Judge William H. Pauley III, the Manhattan federal judge who sentenced Michael D. Cohen, Donald J. Trump’s lawyer, to three years in prison for paying hush money in sex scandals that could have threatened Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016, died on July 6 at his home in East Quogue, N.Y. The cause was bile duct cancer, his son William said. Judge Pauley, who was named to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1998 by President Bill Clinton, presided over several prominent cases in his career on the bench. Two years after that Congress limited that program with the passage of the USA Freedom Act. In 2018, he rejected a settlement that New York City had reached with federal officials to rectify conditions in the city’s public housing projects and settle lawsuits.

Source: New York Times July 16, 2021 23:15 UTC