Thread by @TheViewFromLL2

The thing about all this I don't quite get is why Michael Cohen decided that his best bet was to cooperate with investigators, rather than hold out for a pardon.

One possibility I've wondered about is if Cohen had reason to believe that any Trump pardons wouldn't be happening until Trump is about to leave office, or at least until not until after he's reelected. That might've changed how Cohen weighed his options.

If that's the case, then Trump's pardon offer would give Cohen, in the best case scenario, a potential resolution for this matter in 24 months from now.

Under the deal Cohen, he gets a certain resolution of this matter in 36 months.

Under his plea deal, Cohen is certain to get more prison time than he would under his best-case pardon scenario. But, at the end of the day, Trump may have only been offering Cohen the possibility of cutting down his total time dealing with the criminal case by 10-12 months.

If an immediate pardon was on the table, Cohen would have strong motivation to roll the dice and see if he could get out of this scot-free by going the pardon route.

But if Trump only offered Cohen a pardon down the line, say in Jan of 2021, well, that's really not a great deal.

What Mueller and the SDNY ended up offering Cohen was only a little while more -- 36 months, and with good time credit he could be out again for the start of 2022. And that's even before you get to Cohen's hopes for a Rule 35 reduction.

Today's NYT article on Giuliani hints that this may have been at the heart of why the pardon negotiations broke down, and why Cohen decided to throw in with Special Counsel's Office instead.

Cohen, it would seem, wanted a "pre-pardon." And didn't get it.
nytimes.com/2019/03/06/us/…