Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, has filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of sending him back to prison to stop him from finishing a “graphic and unflattering” tell-all book.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Manhattan late Monday night on Mr. Cohen’s behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union and private lawyers. It asked a judge to immediately release Mr. Cohen and allow him to serve the remainder of his three-year sentence in home confinement.
The suit maintains that Mr. Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was suddenly returned to a federal prison in New York on July 9 after several weeks on medical furlough, interrupting his attempts to put the finishing touches on his manuscript.
The complaint also accuses Attorney General William P. Barr and federal prison officials of using his return to prison as a way to stop the publication of his book, which, court papers say, paints the president as a racist.
“The government cannot imprison Michael Cohen for writing a book about President Trump,” said Ben Wizner, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. The Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that it would not comment on pending litigation or legal proceedings.
This latest twist in Mr. Cohen’s long-running saga began in May when he was allowed to go home from a minimum-security prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles northwest of New York City, as part of an effort by the Bureau of Prisons to curb the spread of coronavirus behind bars. He had expected to serve the rest of his term in home confinement.
But federal officials returned him to prison in early July after they claimed that he refused to sign an agreement promising, in part, that he would not publish a book while still serving his time.
In an affidavit filed with his suit, Mr. Cohen, 53, argued that he never, in fact, refused to sign the agreement, but merely had his lawyer ask a few questions about what it required. “I was shocked,” he wrote, “when three U.S. Marshals later arrived with handcuffs and shackles to take me into custody.”
Mr. Cohen also said that he never hid the fact that he was writing a book about Mr. Trump, noting that he spent his mornings working on the manuscript “in plain sight” in the prison’s law library, and also discussed his project with prison officials, staff members and other inmates.
The book, he said, was tentatively titled “Disloyal: The True Story of Michael Cohen, Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.”
According to his lawsuit, the book will give a glimpse into Mr. Cohen’s “firsthand experiences with Mr. Trump” and offer “graphic details about the president’s behavior behind closed doors.”
“The narrative describes pointedly certain anti-Semitic remarks against prominent Jewish people and virulently racist remarks against such Black leaders as President Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela,” the lawsuit says.
One of Mr. Cohen’s private lawyers, E. Danya Perry, said in court papers that she had asked federal prosecutors who had handled Mr. Cohen’s case to intervene on his behalf and urge the Bureau of Prisons to give him a second chance to be transferred to home confinement.
But, she said, when the prosecutors responded that the decision was up to prison officials and they could not say when it would be made, Mr. Cohen’s legal team opted to go to court. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.
A legal bulldog who once bragged he would take a bullet for Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and other crimes connected to a scheme to pay hush money to two women — a former adult film actress and a former Playboy model — who claimed they had affairs with Mr. Trump before he was president.
In his guilty plea, he pointed the finger at the president, telling the court that Mr. Trump had directed him to make the hush money payments for the purpose of influencing the 2016 election. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.
Mr. Cohen’s lawyers argued in the new lawsuit that his project was only the latest book critical of the president that Mr. Trump and his allies have sought to keep from being published.
In June, the Justice Department asked a judge to delay the release of “The Room Where it Happened,” a memoir by John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser who, among other things, confirmed accusations at the heart of the Democratic impeachment case over the president’s dealings with Ukraine. The judge ultimately denied the request.
On the same day that Mr. Bolton’s book was published, Mr. Trump’s younger brother, Robert S. Trump, filed a suit seeking to stop the publication of a family tell-all written by their niece, Mary L. Trump.
After a few weeks of whirlwind litigation, the judge in that case sided with Ms. Trump, allowing her to publish her memoir, which accused Mr. Trump of embracing cheating “as a way life” and of paying someone to take his college entrance exams.
When Mr. Cohen was sent back to prison, he was immediately placed in solitary confinement. Locked down for 23 hours a day without access to a computer, he wrote in his affidavit, he has been unable to edit his manuscript.
“Given my hope to communicate my impressions, ideas, and political thoughts through my book in September 2020, in advance of the presidential elections,” he added, “this time is a critical juncture.”
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