Donald Trump personally directed Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project. However, a spokesman for the Special Counsel investigation later said the report was "not accurate", but did not specify "which parts of the BuzzFeed story they were calling untrue".


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Although Cohen was convicted of making one false statement to Congress, there were other false statements he made before Congress that he was not charged with. On February 26, 2019 Cohen testified that he never wanted a position in the Trump administration. Bo Dietl, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump said that Cohen had said he wanted a job in the White House. Cohen also testified that he never asked Donald Trump for a pardon, Cohen’s lawyers contradicted him saying that they had reached out to Trump for a pardon.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In 2018 Stormy Daniels sued Cohen for defamation, citing a statement he made to the media in which he said "Just because something isn't true doesn't mean that it can't cause you harm or damage." Daniels's lawsuit alleged that Cohen's comments were meant to convey that Daniels was a liar. The case was dismissed.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen reported to FCI Otisville, on May 6, 2019. He was released from prison early on May 21, 2020, due to concerns regarding COVID-19, in order to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On July 2, 2020, Cohen was photographed dining at a Manhattan restaurant, which according to his lawyer Lanny Davis was not a violation of his prison furlough since he had not yet transitioned to house arrest. A week later, he was taken back into custody after federal officials asserted he had refused to sign an agreement stipulating that he would have no engagement of any kind with the media—including publishing his "tell-all" book—for the remainder of his sentence, which encompassed the November 2020 elections. The previous week he had announced on Twitter that he anticipated releasing a book on his experiences working for Donald Trump in late September 2020. He also tweeted on June 26 that a recent "New York Times" article entitled "Inside Barr's Effort to Undermine Prosecutors in N.Y." had revealed "only a part of the full story," using the hashtag #WillSpeakSoon. After being sent to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, he was returned to FCI Otisville and held in solitary confinement 23 hours each day, which prevented him from working on his manuscript on prison library computers. Cohen denied he refused to sign the agreement, asserting his attorney had simply asked questions about it, at which point US marshals escorted him back to prison.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On July 20, 2020, Cohen filed suit against attorney general Bill Barr and two federal prison officials, asserting his First Amendment rights were being violated. Cohen claimed his return to prison was retaliation "because he is drafting a book manuscript that is critical of the President of the United States." Cohen requested he be immediately released to home confinement. The government denied on July 22 that Cohen had been re-imprisoned in an effort to block publication of his book. On July 23, 2020 U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered Cohen be returned to home confinement because the government had retaliated against him and violated his First Amendment rights. Hellerstein said Cohen would be released to home confinement on July 24, 2020. Hellerstein remarked, "I've never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release." One week later, the government informed Hellerstein it would not challenge his ruling and would remove the restrictive clause from Cohen's home-confinement agreement.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Cohen was released from Otisville Prison in New York on July 24, 2020. Days later, Cohen's attorney informed Hellerstein that Cohen hoped to accept a job offer with an unnamed political action committee to consult and make media appearances on its behalf.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: The Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Attorney General opened investigations into Trump. The Manhattan DA's office ultimately decided in 2022 not to pursue charges, in part because the new DA, Alvin Bragg, worried that the case relied too much on Michael Cohen's testimony.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: These were separate from the investigation by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance which, on August 22, 2018, announced it had subpoenaed Cohen in connection with its investigation into whether the Donald J. Trump Foundation had violated New York tax laws. The department also said in October 2018 it would review allegations that Trump had gained hundreds of millions of dollars through tax fraud.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On January 10, 2019, Cohen agreed to testify publicly before the House Oversight Committee to give a "full and credible account" of his work on behalf of Trump. On January 12, Fox News contributor and legal analyst Jeanine Pirro took a 20-minute, on-air phone call from Trump in which he claimed Cohen had fabricated stories to reduce the length of his expected sentence. Trump suggested that investigations should instead focus on Cohen's father-in-law, saying "that's the one people want to look at." The father-in-law, Fima Shusterman, owned condos both at Trump Tower and in a Trump development near Miami. According to former federal investigators, Shusterman actually introduced Trump to Cohen. On several subsequent occasions Trump hinted publicly that Cohen's father-in-law, or possibly even Cohen's wife, could be tied to criminal activity. On January 20 Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani suggested on CNN that the father-in-law "may have ties to something called organized crime".


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On January 23, Cohen announced through his attorney that he would postpone his testimony to a later date, citing "ongoing threats against his family from President Trump" and Giuliani. Some legal analysts asserted that these comments by Trump and Giuliani constituted intimidation and witness tampering; House Oversight Committee chairman Elijah Cummings and House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said that threatening a witness's family is "textbook mob tactics".


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: After several scheduling delays, Cohen testified before three congressional committees in late February. First was a February 26, 2019, closed-door hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He testified for more than seven hours.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: Also on February 26, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz directly threatened Cohen via Twitter, hinting about unspecified disclosures to Cohen's wife and father-in-law. The Florida Bar Association investigated the incident, but only issued a "letter of advice".


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: The following day, February 27, Cohen gave 10 hours of public, televised testimony before the House Oversight Committee, during which he described Trump as a "racist," a "con man", and a "cheat", and expressed remorse and shame for the things he had done for Trump. He said the president had reimbursed him for illegal hush money payments, suggested that he should lie to Congress and the public about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations, and filed false financial statements with banks and insurance companies. Republicans hammered on his previous false testimony, asking why he should be believed now.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: On February 28, Cohen testified behind closed doors to the House Intelligence Committee for more than seven hours. Cohen returned to that committee for more questioning on March 6.


title: Michael Cohen (lawyer)

text: In April 2019, Cohen said he had found a hard drive with 14 million documents, many of which were personal, but some of which might be relevant to the charges. Cohen later said: “It took 26 people to go through my 14 million documents, literally round the clock, because the judge demanded that we have it done within 45 days."