Donald Trump’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen has admitted giving his lawyers a non-existent case to cite as part of a bid to settle his supervised release following his guilty plea to tax evasion and campaign finance charges in 2018.
In a pair of court filings unsealed Friday, Cohen and his legal team informed Manhattan federal judge Jesse Furman that attorney David Schwartz submitted false quotes prepared by Cohen and produced by Google’s artificial intelligence service Bard to argue for ending court surveillance of Cohen last month. .
“As a non-lawyer, I didn’t keep up with the new trends (and associated risks) in legal technology and didn’t realize that Google Bard is a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, can show real-looking quotes and descriptions. but not really,” Cohen said in a seven-page declaration submitted to Furman Thursday.
Michael Cohen admitted to providing false legal citations to his lawyers in an effort to secure his supervised release. Steven Hirsch for NYPost The appeal comes after a brief stint in prison and house arrest for pleading guilty to campaign fraud as a legal adviser to former President Donald Trump in 2018. AFP via Getty Images
“On the contrary, I understand it as a highly charged search engine and have repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”
Schwartz submitted the Nov. 29 filing without checking whether the case Cohen gave him was true — and faces sanctions if he doesn’t disclose possible “fraudulent conduct,” as the filing indicates.
In a separate letter to the judge, Cohen’s lawyer Danya Perry said her client did not “have an ethical obligation to verify the accuracy of his research” and put the blame squarely on Schwartz.
Fake case quotes But they could cast doubt on Cohen’s testimony for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal business fraud case against Trump. GNMiller/NYPost
“Mr. Schwartz … has an obligation to verify the legal representations made in the motions he files,” Perry wrote, saying the attorney mistakenly believed Perry had produced the quotes himself — adding that Schwartz had a history of being “less scrupulous about accuracy than his citations. “
“The file shows that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong. He is relying on his attorney, as he has the right to do so,” Perry said in a statement to The Post. “Unfortunately, his attorney appears to have made an honest mistake by not verifying the quote in the brief he drafted and filed.”
The turmoil could cast doubt on Cohen’s potential testimony in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal business fraud case against Trump, as well as New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud case.
Bragg indicted the 77-year-old former president in April on 34 counts of allegedly making “hush-hush” payments through Cohen to former porn star Stormy Daniels. Stormy Daniels
Bragg indicted the 77-year-old former president in March on 34 counts of concealing business records to conceal “hush money” payments channeled through Cohen to former porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal.
The money was intended to prevent the two women from going public before the 2016 election with allegations they had affairs with the married Trump.
James also filed a $250 million civil fraud case against Trump last year, alleging that he inflated the assets of the Trump Organization to obtain more favorable loan and insurance terms.
Bob Costello, a lawyer who previously advised Cohen but testified in Trump’s defense before a Manhattan grand jury earlier this year, said he had a “lie, cheat, steal” mindset. Davidoff Hutcher & Citro, LLC
Cohen appeared as the lead witness before a grand jury in the hush money case and testified in a Manhattan courtroom in October about his former boss’s attempts to artificially inflate his net worth.
James’ office has downplayed Cohen’s importance to the civil fraud case, noting that the judge in the matter has said the question of Trump’s liability “doesn’t lie with him [Cohen] at all.”
Before Bragg’s indictment, letters from 2018 also surfaced showing Cohen lied to federal election officials that he “used his own personal funds to facilitate a $130,000 payment to Ms. Stephanie Clifford” — real name Daniels — in 2016.
Cohen pleaded guilty that August, however, to making in-kind campaign contributions to Trump by making payments to Daniels to buy her silence.
The former lawyer, now 57, served about a year in prison before being released in 2020 due to concerns about the spread of COVID-19 in prison. He then served a period of house arrest before being released under supervision.
Bob Costello, a lawyer who previously advised Cohen but testified in Trump’s defense before a Manhattan grand jury earlier this year, said the former law enforcer had a “lie, cheat, steal” mindset, ABC News reported.
“I’m trying to tell the truth to the grand jury,” Costello told reporters after his testimony. “If they want to go after Donald Trump and they have solid evidence, then so be it. Michael Cohen is not strong evidence.”
A spokesman for Bragg’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
