Michael Cohen, center, leaves federal court, followed by attorney Guy Petrillo on Tuesday. Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP

Michael Cohen, the ex-attorney for President Donald Trump who admitted in court on Tuesday to coordinating hush payments to women with damaging information about his former client, apparently has not agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, but former prosecutors say that the possibility that Cohen might later help investigators shouldn't be ruled out.  

Cohen pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to eight counts, including five counts of tax evasion for lying about his income each year from 2012 to 2016 and one count of making false statements to a lending institution for failing to report $14 million in liabilities related to his taxi medallion business on an application for a home equity line of credit.

But the two most eye-popping charges contained in the information filed against Cohen are that, in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential campaign, a candidate for federal office directed him to work with the CEO of a media company to pay $150,000 to a woman with information that could harm the candidate.

The same candidate, Cohen said, directed him to arrange a $130,000 payment to another woman who also had dirt on the candidate, a sum that far exceeds the $2,700 limit on individual contributions.

Neither Cohen nor the federal prosecutors bringing charges against him called out Trump by name during the hearing before U.S. District Judge William Pauley III of the Southern District of New York in lower Manhattan nor in subsequent public statements.   

But Cohen arranged for a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels, for her silence about her 2006 tryst with Trump at a celebrity golf tournament. He also surreptitiously recorded a conversation between himself and Trump discussing a $150,000 payment for ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal in which the parent company for the National Enquirer would purchase the model's story for the purposes of killing it.

Notably, Cohen's plea deal with the government made no mention of cooperating with prosecutors in New York or with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team, which also scored a win on Tuesday with the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on tax and bank fraud charges in Washington, D.C.  

“While it is somewhat unusual, especially in a case with several potential targets, for a plea deal not to include government cooperation, that does not necessarily mean that Mr. Cohen will not ultimately cooperate,” said Ryan Wilson, a white-collar defense attorney at Lowenstein Sandler who previously served on the residential mortgage-backed securities task force in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

There could be several reasons as to why Cohen hasn't explicitly agreed at this point to cooperate with the government, said Harry Sandick, also a white-collar defense attorney with Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler who previously served in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Perhaps there are reasons not to trust Cohen as a cooperator, he said, or there's the possibility that he could have been involved in other offenses.

“It might make him less than useful as a cooperator, but we really don't know,” Sandick said.

Regardless of whether there's a cooperation agreement on the table, one of Cohen's  lawyers, Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to President Bill Clinton, has indicated in no uncertain terms that Cohen is willing to talk and that he would pass on a presidential pardon if one were offered to him.

Davis told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Tuesday that Cohen “is more than happy to tell the special counsel all that he knows, not just about the obvious possibility of a conspiracy to collude and corrupt the American democracy system in the 2016 election … but also knowledge about the computer crime of hacking and whether or not Mr. Trump knew ahead of time about that crime and even cheered it on.”

According to NBC News, before the broadcast, Davis said that his client may also have information that could be useful to the New York Attorney General's Office in its lawsuit regarding alleged improprieties by Trump's philanthropic organization, the Trump Foundation.

On Wednesday, a senior Cuomo administration official confirmed that it had issued a subpoena for Cohen as part of a multiagency effort by the state.

A spokesman for the New York Department of Taxation and Finance, which issued the subpoena, said they will be working with the Attorney General's Office and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office. The spokesman declined to comment further.

Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General's Office, declined to comment on whether there is an ongoing investigation.

“As our lawsuit against the Trump Foundation illustrates, we will hold Donald Trump and his associates accountable for violations of state law, and will seek a criminal referral from the appropriate state agency as necessary,” Spitalnick said.  

As for the eight counts to which Cohen has already pleaded guilty, Cohen's maximum prison sentence adds up to 65 years, though according to his plea agreement, Cohen's maximum recommended prison term under the sentencing guidelines is 63 months.  

“Other than Madoff and murderers, no one gets the statutory maximums,” Sandick said.

Wilson said that if Cohen does end up cooperating with prosecutors before his sentencing, he may be eligible for a “5K letter,” which is essentially a motion by the prosecution at sentencing indicating that the defendant has provided substantial assistance in the prosecution of another defendant. 

What sentence Cohen ultimately receives is up to Pauley, a Clinton appointee and senior judge with almost 20 years' experience on the bench who set Cohen's sentencing for Dec. 12.

And, Sandick said, given the presence of other individuals in charging documents against Cohen who apparently had a hand in the campaign finance violation charges, there may be indictments for other defendants related to Cohen's conduct in the offing.

“Anyone who was part of the effort to pay off women in order to prevent those women's stories from influencing, in theory, can be committing campaign violations if they took those actions willfully,” Sandick said.

With respect to the campaign finance law violation involving the media executive, which appears to be National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, a longtime friend of Trump's, Sandick said it's not entirely clear if the so-called catch-and-kill method of buying McDougal's story is protected by the First Amendment, akin to a newspaper endorsing a candidate.

Prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, senior counsel to Cahill Gordon & Reindel, said that the First Amendment provides “sweeping protection” for editorial decisions on what to, and what not to, publish.   

“But purchasing stories for the purpose of ensuring that they were not published seems to me far afield from what the First Amendment is about,” Abrams said. “It's more like burning newspapers than publishing them.”