Michael Cohen Challenges Justice Department Explanation for His Jailing

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, said the Justice Department conceded he was thrown back in prison for challenging a home-confinement agreement that would have upended his plan to publish a tell-all book about Trump before the election.

The U.S. argues that Cohen’s deal to serve the rest of his three-year term at home due to the coronavirus pandemic was withdrawn because he refused to sign the accord and questioned a provision that would have barred him from communicating with the media, including through books.

Cohen’s lawyer, Danya Perry, said in a response filed late Wednesday that the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons had conceded in its filing “that they took adverse action against Mr. Cohen for questioning the prior restraint provision and its infringement on his First Amendment rights.”

Cohen, who pleaded guilty in August 2018 to crimes tied to his work for Trump, sued on Monday with help from the American Civil Liberties Union. He accused Attorney General William Barr and Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal of using a false justification to lock him up again.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in Manhattan will hear oral arguments Thursday morning on Cohen’s emergency petition for release to home confinement. Cohen argues he’ll win the case on First Amendment grounds and shouldn’t have his health put at risk in the meantime.

The government denied Cohen was locked up to silence him and portrayed his imprisonment as a standard consequence of refusing to agree to terms of home confinement, including being electronically monitored and prohibited from grocery shopping. The U.S. said the probation officer who conducted the meeting didn’t even know Cohen was writing a book.

But Perry said the U.S. is trying to distract the court from the First Amendment issue by claiming that Cohen, who’d been furloughed from prison on furlough, was combative at a July 9 meeting with probation officials to discuss the terms of his transition to home confinement for the remainder of his sentence.

The Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons “do not contest Mr. Cohen’s legal claim that the prior restraint provision violates the First Amendment of the Constitution,” the filing said. “In fact, they offer not one word in defense of that provision or its validity.”

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