From the beginning, there was one sign Michael Cohen was in big trouble: Robert Khuzami was overseeing his prosecution.

Unflappable as always, the former Kirkland & Ellis partner on Tuesday appeared before a mass of cameras outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan to announce that the president's former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to eight felony charges. Five counts were for tax evasion, one was for making false statements to a financial institution, and two were campaign finance violations.

Without referring to Donald Trump by name, Khuzami said Cohen “worked to pay money to silence two women who had information that he believed would be detrimental to the 2016 campaign and the candidate. In addition, Mr. Cohen sought reimbursement for that money by submitting invoices to the candidate's company which were untrue and false … Those invoices were a sham.”

Khuzami assumed responsibility for the Cohen case after U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman recused himself. Berman, previously a partner at Greenberg Traurig, never publicly said why he stepped aside, but it's worth recalling that he was personally interviewed by President Trump before was appointed to be the SDNY's top prosecutor.

Jenna GreeneAs Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York said at the time, such an interview was both highly irregular and “deeply disturbing considering the conflicts of interest inherent by his potential jurisdiction on matters that could affect the president personally.”

Of course, all this might have nothing to do with why Berman recused, but the fact remains: If Trump thought he was hand-picking a law enforcement official who would protect him, he was wrong.

Khuzami—a longtime registered independent with wide-ranging law enforcement experience—was an ideal choice to step in.

He had joined the office as deputy U.S. Attorney in January, giving up a Kirkland partnership stake that earned him a hefty $11 million the year before.

But much of Khuzami's legal career has been spent working for the government. In 2009, when he was director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, he told me in an interview that he found a “professional and personal satisfaction that comes with working in the public sector that can't be matched in the private sector.”

The son of two professional ballroom dancers, his sister is an artist and his brother is a musician. “The family joke is that my parents would say, 'He's the white sheep of the family, where did we go wrong?' ” he said.

Khuzami started his legal career post-clerkship at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, but moved to the U.S. attorney's office in New York in 1990. There, along with Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew McCarthy, he prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine followers for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993.

Six years later, he was promoted to chief of the office's securities task force. One notable case involved more than 100 defendants, including members of New York's five organized crime families.

Khuzami moved to Deutsche Bank in 2002 and became general counsel for the Americas in 2004. From there, he joined the SEC, where he launched a major overhaul of how the agency detects and prosecutes wrongdoing. At Kirkland, he was a partner in the firm's government and internal investigations group.

Suffice to say, if there's a money trail to follow, Khuzami is your man.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrea M. Griswold, Rachel Maimin, Thomas McKay, and Nicolas Roos also handled the prosecution.

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The Other Loser in the Manafort Trial: Judge Ellis

As Michael Cohen was pleading guilty, jurors 240 miles to the south in Alexandria, Virginia were sealing the fate of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort.

Manafort was convicted of eight criminal counts, including tax and bank fraud and failing to disclose foreign bank accounts. The jury deadlocked on the remaining 10 charges.

The two-week trial cast an unflattering spotlight on U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia, who seemed to take a marked dislike to the prosecutors.

Take, for example, this uncomfortable exchange reported by Bloomberg.

“Look at me when you're talking to me,'' Ellis said to prosecutor Greg Andres.

“I'm sorry, judge, I was,'' Andres said.

“No, you weren't,'' Ellis said. “You were looking down.''

“Because I don't want to get in trouble for some facial expression,'' Andres said. “I don't want to get yelled at again by the court for having some facial expression when I'm not doing anything wrong, but trying my case.''

The judge also accused Andres of having tears in his eyes. When Andres said no, he didn't, Ellis responded, “Well, they're watery.”

Nancy Gertner, a retired U.S. District Court judge in Massachusetts, wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post headlined The extraordinary bias of the judge in the Manafort trial. (“The judge continually interrupted the prosecution's questioning of witnesses … He made critical comments about prosecution evidence and strategy—all in front of the jury.”)

It wasn't just her. Judge in the Manafort trial is creating some big problems, wrote GW Law Professor Jonathan Turley for The Hill. (Ellis “has repeatedly attacked the federal prosecutors from the Justice Department office of the special counsel. His actions are creating serious potential problems for the case.”)

Even Fox News senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano didn't like it. “I'm not happy with the judge,” he said. “If you feel that negatively about the government, you shouldn't be on the case.”

Then again, as several commentators pointed out, Ellis has a reputation for being difficult in general. It's not just an anti-prosecutor thing.

(Personally, I know a lawyer who had her motion denied because she accidentally wrote “Judge T.S. Elliot” in a filing. Which, c'mon. Is there anyone who took AP English and doesn't want to call him T.S. Eliot?)

In retrospect, there's a silver lining: By giving prosecutors such a hard time, Ellis took some of the oxygen away from the witch hunt crowd. It's harder to complain the trial is rigged when you see the judge being so awful to Mueller's team.

Or you can take a page from Breitbart, which buried the Manafort and Cohen news and focused its top coverage instead on a pretty college student killed by—you guessed it—an illegal immigrant.

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