Judge faults Michael Cohen legal appeal for citing cases that don’t seem to exist

NEW YORK — An attorney for Michael Cohen cited several legal cases in an appeal to cut short the Donald Trump-fixer-turned-critic’s supervised release — the only problem is, the cases don’t seem to exist, a Manhattan federal judge stated Tuesday.

“As far as the Court can tell, none of these cases exist,” Judge Jessee Furman wrote in an order demanding an explanation from Cohen’s legal team.

Cohen is on supervised release after pleading guilty in 2018 to a slew of charges, including arranging hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to help Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He already served about half of a three-year sentence.

Cohen’s lawyers filed a motion asking Furman to relieve their client of their court’s supervision late last month, but the eagle-eyed judge found notable inconsistencies in the three decisions cited as support for their argument.

One was an excerpt taken from a Fourth Circuit decision that had nothing to do with supervised release, while another quoted from a decision by the Board of Veterans Appeals, an administrative tribunal that does not rule on criminal matters, the judge wrote.

The third case, according to Furman’s order, “appears to correspond to nothing at all.”

And when the judge handed off Cohen’s motion to the court clerks, they found no record of any of the three decisions on file.

Furman is now giving Cohen’s lawyers a week to provide the court with copies of all three decisions, along with a “thorough explanation of how the motion came to cite cases that do not exist.” They face sanctions for citing nonexistent cases to the court if they fail to do so.

Cohen’s filing is reminiscent of a case of legal trickery caught by federal Judge Kevin Castel in June, when he fined two lawyers $5,000 for using ChatGPT to generate false cases in support of his client’s case against Colombian airline Avianca.

Cohen referred a Daily News request for comment to his new attorney, Danya Perry.

She said she began work on his case after the suspicious motion was filed and appeared to agree with Furman on the three citations in question.

“I was unable to verify the case law that had been submitted by previous counsel in his initial papers,” Perry said in a statement.

The lawyer has put together her own list of decisions, which not only support her client’s bid for freedom, but also actually exist, she added.

“Based on the many cases I cited in my papers, I believe the motion for early termination of Mr. Cohen’s supervised release to be a meritorious one,” Perry stated.

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