Michael Cohen, once a trusted confidant of former President Donald Trump, has confessed to providing his attorney with fictitious legal cases.
This was part of an attempt to conclude his supervised release, which was a consequence of his 2018 guilty plea for tax evasion and campaign finance violations.
In two court documents made public on Friday, Cohen and his legal team disclosed to Manhattan federal judge Jesse Furman that Cohen had supplied his lawyer, David Schwartz, with false citations. These were generated by the AI service Google Bard and were used to argue for the termination of Cohen's court supervision last month.
Cohen, in a seven-page declaration submitted to Furman on Thursday, said, "As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but were actually not." He added that he had previously used the service as a "super-charged search engine" to find accurate information online.
Schwartz, without verifying the authenticity of the cases provided by Cohen, submitted the filing on November 29. He was facing potential sanctions if he did not disclose the possibly "fraudulent conduct," according to the documents.
In a separate letter to Judge Furman, Danya Perry, another attorney for Cohen, argued that her client was not ethically obligated to verify his research's accuracy. She placed the blame squarely on Schwartz, stating, "Mr. Schwartz did have an obligation to verify the legal representations being made in a motion he filed." Perry added that Schwartz had a history of being "less than meticulous about the accuracy of his citations."
Perry defended Cohen in a statement to The Post, saying, "The filings show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong. He relied on his lawyer, as he had every right to do." She added that Schwartz seemed to have made an honest mistake by not verifying the citations in the brief he drafted and filed.
This debacle could cast a shadow over 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 former president in March on 34 counts of allegedly concealing business records to hide "hush money" payments routed through Cohen to former adult film actress Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal. These payments were intended to prevent the women from disclosing their alleged affairs with Trump before the 2016 election.
James also filed a $250 million civil fraud case against Trump last year, alleging that he had inflated the Trump Organizations assets to secure more favorable loan and insurance terms.
Cohen, now 57, served approximately a year in prison before being released in 2020 due to COVID-19 concerns in prisons. He then served a period of home confinement before being put on supervised release.
Bob Costello, an attorney who previously advised Cohen but testified in Trumps defense before the Manhattan grand jury earlier this year, criticized Cohen's "lie, cheat, steal" mindset, according to ABC News.
Costello told reporters after his testimony, "Im trying to tell the truth to the grand jury. If they want to go after Donald Trump and they have solid evidence, then so be it. Michael Cohen is not solid evidence."
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