A federal judge has ordered the release of Michael Cohen, reversing a decision earlier this month to reimprison the former attorney to President Donald Trump, after a dispute over a gag order that threatened to scuttle a book Cohen was set to release.
Cohen will serve the remainder of his prison sentence at home, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled.
Hellerstein said Cohen’s return to prison amounted to retaliation for his refusal
to agree to the broad restrictions on his public statements, including publishing books or articles, as well as communicating with the press. Cohen has argued that the gag order amounted to a retaliatory rule intended to block him from writing a book critical of the president.
“I’ve never seen such a clause, in 21 years of being a judge, sentencing people and looking at terms and conditions of supervised release, I’ve never seen such a clause,” Hellerstein said during a 35-minute telephone hearing Thursday on a habeas corpus petition Cohen filed seeking his release. “How can I take any other inference but that it was retaliatory?”
Hellerstein, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered Cohen released by 2 p.m. Friday to be confined at his Manhattan home. The judge said the gag order originally proposed by the government will be in place for a week, while lawyers for Cohen and the federal Bureau of Prisons negotiate new terms.
