Michael Cohen, who was one of former President Donald Trump’s closest legal advisers, pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in 2018.
The court’s decision to turn away Cohen’s appeal leaves intact a lower court ruling that tossed out the lawsuit based on a 2022 Supreme Court decision that limited citizens’ ability to seek monetary damages from federal officials over constitutional violations.
Cohen served as one of Trump’s closest legal advisers and was known as his longtime “fixer” before becoming one of the former president’s loudest opponents in 2018, when he to multiple felonies and implicated Trump in a intended to conceal damaging information before the 2016 election.
Cohen was in prison and began serving that sentence in May 2019 at a federal correctional facility in New York.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Cohen was to home confinement, during which he posted to social media about a forthcoming book about his experiences working with Trump. But his release was short-lived — during a meeting with probation officers in July 2020, Cohen said he was asked to sign a form that prohibited him from engaging with the media or posting to social media and, when he refused to agree to the provision, was .
Cohen alleged that upon his return to the correctional institution in Otisville, New York, he was placed in solitary confinement for 16 days.
After , a federal district judge to be released to home confinement, finding that he was transferred back to custody in retaliation for his desire “to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book critical of the president and to discuss the book on social media.
