Yesterday, Michael D. Cohen, Donald Trump's former lawyer, was sentenced to three years in prison after being found guilty of breaking campaign finance laws, tax evasion and lying to Congress. This is terrible news for the president, who is no doubt panicking about all the dirt his former employee has on him, but an excellent result for anyone who enjoys a good joke at a crooked lawyer's expense.
As soon as the sentence was announced, Twitter users set to work dragging up all of Cohen's previous statements in order to demonstrate his extreme hypocrisy - including things he once said about Hillary Clinton.
After that, the jokes pretty much wrote themselves...
According to the New York Times, Judge William H. Pauley III, who presided over the case, described Cohen’s crimes as a "veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct" and added that "Each of the crimes involved deception and each appears to have been motivated by personal greed and ambition."
Amongst other things, Cohen was found to have lied about making payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal: two adult film stars that Trump had affairs with, and about the Trump Organisation's meetings and negotiations with Russia during the 2016 presidential election campaign.
Right before he was sentenced, Cohen accepted accountability for his crimes, and directly referenced the president as the reason why he committed so many illegal acts.
"I blame myself for the conduct which has brought me here today," he said, "and it was my own weakness and a blind loyalty to [President Donald Trump] that led me to choose a path of darkness over light."
Cohen then apologised to the public, saying: "You deserve to know the truth and lying to you was unjust."
Even so, Rudy Giuliani, another of Trump's lawyers, said that Cohen's claim that he was acting out of "blind loyalty" was "a complete lie", and that it was inaccurate to link the president to any of this.
However, this is difficult to believe considering that Trump initially denied any sort of hush money payment to women he'd had extramarital affairs with, but later changed his story to say that "a simple private transaction" had been made - but it was nothing to do with campaign finances.
For now, then, it seems that Donald Trump has managed to swerve any direct consequences from Cohen's conviction, but his lawyer's criminal activity obviously does not look good for him. With so many accusations of collusion and illegal behaviour hanging over his head, this is yet another strike against his name.
On top of his three-year sentence, Cohen has also been ordered to pay just shy of $2 million in fines, forfeitures and restitution.
He will begin serving his prison sentence in March next year.
