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A federal judge on Wednesday denied Michael Cohen’s attempt to end his supervised release early after finding Donald Trump’s former attorney likely “committed perjury” in past testimony.
Cohen asked to lift his supervised release, which ends in November, based on his testimony in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against Trump. His attorney at the time said Cohen’s testimony had “been widely lauded and publicized” and that he showed remorse by testifying. Cohen has tried three prior times to lift the supervision and told the judge now there had been a “substantial change in circumstances.”
US District Judge Jesse Furman agreed there was a change, but not one that helped Cohen.
“In short, there was ‘a substantial change in circumstances’ between Cohen’s third failed application and this, his fourth. But that change — his October 2023 testimony, which was either perjurious or confirms that he committed perjury before this Court — makes plain that Cohen should be required to serve out the remainder of his supervised release term,” the judge wrote.
Last fall, Cohen testified that he lied to Judge William Pauley when he pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax evasion, claiming he had not evaded taxes.
“It gives rise to two possibilities: one, Cohen committed perjury when he pleaded guilty before Judge Pauley or, two, Cohen committed perjury in his October 2023 testimony,” Furman wrote.
“At a minimum, Cohen’s ongoing and escalating efforts to walk away from his prior acceptance of responsibility for his crimes are manifest evidence of the ongoing need for specific deterrence,” the judge explained in denying Cohen’s request to supervise the release.
In a statement, Cohen’s attorney E. Danya Perry took exception to Furman’s contention that Cohen had committed perjury, saying the characterization “is both factually inaccurate and legally incorrect.”
“Judge Furman did not have a front seat to the testimony at the lengthy trial before Judge (Arthur) Engoron, who emphatically declared that ‘Michael Cohen told the truth,’” Perry said.
“And Judge Furman ignores that Mr. Cohen never disputed the underlying facts of his conduct, and also what many of Judge Furman’s own colleagues on the bench have long noted: that defendants often feel compelled to agree to coercive plea deals under severe pressure. That is exactly what happened to Mr. Cohen,” Perry added.
Engoron wrote in his decision last month finding Trump liable for fraudulently inflating the value of his assets that he found Cohen’s testimony credible about Trump indirectly ordering him to reverse engineer financial statements. The judge did not directly address questions about Cohen’s tax evasion plea, but noted: “This factfinder does not believe that pleading guilty to perjury means that you can never tell the truth. Michael Cohen told the truth.”
In Cohen’s motion for an early release, his lawyers cited non-existent cases, which Cohen had unwittingly sent to his attorney after they were generated by artificial intelligence. Furman wrote in his decision that the erroneous citations did not factor in the decision against Cohen.
The judge also declined to enact sanctions against Cohen’s former attorney, David Schwartz, who had cited the non-existent cases in the filing. He concluded that Schwartz’s explanation – that he had though the citations had come from Cohen’s current attorney, Danya Perry, not from Cohen – was believable.
“His citation to non-existent cases is embarrassing and certainly negligent, perhaps even grossly negligent. But the Court cannot find that it was done in bad faith,” Furman wrote.
In a signed declaration, Cohen said the citations and descriptions he sent to Schwartz came from Google Bard, an AI chatbot tool that directly competes with ChatGPT.
“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 actually were not,” Cohen said in his declaration.
Furman also said there was no reason to sanction Cohen, because as a disbarred attorney, Cohen is no longer an officer of the court.
“In sum, as embarrassing as this unfortunate episode was for Schwartz, if not Cohen, the record does not support the imposition of sanctions in this case,” Furman wrote.
This story has been updated with additional reaction.
