Judge orders Cohen to be released from prison
NEW YORK » A judge ordered the release from prison of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer on Thursday, saying the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book critical of Trump before November’s election.
Michael Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said during a telephone conference.
Hellerstein on Thursday ordered Michael Cohen released from prison to home confinement by 2 p.m. the next day.
“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation
Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen’s public communications.
“I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release,” the judge said. “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this ... unless there was a retaliatory purpose?”
In ruling, Hellerstein said he made the “finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory. And it’s retaliatory for his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish the book.”
Cohen, 53, sued federal prison officials and Attorney General William Barr on Monday, saying he was ordered back to prison because he was writing a book: “Disloyal: The True Story of Michael Cohen, Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.”
In a written declaration, Cohen said his book “will provide graphic and unflattering details about the President’s behavior behind closed doors,” including a description of anti-Semitic and “virulently racist remarks” against Black leaders, including President Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first Black president.
He said he worked openly on his manuscript until May at the library in an Otisville, N.Y., prison camp, and discussed his book with prison officials. He said he was told in April that a lawyer for the Trump Organization, where he worked for a decade, was claiming he was barred from publishing his book by a nondisclosure agreement. Cohen disputes that.