Michael Cohen cops to fake citations in plea to end supervision

Former Donald Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen admitted to giving his lawyer non-existent cases to cite as part of a bid to wrap up his supervised release following his guilty plea on charges of tax evasion and campaign finance offenses in 2018.

In a pair of court filings unsealed Friday, Cohen and his legal team informed Manhattan federal judge Jesse Furman that attorney David Schwartz submitted false citations that were provided by Cohen and produced by the artificial intelligence service Google Bard to argue for an end to Cohen’s court supervision last month.

“As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but were actually not,” Cohen stated in a seven-page declaration submitted to Furman Thursday.

“Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”

Schwartz submitted the Nov. 29 filing without checking whether the cases Cohen gave him were real — and was facing sanctions if he did not disclose the potentially “fraudulent conduct,” the filings show.

In a separate letter to the judge, Cohen lawyer Danya Perry said her client did not “have an ethical obligation to verify the accuracy of his research” and placed the blame squarely on Schwartz.

“Mr. Schwartz … did have an obligation to verify the legal representations being made in a motion he filed,” Perry wrote, saying the attorney mistakenly believed Perry had produced the citations herself — adding that Schwartz had a history of being “less than meticulous about the accuracy of his citations.”

“The filings show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong. He relied on his lawyer, as he had every right to do,” Perry said in a statement to The Post. “Unfortunately, his lawyer appears to have made an honest mistake in not verifying the citations in the brief he drafted and filed.”

The mess could cast doubt on Cohen’s potential testimony in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s criminal business fraud case against Trump, as well as New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud case.

Bragg indicted the 77-year-old ex-president in March on 34 counts of allegedly concealing business records to hide “hush money” payments routed through Cohen to former porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal.

The money was meant to keep both women from going public before the 2016 election with claims they had affairs with the married Trump.

James also filed a $250 million civil fraud case against Trump last year, alleging that he had inflated the Trump Organization’s assets to secure more favorable loan and insurance terms.

Cohen emerged as a prominent witness before the grand jury in the hush money case and testified in a Manhattan courtroom in October about his former boss’ attempts to artificially boost his net worth.

James’ office has downplayed Cohen’s importance to the civil fraud case, noting that the judge in that matter has said the question of Trump’s liability “did not rest with him [Cohen] at all.”

Before the Bragg indictment, a letter from 2018 also surfaced that showed Cohen lying to federal election officials that he “used his own personal funds to facilitate a payment of $130,000 to Ms. Stephanie Clifford” — Daniels’ real name — in 2016.

Cohen pleaded guilty that August, however, to making in-kind campaign contributions to Trump by making the payments to Daniels to buy her silence.

The ex-lawyer, now 57, served roughly a year in prison before being released in 2020 due to concerns about COVID-19 spread in prisons. He then served a stint of home confinement before being put on supervised release.

Bob Costello, an attorney who previously advised Cohen but testified in Trump’s defense before the Manhattan grand jury earlier this year, said the former legal fixer had a “lie, cheat, steal” mindset, ABC News reported.

“I’m trying to tell the truth to the grand jury,” Costello told reporters after his testimony. “If they want to go after Donald Trump and they have solid evidence, then so be it. Michael Cohen is not solid evidence.”

A spokeswoman for Bragg’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.