Michael Cohen’s joke about Hillary Clinton going to prison seems awfully ironic now

The bad news for Michael Cohen is that he’s been sentenced to a 36-month prison term for tax evasion, campaign finance violations (involving hush-money payments made on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump), and lying to Congress about President Trump’s efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. And he’ll have to pay $500,000 in forfeiture and $1.4 million in restitution.

The good news is that when he goes to prison, his room and board will be free.

That joke might not seem funny to Cohen now, but it sure did in 2015, when he tweeted it to Hillary Clinton:

Wayback Machine

Cohen shares with Trump, his former boss and apparent co-conspirator, the uncanny ability to attack people on Twitter for things that he would later end up doing himself. In this case, it’s not just that Cohen gleefully jumped on the “lock her up” bandwagon; it’s that he went so far as to accuse Hillary Clinton of specific crimes — “defrauding America and perjury” — and predict she’d be convicted and incarcerated for them.

Cohen himself has now been convicted of defrauding the Internal Revenue Service, and thus the American government, by evading taxes. And he’s been convicted of perjury before Congress.

Unlike Trump, however, Cohen had the self-awareness to delete this tweet. When his home and office were raided in April 2018, enterprising Twitter users tracked down the tweet and started, in the words of the Washington Post, “dragging” Cohen for it. Shortly after he pleaded guilty to the tax and campaign finance crimes in August, he deleted it.

Trump himself might want to follow Cohen’s example. After all, while the president has spent the last several months trying to smear Cohen as a liar and a turncoat, this tweet is still up:

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