ZEROHEDGE
Michael Cohen, former President Trump’s onetime fixer and lawyer, has admitted to a federal court that he was the source of fake case citations used to support his effort to end his supervised release from his earlier criminal convictions.
He was, of course, disbarred as a lawyer after pleading guilty various federal crimes.
Cohen told the court:
“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. 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.”
He then put part of the blame on his non-AI lawyer, David Schwartz, and emphasized that it was in the end Schwartz’ filing, not his:
“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. I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz’s filing may have caused.”
Cohen’s current counsel E. Danya Perry, asked that his client “not suffer any collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s misstep.”
The problems with AI are well-known, but so is Cohen’s checkered history with the courts.
As I have previously written, Cohen has a long history of alleged lies and half-truths in dealing with the government or courts.
In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to various charges, including tax evasion, campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and several banks to obtain campaign financing and was sentenced to three years in prison.
He unsuccessfully sued Trump on the basis of a verbal contract that again put his own dubious veracity at issue.
As noted in earlier proceedings in Manhattan, Cohen has continued to misrepresent his criminal background and, after assuring the court that he was remorseful for his crimes, was regularly going on the air to deny that he committed tax fraud and suggesting that he was railroaded by prosecutors.
Prosecutors cited his numerous media appearances as containing false accounts of himself and his case: “while Cohen is free to write and say what he wants, he cannot simultaneously distance himself from his conduct on cable news, while cloaking himself in claims of acceptance of responsibility in court filings.”
I became a critic of Cohen long before he broke with the President. He was a disgrace to the bar for years and Trump bears equal blame for retaining such a person as his legal representative.
