Michael D. Cohen, who was once former President Donald J. Trump's fixer, said in court documents unsealed Friday that he had mistakenly given his lawyer fake legal subpoenas generated by the Google Bard artificial intelligence program.
The fictitious quotes were used by Mr. Cohen's lawyer in a motion filed before a federal judge, Jesse M. Furman. Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and served prison time, had asked the judge to end court oversight of his case early now that he is out of prison and has complied with the conditions of his release. .
In an affidavit made public on 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, it could show quotes and descriptions that looked real but actually weren't.”
He also said he did not realize that the attorney who filed the motion on his behalf, David M. Schwartz, “would leave the cases in his filing without even confirming that they existed.”
The episode, the second this year in which Manhattan federal court lawyers have cited bogus decisions created by artificial intelligence, 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 completely new example.
Schwartz, in his own statement, acknowledged using the three subpoenas in question and said he had not independently reviewed the cases because Cohen indicated that another attorney, E. Danya Perry, was providing suggestions for the motion.
“I sincerely apologize to the court for not personally checking these cases before bringing them to the court,” Schwartz wrote.
Barry Kamins, Schwartz's attorney, declined to comment Friday.
Perry has said he began representing Cohen only after Schwartz filed the motion. She wrote to Judge Furman on December 8 that after reading the document already filed, she could not verify the case law cited. In a statement at the time, she said that “in accordance with my ethical obligation of candor to the court, I informed Judge Furman of this matter.”
He said in a letter made public Friday that Cohen, a former attorney who was disbarred, “did not know that the cases he identified were not real and, unlike his attorney, he was under no obligation to confirm this.”
“It should be emphasized that Mr. Cohen did not engage in any misconduct,” Ms. Perry wrote. She said Friday that Cohen had no comment and that he had consented to the release of the court documents after the judge raised the question of whether they contained information protected by attorney-client privilege.
The imbroglio began when Judge Furman said in a Dec. 12 order that he could not find any of the three decisions. He ordered Mr. Schwartz to provide copies or “a detailed 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 scheduled for trial on March 25.
District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg accused Trump of orchestrating a hush money scheme that centered on a payment Cohen made during the 2016 election to a pornographic film star, Stormy Daniels. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges.
Refuting claims by Trump's lawyers that Cohen is untrustworthy, his defenders have said that Cohen lied on Trump's behalf but has told the truth since breaking up with the former president in 2018 and pleading guilty to the charges. federal. .
Trump's lawyers immediately seized on the Google Bard disclosure on Friday. Susan R. Necheles, a lawyer representing Trump in the upcoming Manhattan trial, said he was “a typical Michael Cohen.”
“The district attorney's office should not be basing a case on him,” Ms. Necheles said. “He is an admitted perjurer and has pleaded guilty to multiple felonies and this is just a further indication of his lack of character and his continued criminality.”
Ms. Perry, the lawyer now representing Mr. Cohen in the motion, rejected that claim.
“These filings, and the fact that he was willing to disclose them, demonstrate that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong,” he said. “He trusted his lawyer, as he had every right to do. Unfortunately, his attorney appears to have made an honest mistake by not verifying the citations in the brief he drafted and filed.”
A spokeswoman for Bragg declined to comment Friday.
Prosecutors may argue that Mr. Cohen's actions were not intended to defraud the court, but rather, by his own admission, a regrettable misunderstanding of new technology.
The nonexistent cases cited in Mr. 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 Court of Second Instance of Appeals of the United States. Circuit. It has become clear that they were hallucinations created by the chatbot, taking fragments of real cases and combining them with robotic imagination.
Judge Furman noted in his Dec. 12 order that the Figueroa-Flores subpoena in fact referred to a page of a decision that “has nothing to do with supervised release.”
The Amato case mentioned in the motion, the judge said, actually concerned a decision by the Board of Veterans Appeals, an administrative court.
And the quote from the Ortiz case, Judge Furman wrote, seemed “to correspond to nothing at all.”
William K. Rashbaum contributed reports.
