WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected disbarred lawyer Michael Cohen’s last-ditch effort to revive a civil rights claim against his former boss Donald Trump.
The justices left in place lower court rulings that said Cohen could not pursue his allegation that then-President Trump and other officials violated his rights by putting him in solitary confinement for writing a tell-all book.
In 2020, Cohen was serving a three-year sentence on various charges relating to the work he had carried out for Trump.
He had been in home confinement because of the Covid-19 pandemic but was ordered back to prison after refusing to sign a form that would have prevented him from speaking to the press or posting on social media.
After 16 days in solitary confinement, a federal judge ordered Cohen released, finding that officials had retaliated against him on free speech grounds.
Cohen then sued Trump and other officials, seeking damages for the alleged violation of his right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure under the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, among other things.
He recently told NBC News that if Trump is elected to a second term in November, he “won’t stop with just locking people up” unless there is a significant deterrent.
But constitutional claims against individual federal officials are notoriously difficult to bring as a result of a line of Supreme Court rulings.
“The American people can no longer speak freely without fear of incarceration by a corrupt president and his/her willing and complicit underlings,” Cohen said in a statement after the court’s decision not to take his case. “These are basic, fundamental rights that makes America the beacon of democracy. Now, the guardrails are gone!”
The court in recent years has made it almost impossible to bring constitutional claims against individual federal officials, rolling back a 1971 precedent called Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that first allowed them.
In a 2022 case called Egbert v. Boule, the Supreme Court effectively put “Bivens claims” on life support in a ruling that tossed out allegations against a Border Patrol agent.
As NBC News reported last year, the 2022 Egbert ruling has been cited hundreds of times by lower court judges when throwing out Bivens claims in cases concerning a broad range of allegedly unconstitutional conduct.
A federal judge in New York and the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals both highlighted the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in throwing out Cohen’s claims.
Unless Congress passes legislation to allow a form of Bivens claims, there are few legal avenues to seeking accountability when federal officials, including thousands of law enforcement officials, commit unlawful acts.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
