The U.S. Supreme Court has denied Michael Cohen’s appeal against old boss Donald Trump in his efforts to bring forth an old lawsuit in which he accused the former president and several other officials of sending him back to prison in retaliation for his tell-all book, “Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.”
The justices — six of whom are Republican, and three of whom were selected by Trump — submitted their response to Cohen’s ask on Monday without providing a written explanation for their ruling.
Their decision comes more than a year after Cohen filed his appeal in July 2023, accusing Trump’s associates of violating his constitutional rights by locking him up in solitary confinement after he’d announced plans for his memoir. This now maintains a lower court’s previous choice to toss out Cohen’s petition on the basis of a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that limits a person’s chances of seeking monetary damages from federal officials over violations of the U.S. constitution, per CBS News.
“In denying Michael Cohen’s petition, the Supreme Court has stated that the courts will not provide any deterrent for an executive intent on incarcerating its critics in retaliation for their speech,” Cohen’s lawyer Jon-Michael Dougherty said in a statement to Reuters, adding that the move “signals a dangerous moment in American democracy.”
On the other side, Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said the court’s decision is the right one: “Michael Cohen has exhausted every avenue of his pathetic attempt to drag my client into court time and time again. As expected, the Supreme Court has correctly denied Michael Cohen’s petition and he must finally abandon his frivolous and desperate claims.”
This the latest update in Cohen’s ongoing beef with Trump, for whom he once served as a legal advisor and lawyer. But things shifted between the two in August 2018 when Cohen pleaded guilty to a slew of felonies, including criminal tax evasion and campaign finance violations all while revealing his involvement in a “hush money” plot to silence Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels. He in turn was sentenced to three years in prison.
However, Cohen was released during the COVID-19 pandemic and moved to home confinement where he shared the news that he’d be coming out with a book that detailed his experience working alongside Trump over the years. But after he declined to sign an agreement to not use social media, he was sent back to prison. When he returned, Cohen said he was put in solitary confinement for 16 days before he legally challenged the arrangement.
In July 2020, a judge ordered that Cohen could go back to home confinement after ruling he was retaliated against over wanting to “exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book critical of the president and to discuss the book on social media.”
Cohen served the remainder of his sentence at home.
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