Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, unwittingly submitted a fake artificial intelligence-generated lawsuit citation obtained online to the attorney’s office before it was submitted to a judge. He says he gave it to him.
Mr. Cohen was sentenced on Friday after a judge earlier this month asked his lawyers to explain how a non-existent court ruling was cited in a motion filed on Mr. Cohen’s behalf. He made the admission in a court filing made public in Manhattan federal court. Judge Jesse Furman also asked what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played in drafting the motion.
The AI-generated lawsuit was cited as part of written arguments by attorney David M. Schwartz to get Cohen’s court supervision ended early after he served more than a year in prison. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to charges of tax evasion, campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, and President Trump silenced the porn actor and former Playboy model to avoid damaging his 2016 presidential campaign. He claimed that he had instructed him to pay the fee.
Cohen, who was disbarred five years ago, said in a statement to a judge Thursday that he found the citation through research. Google Bard didn’t know that the service could generate cases that didn’t exist. He said he relies on the Internet for research because he no longer has access to formal legal research sources.
โAs a non-lawyer, I can’t keep up with new trends in legal technology (and the associated risks), and Google Bard is a generated text service that, like Chat-GPT, can display authentic-looking quotes and explanations. I didnโt know there was, but it wasnโt,โ Cohen said. “Instead, I understood it to be a powerful search engine and had used it repeatedly in other situations to (successfully) find accurate information online.”
Google unveiled Bard earlier this year as an answer to ChatGPT, which Microsoft is integrating into its Bing search engine. Although these tools can quickly generate text based on prompts from users, they are prone to fabrication, also known as “hallucinations.”
Cohen accused Schwartz, an attorney and longtime friend, of failing to check the validity of the citations before submitting them to the judge, but he said that he did not check the citations because he was “honest.” “This was a huge mistake,” he said, asking the judge to show Schwartz mercy. โIt was a product of carelessness and there was no intent to deceive.โ
Schwartz, a former federal prosecutor and now in private practice, said in a statement to the court that he had drafted documents he would submit to a judge to get Cohen off probation early. He said he believed the matter was reviewed by E. Danya Perry, who is also his attorney. He said he never reviewed what appeared to be another attorney’s investigation.
Schwartz’s claim that after reviewing court filings and discovering that the cited lawsuit was fabricated, Schwartz “came to believe” that the quote from Perry was “false.” “I believe it is false and far-fetched as I was not involved in any of the incidents,” he said. I did not communicate directly with Mr. Schwartz or his paralegal, or even indirectly through Mr. Cohen. โ
When Perry learned of this, he reported the false case citation to the judge and federal prosecutors.
“Mr. Cohen committed no wrongdoing and should not be collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s failures,” Mr. Perry wrote in his submission to the judge.
While discussing possible sanctions earlier this month, the justices noted that this is the second time this year that a Manhattan federal judge has faced off with a lawyer over fake citations generated by artificial intelligence. Two lawyers in unrelated cases have been fined $5,000 for citing fake lawsuits concocted by ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot.
In entering his 2018 guilty plea, Mr. Cohen did not even name the two women he received hush money from or Mr. Trump, instead calling him an “unnamed candidate” to influence the 2016 election. He recalled that he cooperated. But the amount and date are the same as the $130,000 paid to porn actor Stormy Daniels and a Playboy playmate to buy her silence in the weeks and months leading up to the presidential election, which Republican Trump won over Hillary. It matched the $150,000 paid to Karen McDougall. Clinton, Democrat. Ms. Daniels and Ms. McDougal claimed they had an affair with Mr. Trump, which Mr. Trump denied.
Earlier this year, Trump pleaded not guilty in New York state court in Manhattan to 34 felonies for allegedly falsifying the internal business records of a private company to conceal his involvement in the payments.
After his arrest, President Trump said in a speech, “This bogus case was brought up solely to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election, and it must be dropped immediately.”
He later pleaded not guilty to three other criminal charges.
