NEW YORK – Michael Cohen, the former fixer for the former president Donald Trumpsaid in court papers released Friday that he accidentally gave his attorney false legal citations generated by the Google Bard artificial intelligence program.
The fictitious quotes were used by Cohen’s attorney in a motion filed before federal judge Jesse Furman. Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in 2018 and served time in prison, had asked the judge to prematurely end court oversight of his case now that he is out of prison and has fulfilled the terms of his release.
In an affidavit made public Friday, Cohen explained that he had not kept pace with “emerging trends (and associated risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT , quotes and descriptions. that looked real, but in reality were not.”
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He also said he didn’t realize that the attorney who filed the motion on his behalf, David Schwartz, “would drop the cases in their entirety without even acknowledging that they existed.”
The episode — the second this year in which lawyers in Manhattan federal court have cited false AI decisions — could have implications for a Manhattan criminal case against Trump, in which Cohen is expected to be the key witness. The former president’s lawyers have long attacked Cohen as a serial fabulist; now they say they have a brand new example.
Schwartz acknowledged in his own statement that he used the three quotes in question and said he did not independently review the cases because Cohen indicated that another attorney, E. Danya Perry, made suggestions for the motion.
“I sincerely apologize to the court for not personally reviewing these matters before submitting them to the court,” Schwartz wrote.
Barry Kamins, attorney for Schwartz, declined to comment Friday.
Perry has said she only began representing Cohen after Schwartz filed the motion. She wrote to Furman on December 8 that, after reading the document already submitted, 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 have informed Judge Furman of this matter.”
She said in a letter made public Friday that Cohen, a former attorney who has been disbarred, “did not know that the matters he identified were not real and, unlike his attorney, had no obligation to confirm that.”
“It must be emphasized that Mr. Cohen has not engaged in any misconduct,” Perry wrote. She said Friday that Cohen had no comment and that he had agreed to release the court papers after the judge raised the question of whether they contained information protected by attorney-client privilege.
The confusion began when Furman said in an order on December 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 case could have significant ramifications given Cohen’s crucial role in a case brought by the Manhattan district attorney and set to go to trial on March 25.
The district attorney, Alvin Bragg, accused Trump of orchestrating a hush money scheme that focused on a payment Cohen made to an adult film actress, Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 election. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges.
In an effort to refute Trump’s lawyers’ claims that Cohen is untrustworthy, his defenders have said Cohen has lied on Trump’s behalf but has been telling the truth since he split with the former president in 2018 and pleaded guilty to federal charges. charges.
Trump’s lawyers immediately seized on Google Bard’s revelation on Friday. Susan Necheles, a lawyer representing Trump in the upcoming Manhattan trial, said it was “typical Michael Cohen.”
“The District Attorney’s Office should not base a case on him,” Necheles said. “He is a known perjurer and has pleaded guilty to multiple crimes, and this is just another indication of his lack of character and continued criminality.”
Perry, the attorney now representing Cohen in the motion, rejected that claim.
“These documents — and the fact that he was willing to release them — show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong,” she said. “He relied on his lawyer, which he had every right to do. Unfortunately, his attorney appears to have made an honest mistake by not verifying the quotes in the letter he drafted and submitted.
A spokesman for Bragg declined to comment Friday.
Prosecutors could argue that Cohen’s actions were not intended to defraud the court, but rather, in their own words, an unfortunate 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 notes 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 Figueroa-Flores’ citation actually referred to a page from a decision that “has nothing to do with supervised release.”
The Amato case mentioned in the motion, according to the judge, actually involved a decision by the Board of Veterans’ Appeals, an administrative tribunal.
And the quote from the Ortiz case, Furman wrote, “seemed to correspond to nothing at all.”
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
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