President Trump will avoid a legal battle involving allegations he retaliated against his former lawyer and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, by having him sent back to prison in 2020. 

On Monday, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Cohen to revive a retaliation lawsuit against Trump and other officials at the Department of Justice without comment.

Trump’s lawyers and the Biden administration urged the court to reject Cohen’s bid to revive the lawsuit. Attorneys for the former president called the case “entirely devoid of merit.” Meanwhile, the Justice Department said there was no evidence that the “legal issues raised by this case recur in other cases” and that it was “outside the mainstream” of the Supreme Court’s role. 

The lawsuit filed by Cohen, who was disbarred after he pled guilty to multiple crimes in 2018, focuses on the status of his home confinement during the Covid pandemic. The former lawyer was released from a minimum-security prison in May 2020 due to health concerns related to the virus. 

However, in July 2020, he tweeted that he had finished writing a tell-all book about his time working with Trump. Cohen said he was told by a probation officer a week after the tweet was sent that he would have to agree to a public speaking ban, which included a prohibition on publishing a book, as a term of his release and home confinement. 

One provision of the agreement stated he could not participate in any engagement of any “kind with the media, including print, TV, film, books, or any other form of media/news.” It also required a “prohibition from all social media platforms.”

When he declined to sign the agreement, he was ordered back to prison. Lawyers for Cohen argued the agreement violated his First Amendment rights. They said the government could not prevent their client from publishing a book critical of Trump as a term of his continued home confinement. 

The Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that the allegation that the decision to send Cohen back to prison was retaliation was “patently false.”

“Mr. Cohen refused to agree to the terms of the program, specifically electronic monitoring. In addition, he was argumentative, was attempting to dictate the conditions of his monitoring, including conditions relating to self-employment, access to media, use of social media and other accountability measures,” the statement added. 

However, two weeks later, a federal district court judge, Alvin Hellerstein, agreed with Cohen’s lawyers and called the decision to order the disgraced former lawyer back to prison “retaliatory.” Mr. Hellerstein also ordered that Cohen be released from prison to home confinement once again. 

Cohen’s book “Disloyal: A Memoir” was released in September 2020 and reached the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s bestseller list. 

Cohen sued Trump and other officials, alleging the decision to order him back to prison was retaliation. However, federal judges dismissed the case in two separate instances, citing Supreme Court precedent.