lpetrich
Contributor
Judge Orders Cohen Released, Citing ‘Retaliation’ Over Tell-All Book - The New York Times - "A judge agreed that federal officials had returned Michael D. Cohen to prison because he wanted to publish a book this fall about President Trump."
But what I was most interested in is what will be in his book.Mr. Cohen was already out on furlough because of the coronavirus. But to remain at home, he was asked to sign a document that would have barred him from publishing a book during the rest of his sentence. Mr. Cohen balked because he was, in fact, writing a book — a tell-all memoir about his former boss, the president.
The officers sent him back to prison.
On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the decision to return Mr. Cohen to custody amounted to retaliation by the government and ordered him to be released again into home confinement. Mr. Cohen is expected back in his Manhattan apartment on Friday.
“I make the finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory,” the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said in court. “And it’s retaliatory because of his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book and to discuss anything about the book or anything else he wants on social media and with others.”
Judge Hellerstein, who delivered the verdict, said this about it:In court papers, Mr. Cohen said the book would paint Mr. Trump as a racist and offer revealing details about “the president’s behavior behind closed doors.”
Mr. Cohen also pointed out that Mr. Trump and his supporters had sought to derail the publication of books written by John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, and Mr. Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, whose best-selling memoir laid bare a history of dysfunction in her family.
E. Danya Perry, one of Mr. Cohen’s lawyers, called the judge’s order “a victory for the First Amendment.”
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The provision that Mr. Cohen, 53, objected to would have barred him from “engagement of any kind with the media, including print, TV, film, books.” It also sought to keep him from posting on social media, according to a copy of the agreement attached to his lawsuit.
A gag order without any apparent motivation. Good that the judge revoked it.“In 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at the terms and conditions of supervised release,” he said, “I have never seen such a clause.”