He has to serve the rest of his sentence under house arrest, but he’s getting out.
He could dictate or scribble notes while jailed. Now he needn’t share a toilet with some more heavily-tattooed fellow. Lucky dog!
If there’s a book, I reckon it’ll take 5.5 months to write it and get it published.
Cohen is to be released into home confinement due to the fact that the reason he was recently taken back into custody was retaliatory political bullshit, according to the Judge. His book was scheduled to be released (no pun intended) prior to the upcoming election, and someone wanted to prevent that from happening.
Cohen was Trump’s personal lawyer. What ethical constraints would be upon him regarding what he can divulge? And being the ethical paragon that he is anyway, would he pay any worry about that?
The fact that many people find Michael Cohen to be a rather unpleasant and unsympathetic person is obscuring another fact: that Trump’s enablers attempted to flat-out violate Cohen’s right to First Amendment protections.
There are laws that keep certain types of convicted criminals from profiting from their crimes by publishing books, but no laws that keep them from publishing those books-—because our Constitution protects freedom of speech.
And Cohen, morally-unattractive as he may be, has the right to say what he wants to say—William Barr, Enemy of the Constitution, be damned.
I remember well the first time I ever encountered Michael Cohen. I was still watching CNN then, he was in an interview with Brianna Keilar and obviously a Trump shill. He barked his infamous, “Says who?” at her in response to her question about Trump’s campaign team shakeup. A shudder went down my spine, I clocked the guy as a wannabe gangster. I despised him in that instant.
After Trump “won,” I recall how sorrowful Cohen was at being left behind at Trump Tower. His loyalty was slavish, like a dog that never questions its place . I felt a little bit sorry for him.
When Trump threw him under the bus over Stormy Daniels, Cohen’s hurt at the betrayal was borne of pure shock and akin to that of a scorned lover. He really believed the Trump loyalty shit was a two-way street. The scales fell and they fell hard.
Michael Cohen is not a good person. But sometimes people experience an epiphany. I respect and believe the testimony he provided to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in February 2019. I don’t think he ever expected to become Trump’s unwitting fall guy. He is genuinely hurt and now highly motivated to speak his truth about his former boss. He knows a lot.
Cohen is so dangerous to Trump. I am glad he flipped, and his is one book I will gladly, gratefully purchase. And I hope he has a well-trained security detail.
Can the judge’s order be appealed? SCOTUS cares about the first amendment only when it benefits Republicans.
Violating attorney-client privilege will get you disbarred, but I think he probably already has been (or soon will be).
Also, we have the crime-fraud exception:
The attorney-client privilege protects most communications between clients and their lawyers. But, according to the crime-fraud exception to the privilege, a client’s communication to her attorney isn’t privileged if she made it with the intention of committing or covering up a crime or fraud.
The Wikipedia entry on him indicates that he was, in fact, disbarred in February of 2019, on the heels of pleading guilty to committing perjury.
Great points. I, too, will be a customer for that book. (And yes, let’s hope that Cohen is being attentive to his own security.)