President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has been ordered released from prison. Cohen calls his return to jail retaliation for a planned book on the president.
Cohen's First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said during a telephone conference.
Cohen had been posting on social media his intentions to publish a critical book about Trump.
Hellerstein ordered Michael Cohen released from prison by 2 p.m. on Friday.
“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen's public communications.
“I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release,” the judge said. “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this ... unless there was a retaliatory purpose?"
Cohen was released early from an upstate federal prison because of coronavirus fears and serve out the rest of his sentence at home, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing a person familiar with the matter.
But this isn't the first time it's been reported that he was going to be released early: In mid-April it was reported by multiple outlets, including CNN, which cited his lawyer Roger Adler, that he would be released early.
Then on May 1, ABC News reported that he would not be leaving the prison. ABC News reported that it appeared all of the prisoners at the facility who were granted home confinement had lost those privileges.
Cohen, sentenced to three years at the Otisville facility, is scheduled to be released in November 2021.