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WASHINGTON, Dec. 13-- U.S. President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen has been sentenced for crimes including those he committed to help his boss win the presidency, and Trump has denied that he had directed Cohen to break the law. Cohen was sentenced to a three-year jail term on Wednesday after he pleaded guilty to multiple crimes, including tax evasion, lying to Congress, as well as violating campaign-finance laws by paying two women, who alleged affairs with Trump, hush-money to buy their silence on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. "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 in a guilty plea at a federal court in New York on Wednesday. At times he paused to control his emotions and shed tears. Trump, who reportedly said in private Wednesday that Cohen is a liar, held off from commenting publicly on the matter until Thursday, when he fired three tweets in the morning in an effort to distance himself from the case. "I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called 'advice of counsel,' and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid," he tweeted. The president was responding to prosecutors' accusation on Friday that Cohen "acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1" in the hush-money payments. Individual-1 is the term prosecutors have been using to refer to Trump. Cohen had admitted it. | 
