NEW YORK — Michael Cohen, the onetime fixer for former President Donald Trump, said in court papers unsealed Friday that he had mistakenly given his lawyer bogus legal citations generated by the artificial intelligence program Google Bard.
The fictitious citations were used by Cohen’s lawyer in a motion submitted to a federal judge, Jesse Furman. Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and served time in prison, had asked the judge for an early end to the court’s supervision of his case now that he is out of prison and has complied with the conditions of his release.
In a sworn declaration made public Friday, Cohen explained 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.”
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He also said he did not realize that the lawyer filing the motion on his behalf, David Schwartz, “would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed.”
The episode — the second this year in which lawyers in Manhattan federal court have cited bogus decisions created by AI — could have implications for a Manhattan criminal case against Trump in which Cohen is expected to be the star witness. The former president’s lawyers have long attacked Cohen as a serial fabulist; now they say they have a brand-new example.
Schwartz, in his own declaration, acknowledged using the three citations in question and said he had not independently reviewed the cases because Cohen indicated that another lawyer, E. Danya Perry, was providing suggestions for the motion.
“I sincerely apologize to the court for not checking these cases personally before submitting them to the court,” Schwartz wrote.
Barry Kamins, a lawyer for Schwartz, declined to comment Friday.
Perry has said she began representing Cohen only after Schwartz filed the motion. She wrote to Furman on Dec. 8 that after reading the already-filed document, she could not verify the case law being cited. In a statement at the time, she said that “consistent with my ethical obligation of candor to the court, I advised Judge Furman of this issue.”
She said in a letter made public Friday that Cohen, a former lawyer who has been disbarred, “did not know that the cases he identified were not real and, unlike his attorney, had no obligation to confirm as much.”
“It must be emphasized that Mr. Cohen did not engage in any misconduct,” Perry wrote. She said Friday that Cohen had no comment and that he had consented to the unsealing of the court papers after the judge raised the question of whether they contained information protected by the attorney-client privilege.
The imbroglio began when Furman said in an order Dec. 12 that he could not find any of the three decisions. He ordered Schwartz to provide copies or “a thorough explanation of how the motion came to cite cases that do not exist and what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played.”
The matter could have significant implications, given Cohen’s pivotal role in a case brought by the Manhattan district attorney that is scheduled for trial March 25.
The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, charged Trump with orchestrating a hush-money scheme that centered on a payment Cohen made during the 2016 election to an adult film actress, Stormy Daniels. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges.
Seeking to rebut Trump’s lawyers’ claims that Cohen is untrustworthy, his defenders have said that Cohen lied on Trump’s behalf but has told the truth since splitting with the former president in 2018 and pleading guilty to the federal charges.
Trump’s lawyers immediately seized on the Google Bard revelation Friday. Susan Necheles, a lawyer representing Trump in the coming Manhattan trial, said it was “typical Michael Cohen.”
“The DA’s office should not be basing a case on him,” Necheles said. “He’s an admitted perjurer and has pled guilty to multiple felonies, and this is just an additional indication of his lack of character and ongoing criminality.”
Perry, the lawyer now representing Cohen on the motion, rejected that assertion.
“These filings — and the fact that he was willing to unseal them — show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong,” she said. “He relied on his lawyer, as he had every right to do. Unfortunately, his lawyer appears to have made an honest mistake in not verifying the citations in the brief he drafted and filed.”
A spokesperson for Bragg declined to comment Friday.
Prosecutors may argue that Cohen’s actions were not intended to defraud the court, but rather, by his own admission, a woeful misunderstanding of new technology.
The nonexistent cases cited in Schwartz’s motion — United States v. Figueroa-Flores, United States v. Ortiz and United States v. Amato — came with corresponding summaries and notations that they had been affirmed by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It has become clear that they were hallucinations created by the chatbot, taking bits and pieces of actual cases and combining them with robotic imagination.
Furman noted in his Dec. 12 order that the Figueroa-Flores citation in fact referred to a page from a decision that “has nothing to do with supervised release.”
The Amato case named in the motion, the judge said, actually concerned a decision of the Board of Veterans’ Appeals, an administrative tribunal.
And the citation to the Ortiz case, Furman wrote, appeared “to correspond to nothing at all.”
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
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Amanda Smith is a dedicated U.S. correspondent with a passion for uncovering the stories that shape the nation. With a background in political science, she provides in-depth analysis and insightful commentary on domestic affairs, ensuring readers are well-informed about the latest developments across the United States.
