Disgraced former personal lawyer to Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, was dealt a major blow to his efforts to go to battle with his former boss.
Today, the Supreme Court outright rejected Cohen’s last-ditch effort to revive a civil rights claim against Trump.
According to NBC News, the nation’s highest court 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 basis of the case stems from 2020, when 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.
However, the Supreme Court has made it difficult 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, according to the NBC report.
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, which the Supreme Court ultimately upheld and put Cohen’s last-ditch effort on life support.