Michael Cohen Admits He Sent Fake, AI-Generated Legal Cases To His Lawyer
HuffPost
The former Donald Trump lawyer blamed his own attorney for failing to check the cases before submitting them to the judge.
NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s onetime personal lawyer and fixer, says he unwittingly passed along to his attorney bogus artificial intelligence-generated legal case citations he got online before they were submitted to a judge.
Cohen made the admission in a court filing unsealed Friday in Manhattan federal court after a judge earlier this month asked a lawyer to explain how court rulings that do not exist were cited in a motion submitted on Cohen’s behalf. Judge Jesse Furman had also asked what role, if any, Cohen played in drafting the motion.
The AI-generated cases were cited as part of written arguments a lawyer made to try to bring an early end to Cohen’s court supervision after he served more than a year behind bars. Cohen had pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax evasion, campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, saying Trump directed him to arrange the payment of hush money to a porn actor and to a former Playboy model to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential bid.
Cohen, who was disbarred five years ago, said in a declaration submitted to the judge on Thursday that he found the citations by doing research through Google Bard and was unaware that the service could generate nonexistent cases. He said he uses the internet for research because he no longer has access to formal legal-research sources.
“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.”
"If you're going to buy somebody something that comes in pairs, like shoes or socks, give that person both of them," advised the niece of the president-elect.
Despite his best efforts, the former GOP representative has failed to outrun the congressional investigation into his alleged crimes.
Republicans who oppose Trump's Cabinet nominees could find themselves with a lump of coal — or a primary challenger — in the next Congress.
“Anybody who wants to give me heat for doing my job, bring it on,” said John Curtis, who was elected to replace the Trump critic in the upper chamber.
The president’s season’s greetings were greeted with contempt by conservatives for the silliest reason.
The former congressman knocked the "sad" NBC show following the comedian's name-drop.
Bill Hagerty claimed the billionaire's social media takes led to his office being "inundated with calls."
The Bulwark's Tim Miller wrote that the election-denying conspiracy theorist made a "SCENE" at a Turning Point USA conference afterparty.
A sheriff in rural, coastal Oregon says he's concerned about letters asking residents to collect information on immigrants.
Trump also talked about the TikTok ban and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leading the health department.
Following a 5-month absence from the House, Granger's family confirmed she was dealing with dementia.