Former President Trump’s fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen revealed in an unsealed filing Friday that he accidentally sent his lawyer with bogus court case citations generated by artificial intelligence in conjunction with a motion to end his supervised release early.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman questioned the citations, writing, “In the letter brief, Mr. Cohen asserts that, “[a]s recently as 2022, there have been District Court decisions, affirmed by the Second Circuit Court, granting early termination of supervised release.”
Furman went on to say, “As far as the Court can tell, none of these cases exist.”
Cohen stated in his written affidavit, which was made public on Friday, that he discovered the false citations using Google Bard, an AI tool that he described as a “supercharged” search engine.
“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 stated in a statement. “Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”
Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance violations, and lying to Congress in 2018, serving more than a year in jail before being released on supervised release. He was also forbidden from practicing law.
“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 that they existed,” he said, referring to his lawyer, David Schwartz. “I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz’s filing may have caused.”
He claimed Schwartz’s purported error was “a product of inadvertence, not any intent to deceive.”
E. Danya Perry, who represents Cohen and learned the citations were forgeries, told the judge, “Mr. Cohen engaged in no misconduct and should not suffer any collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s misstep.”In a separate case earlier this month, two lawyers were fined $5,000 for citing AI-generated bogus cases.
“These filings—and the fact that he was willing to unseal them—show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong,” Perry said in a statement to Fox News Digital. He had every right to rely on his attorney. Unfortunately, his lawyer appears to have made a genuine error in failing to verify the citations in the brief he produced and filed.”
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