Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former attorney, released his cellphone number Wednesday to his Twitter followers and encouraged them to text messages to him.
Cohen, who has been disbarred from his former legal practice, served as a Trump attorney from 2006 to 2018. He was a vice president of the Trump Organization and a personal counsel to Trump.
Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes, including lying to Congress, was one year into a three-year prison sentence when he was released earlier this year.
Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing a book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said.
Cohen, 53, is suing federal prison officials and Attorney General William Barr, saying he was ordered back to prison because he was writing a book to be released before the November presidential election. He has been in isolation at an Otisville, New York, prison camp.
The lawsuit said the book would address “Trump’s personality and proclivities, his private and professional affairs, and his personal and business ethics.”
The lawsuit said the government’s demand that Cohen agree not to speak to or through any media, including by publishing a book, violated his First Amendment rights.
Cohen had been furloughed in May along with other prisoners as authorities tried to slow the spread of the coronavirus in federal prisons.
Cohen’s book, titled “Disloyal: A Memoir,” attempts to make the case Trump is “guilty of the same crimes” that landed his former fixer in federal prison, offering a blow-by-blow account of Trump’s alleged role in a hush money scandal that once overshadowed his presidency.
The White House has called Cohen’s memoir “fan fiction.”
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