Michael Cohen ordered back to prison after breaking house arrest

Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen has been returned to federal custody after he allegedly violated the terms of his coronavirus-related release to serve the remainder of his sentence at home.

Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress and to campaign finance violations by facilitating hush money payments to women who alleged affairs with the president, which Mr Trump has denied.

He began a three-year sentence late last year but was among nonviolent offenders who were released from prison amid Covid-19 pandemic fears in US detention centres.

Photographs recently published by The New York Post showed Cohen dining at a Manhattan restaurant earlier this month.

The Bureau of Prisons said Cohen had "refused the conditions of his home confinement" and has been returned to prison, according to a bureau statement.

His sentence is set to expire on 22 November 2021.

Paul Manafort, the president's former campaign manager, was also released from prison in May over coronavirus concerns after serving only a fraction of a seven-year sentence following his convictions on charges related to tax violations and foreign lobbying.

Both men were central to FBI special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into foreign influence in 2016 elections.

The president's former attorney was among his most prominent defenders before he implicated his client in payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.

On behalf of his client, Cohen claims to have paid Ms Daniels $130,000, and he arranged $150,000 to Ms McDougal from the publisher of the National Enquirer in an effort to quash the publication of politically damaging stories that could impact the president's election chances.

Cohen's attorneys wrote that he was an "enabler" for the Trump Organisation and lured by its "magnetic, charismatic and powerful" figurehead.

In a six-page sworn affirmation filed in a US District Court in December, Cohen said that everything he "thought was important and valuable has been painfully revealed as derived" from a "Faustian bargain" in which he cast the president as the Devil, to whom Cohen "sold his soul" and "foolishly frittered away his integrity" on behalf of the president.

His return to federal custody also follows a US Supreme Court decision on Thursday that allows Manhattan's district attorney to seek the president's tax and financial records.

The office had sought records from the president's accounting firm concerning the alleged hush money payments arranged by Cohen.

Mr Trump responded to the ruling by calling the investigation by the Manhattan district attorney "a political prosecution".

District Attorney Cyrus Vance hailed the court's decision as a "tremendous victory for our nation's system of justice and its founding principle that no one – not even a president – is above the law," he said in a statement.

"Our investigation, which was delayed for almost a year by this lawsuit, will resume, guided as always by the grand jury's solemn obligation to follow the law and the facts, wherever they may lead," he said.

Another ruling by the nation's high court effectively blocked Congress from reviewing the same records, preventing House Democrats who impeached the president from scrutinising his tax records, financial information and more from his accounting firm, Mazars USA, and his major lenders, Deutsche Bank and Capital One.