Michael Cohen says he unwittingly passed along to his attorney bogus artificial intelligence-generated legal case citations he got online before they were submitted to a New York judge. (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah)
"The Court has no basis to question Cohen’s representation that he believed the cases to be real," Furman wrote. "Indeed, it would have been downright irrational for him to provide fake cases for Schwartz to include in the motion knowing they were fake – given the probability that Schwartz would discover the problem himself and not include the cases in the motion (as he should have) or, failing that, that the issue would be discovered by the Government or Court, with potentially serious adverse consequences for Cohen himself."
Cohen said in his sworn declaration released in December that he had found the phony citations through Google Bard, an AI service that he said he thought was a "supercharged" search engine.
"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," Cohen said. "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."
In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, spending more than a year in prison before he was put on supervised release. He was also disbarred as a lawyer.
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Michael Cohen's fourth attempt to have his sentence for tax and campaign finance crimes reduced was rejected by a federal judge. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
"This testimony is more troubling than the statements that Cohen had previously made in his book and on television – statements that the Court had specifically cited in denying Cohen’s third motion for early termination of supervised release… because it was given under oath."
The judge said Cohen lied under oath either when he pleaded guilty to tax crimes or in the October 2023 testimony. "Either way, it is perverse to cite the testimony, as Schwartz did, as evidence of Cohen's "commitment to upholding the law."
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"At minimum, Cohen's ongoing and escalating efforts to walk away from his prior acceptance of responsibility for his crimes are manifest evidence of the ongoing need for specific deterrence," Furman wrote.
Cohen's attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Fox News Digital's Brie Stimson contributed to this report.
Chris Pandolfo is a writer for Fox News Digital. Send tips to chris.pandolfo@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @ChrisCPandolfo.
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