Michael Cohen, Consigliere, Confessor, Commentator

[Rolodex]

I checked and couldn't find a thread about Cohen.

So we know his story, and we know Mikey went to prison. He got out early, to finish serving at home. Now he's trying to end his period of "supervised release" earlier than scheduled.

His lawyer is either not competent or relied on AI or both. Brutal finding from the judge about Cohen's filing.

[raison de arizona]

Oh my. What, did he think they wouldn't check?

[NewMexGirl]

Oh my. What, did he think they wouldn't check?

Oh my, indeed. Cohen is an attorney. That he wouldn’t carefully peruse anything filed on his behalf is amazing.

[Maybenaut]

It’s interesting to me that the Court wants to know what role, if any, Cohen played in drafting the motion. I think Schwartz is screwed no matter what he says.

If he says Cohen had nothing to do with it, then it’s all on him and wtf was he thinking? If he says Cohen drafted it, or wanted him cite those particular cases or whatever, so what? Schwartz is the one with the bar card, Schwartz is the one who signed the pleading, and Schwartz is the one with a duty not to put effluvia like this before the court.

[Rolodex]

Oh my. What, did he think they wouldn't check?

No one will notice if I cite cases that aren't real, will they?

Wait - you mean someone actually checks that stuff?

[Slim Cognito]

Hey, if SCOTUS doesn't bother to check whether a gay couple that wasn't really gay tried to get a cake baked by a baker they didn't really ask to bake a cake, why should this be any different?

[Foggy]

I'd like to tell an AI to Shephardize the cases it's citing ...

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

[bill_g]

Fifty percent of all statistics are made up, and half are wrong. This would apply to citations as well.

[RTH10260]

Don't trust a statistic citation that you did not forge yourself

[sugar magnolia]

Did they learn nothing from that case where the lawyer used AI to write his stuff?

[Maybenaut]

My friend (a lawyer in CA) told me that they were recently playing around with an AI demo on Lexis (I don’t know if this is a service that Lexis currently offers - they said it was a demo). They said the citations were to real cases, but the results were misleading.

That’s how I feel about Shepardizing. Back in the stone age, Shepards was a big collection of books, new ones published every year, that would tell you whether the case you want to cite is still good law. The advent of computer-based legal research means that pretty much nobody uses the books anymore. I don’t know if they’re still published. But when you bring up a case on Lexis (which owns Shepards) or Westlaw (which has its own version), you get a signal (Lexis signals are color-coded: green = still good law; yellow = caution; red = overruled or abrogated by statue or the like).

I got called out during oral argument once for citing a case that had been overturned. After the argument I went back and checked - Shepards said it was still good law. After that, every single case I cited went into the Lexis search box and I read every case that cited it (in my practice it wasn’t that much work - usually just confirming that any new cases cited my cases for the same proposition I did.

But all of this made me realize that using Shepards, and Lexis Headnotes and Westlaw Keynotes (those are little blurbs that supposedly tell you the holdings on certain issues but don’t always get it right) without checking the stuff yourself means you’re risking that perhaps Lexis and Westlaw actually hired lawyers who aren’t all that good at interpreting legal opinions.

[p0rtia]

I'm patiently waiting for the Meidas Touch boyz to broach the subject of Cohen's lawyers' fuck up. So far they have been, shall we say, uncharacteristically silent. Cohen has a show on Saturday mornings, I think. No doubt he will address it. He's very good at frankly and briefly stating his feelings when things go wrong, so I'm not expecting much, but I'm curious as to what he'll say.

[p0rtia]

cross-posted to the Habba thread

Having recently realized that today is Thursday ( ) I headed over to Meidas Touch to listen to Cohen and Ben M's regular show. I was surprised that Cohen did not mention the citation fuck-up, but was interested enough in the convo to stick around.

Apparently, there was argument before the 2nd Ciruit, 3 judge panel today on another of Cohen's cases. Alina Habba was representing TFG, and according to Cohen, she was a massive embarrassment. I did the google, and found this:

IANAL, but Habba's argument seems Taitzian in its oblivious ignorance. Mr. parking-garage lawyer is so incredibly out of her depth.

NB This is a difference case than the one involving the phony citations.

https://www.rawstory.com/alina-habba-cu ... d-circuit/

Trump lawyer Alina Habba humiliated in appeals court during Michael Cohen hearing
Sarah K. Burris December 14, 2023 5:55PM ET

Former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was back in court on Thursday for his ongoing case U.S. vs. Cohen, in which the ex-fixer argues that his case against former Attorney General Bill Barr, and the Trump government should be able to move forward.

Among the issues cited is that Cohen was told by the Bureau of Prisons that he could only be allowed out on home confinement if he agreed not to speak to the press or write anything about Trump. He refused, and was promptly thrown back into prison and isolated in solitary confinement. When he took the case to court, a judge found that it was against his First Amendment rights and he was released in the middle of the pandemic.



Those speaking before the Court were Cohen's lawyers, the Justice Department, and Trump's lawyer Alina Habba. The arguments took less than 30 minutes, ten minutes for each side. But it was significantly less, possibly because Habba's presentation was so short.

While the Justice Department prosecutors experienced tough questions from the appeals panel, it was Habba who sent one judge to simply hold his head in his hands.

"What would deter a president from engaging in behavior like this if we don't use Bibbins?" asked one of the female judges, indistinguishable on audio.

"That's not a part of this," said Habba, citing Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a case in which a civilian analyst with the United States Air Force was fired after testifying before a congressional committee that there were inefficiencies and cost overruns.

"So, you're basically conceding there's no deterrence available? There's nothing to deter?" the judge cut in.

Habba claimed she thinks the "deterrence" was that Cohen was able to be released in spite of Trump's actions when he sought an injunction from a judge. [!!!]

"What is deterring behavior like this again?" the judge asked.

Habba claimed that the ruling by the judge in Cohen's case is what deters it in the future. She said that the biggest prevention is "separation of powers."

"Ok, so," the judge cut in again, "the allegation, and again, we are at this point where we need to take the allegations, was that someone pulled strings to retaliate against someone related to a personal vendetta. How does that fall within a president's official capacity as an office holder?"

"In this case, he has absolutely no facts," said Habba. "It's a Michael Cohen assumption."



"So, you're saying it's too conclusory for us to credit?" the judge stepped in again.

"Absolutely," Habba agreed.

The judge then asked Habba if she was familiar with Blassingame v. Trump.

"Not off the top of my head, your honor," said Habba.

The case in question was decided last week and found that Trump doesn't have absolute immunity in civil cases. It's the case of the Capitol police who were injured on Jan. 6. They have argued Trump is responsible for actions he took as a candidate and not in his official capacity as president, which was agreed to by the appeals court.

Habba, who has worked as Trump's lawyer for more than a year, said she wasn't aware of the case.

Habba said that if the decision isn't from the Supreme Court then it takes a second seat to Bibbins.

The judge interrupted and explained that Bibbins is an official act case and the one she questioned Habba about was about presidential immunity.

Habba said that in Cohen's filing the case says that the individuals he is targeting acted in their official capacity. Cohen is arguing that Trump used his power of the presidency to target and silence as a perceived foe.

"He admits that the president is working within his job as the president of the United States and his complaint fails under absolute immunity," said Habba. "So, frankly it fails on two levels."

Habba continued to speak using her prepared remarks. She talked for a little less than a minute before the judge stepped in.

"I think, I thank you for your time if my colleagues don't have any questions," the judge said.

[RTH10260]

a lawyer that does not know what is happening in concurrent court cases against their client

[noblepa]

a lawyer that does not know what is happening in concurrent court cases against their client

And its not like that concurrent case was some trivial little case that had nothing to do with Trump's actions while he was President.

The Blassingame case will have ramifications in just about all the cases pending against Trump, so even a IANAL like me knows that she should have been following that case closely and planning how to pursue her case in the event of an unfavorable ruling.

The notion that TFG enjoys absolute immunity for anything he did while he was President is kind of central to the defense arguments in just about all of his cases, isn't it? "You can't prosecute me because I was President!"

[raison de arizona]

https://x.com/MichaelCohen212/status/17 ... 75667?s=20

Rudy ‘Colludy Drunkin’ Giuliani was just ordered to pay Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss $148 million for defamation. I warned this moron that everyone who gets close to Donald, suffers. Rest assured, the next line from Donald’s mouth will be…Rudy who? #TeamCohen

[Maybenaut]

Apparently, Cohen gave AI generated law salad to his lawyer, who didn’t check the shit himself.

Michael Cohen used fake cases created by AI in bid to end his probation

Michael Cohen, a former fixer and lawyer for former president Donald Trump, said in a new court filing that he unknowingly gave his attorney bogus case citations after using artificial intelligence to create them as part of a legal bid to end his probation on tax evasion and campaign finance violation charges.

According to the filing, which was unsealed Friday, Cohen said he used Google Bard, an AI chatbot, to generate case citations that his lawyer could use to assist in making the case to shorten his supervised release. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in 2018 and had served time in prison.

Cohen said he gave those citations to one of his attorneys, David M. Schwartz, who then used them in a motion filed with a U.S. federal judge on Cohen’s behalf, the filing said.

Cohen’s admission comes after U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York said in a Dec. 12 order that he could not find any of the three cases cited by Schwartz and asked for a “thorough explanation” of how these cases came to be included and “what role, if any” Cohen may have played in the motion before it was filed.

In the filing, Cohen wrote that he had 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 ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.” To him, he said, Google Bard seemed to be a “supercharged search engine.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... citations/

Edit: Cohen underbussed his attorney, Schwartz (not that he didn’t deserve it):

Cohen added that at no point did Schwartz or his paralegal “raise any concerns about the citations” he had suggested. “It did not occur to me then — and remains surprising to me now — that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming they had existed,” Cohen wrote.

[raison de arizona]

Tsk tsk, caught cutting corners.

[RTH10260]

What you have to agree to before getting access to Google Bard, and they stress it is Experimental

Things to know

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Bard is an experimental technology and may sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information that doesn’t represent Google's views.
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[Slim Cognito]

Well, it wasn't his first bad decision.

[RTH10260]

Appeals court says Michael Cohen can’t hold Trump liable for retaliatory imprisonment

Politics
Jan 2, 2024 3:39 PM EST

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cohen can’t hold his former boss, ex-president Donald Trump, liable for allegedly jailing him in retaliation for writing a tell-all memoir, an appeals court said Tuesday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said in an order that it would not revive a lawsuit that a lower-court judge had tossed out because the law did not seem to provide a damages remedy for most claims that someone was jailed in retaliation for their criticisms of a president.

A three-judge panel concluded Cohen already obtained relief by getting a judge to order his release from imprisonment to home confinement several weeks after he was abruptly put behind bars when the government claimed he violated severe restrictions on his public communications. It said the law did not provide an outlet for more relief than that.



https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a ... prisonment