Judge orders Cohen released from jail

When Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s one-time lawyer and fixer, met with probation officers this month to complete paperwork that would have let him serve the balance of his prison term at home, he found a catch.

Cohen was already out on furlough because of the coronavirus. But to remain at home, he was asked to sign a document that would have barred him from publishing a book during the rest of his sentence. Cohen balked because he was, in fact, writing a book — a tell-all memoir about his former boss, the president. The officers sent him back to prison.

On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the decision to return Cohen to custody amounted to retaliation by the government and ordered him to be released again into home confinement. Cohen is expected back home today.

“I make the finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory,” the judge, Alvin Hellerstein of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said in court. “And it’s retaliatory because of his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book and to discuss anything about the book or anything else he wants on social media and with others.”

Hellerstein’s decision was a remarkable rebuke of prison and probation officials and, by extension, the Trump administration. It raised concerns that the authorities had used the penal system to squelch the free speech rights of one of Trump’s enemies in an effort to protect the president.

Justin Long, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, said it was not uncommon for prison officials to restrict inmates’ contact with the media. But he said that Cohen’s refusal to agree to the media ban “played no role whatsoever in the decision to remand him to secure custody, nor did his intent to publish a book.”