Michael Cohen is taking his feud with former President Donald Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, told Newsweek on Tuesday that he plans to appeal a decision from a federal appeals court that rejected his efforts to revive the prison lawsuit against his former boss, and bring the matter all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The outcome is wrong if democracy is to prevail,” Cohen said in a statement. “A writ of habeas corpus cannot be the only consequence to stop a rogue president from weaponizing the Department of Justice from locking up his/her critics in prison because they refuse to waive their first amendment right. We will be filing a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court.”
Writ of certiorari is a request for the Supreme Court to order a lower court to send up the record of a case for review.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York affirmed a lower court’s decision on Tuesday, agreeing that Cohen cannot pursue damages to remedy his claims that Trump retaliated against him for promoting his tell-all book by throwing him back into prison after he criticized Trump.
While Cohen was incarcerated after pleading guilty to various crimes, he wrote the draft of his book, Disloyal, which detailed his experiences with Trump that he said would portray the former president in a negative light.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cohen was approved for early release and began home confinement in May 2020.
However, he was thrown back into prison two months later after a visit to a local U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services office, where he was presented with a location monitoring agreement that barred him from engaging with the media and from using social media ahead of his book’s release.
After waiting an hour and a half for probation officers to adjust the wording of the agreement, Cohen was sent back to prison and put into solitary confinement for 16 days. He recalled poor ventilation and temperatures well over 100 degrees during his incarceration.
He filed a petition of writ of habeas corpus and filed for an emergency temporary restraining order, and was subsequently pulled out by a federal judge, who released him back to home confinement. Habeas corpus is legal recourse that allows someone to report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court.
In its decision, the appeals court ruled that the relief Cohen was granted in 2020 was enough to meet his claims.
The panel acknowledged that Cohen was thrown back into prison with weak reasoning and agreed that the Supreme Court has allowed for individuals to seek damages from federal officials for injuries suffered by violations of constitutional rights. But they found that the precedent wouldn’t extend to Cohen because he was already successful in pursing other forms of judicial relief.
Cohen called it a “terrible, terrible decision” in an interview with RawStory.
“This goes well past me,” Cohen said. “What happens if Trump comes into the White House? What happens if Ron DeSantis or any Trump 2.0 candidate comes into the White House and they decide they want to lock up Sarah Burris? Why? Because you wrote something nasty about them. It’s something we’ve seen from the likes of Kim Jong Un or [Vladimir] Putin or [Viktor] Orban.”
“How many Americans want Donald Trump to have the power to unilaterally incarcerate a critic?” Cohen asked. “The answer should be no one.”
Cohen first filed suit in December 2021 against Trump, then-Attorney General Bill Barr as well as the federal agents, including a prison warden and officers with the Bureau of Prisons and Probation and Pretrial Services. His claims were dismissed by a federal judge in November 2022. Tuesday’s ruling sided with the lower court judge.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s attorneys via email for comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.