Michael Cohen's lawyer cited cases that may not exist, judge says – The Seattle Times
NEW YORK — Michael Cohen, the onetime fixer for former President Donald Trump who went to prison after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations in 2018, was trying to persuade a judge to end court supervision of his case now that he has been released.
There was just one hitch: Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, appeared to have cited three bogus rulings in making his argument in a court filing last month.
“As far as the court can tell,” a Manhattan federal judge, Jesse Furman, wrote in an order Tuesday, “none of these cases exist.”
The episode echoed a case in June when another federal judge, P. Kevin Castel, imposed a $5,000 fine on two lawyers who had filed a legal brief full of made-up cases and citations, all generated by the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT.
On Tuesday, Furman ordered Schwartz to provide the court with copies of the three decisions he had cited in the filing. If Schwartz could not do so within a week, Furman said, the lawyer would have to produce a sworn declaration and a thorough explanation of “how the motion came to cite cases that do not exist and what role, if any, Cohen played in drafting or reviewing the motion before it was filed.”
Schwartz did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. E. Danya Perry, a new lawyer representing Cohen in his request to end his supervised release, said she had joined the case after Schwartz filed the motion at issue.
“In conducting my own research in support of Cohen’s motion,” she said, “I was unable to verify the case law that had been submitted by previous counsel in his initial papers. Consistent with my ethical obligation of candor to the court, I advised Furman of this issue.”
Perry said Cohen would have no comment.
As cited in Schwartz’s legal motion, the cases — United States v. Figueroa-Flores, United States v. Ortiz and United States v. Amato — all sounded legitimate. They were affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, Schwartz noted in his motion, offering summaries of each decision.
But Furman, in his order Tuesday, noted that the Figueroa-Flores citation actually referred to a page in the middle of an opinion issued by a different federal appeals court and which, the judge added, “has nothing to do with supervised release.”
The Amato case, Furman wrote, corresponded to a decision of the Board of Veterans’ Appeals, an administrative tribunal.
And the citation to the Ortiz case, the judge said, appeared “to correspond to nothing at all.”
Furman wrote that he had contacted the clerk of the 2nd Circuit, “who found no record of any of the three decisions.”
The judge did not indicate whether he believed the three decisions cited in Schwartz’s motion were the product of a chatbot, but in making clear he had the power to issue sanctions, he cited the earlier case before Castel that involved ChatGPT.
On Friday, Perry wrote to Furman, asking that he grant the early termination of Cohen’s supervised release, a request that federal prosecutors oppose.
Perry argued that Cohen had complied with the conditions of his supervised release and had cooperated with the authorities in numerous investigations, including of Trump. Last month, Cohen testified over two days as a witness for New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, in a fraud lawsuit her office brought against the former president.
If Furman determines that Cohen had a role in citing the bogus cases, Trump’s lawyers, who have attacked Cohen as a serial liar, are likely to use the episode to try to further undercut his credibility. Cohen is expected to be the star witness in the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal trial against Trump, which is scheduled for next year.