#Michael Cohen pleaded for freedom after seeing US Marshal with shackles, pal says

“I’ll sign exactly what you want me to sign, so I don’t have to go back to jail,” Cohen whined to the lawmen who proceeded to chain him and take him into their custody, his former lawyer and friend Lanny Davis said.

Cohen was brought into custody by the marshals at Manhattan federal court, where he reported Thursday morning to have an ankle bracelet attached and to sign terms of his new home confinement.

Cohen refused to agree to the first term of the home confinement deal, which would’ve barred him from speaking to the press and blocked him from publishing a tell-all book that he’s been writing while behind bars in an upstate New York federal prison.

When he refused to sign, federal authorities left the room and returned an hour and a half later with the shackle-carrying marshals.

According to Davis, when he saw the marshals emerge from an elevator, Cohen’s lawyer, Jeff Levine, turned to Cohen and said: “I hope they’re not here for you.”

“The next thing that happened was the Marshals said they had an order signed by someone from the Bureau of Prisons. The order was to arrest him and put him in jail, and they started to put shackles on him,” said Davis, who spoke to Levine after Cohen’s arrest.

“Michael reacted very quickly and said, ‘I’ll sign exactly what you want me to sign, so I don’t have to go back to jail,’ ” Davis said.

“The comment from one of the three Marshals, was: ‘It’s out of our hands,’ ” he added.

His arrest comes after a photograph of Cohen dining out with his wife and another couple at a French restaurant on the Upper East Side was published on Page One of The Post.

Cohen is supposed to be serving a three-year sentence for crimes that include tax evasion, bank fraud and lying to Congress, as well as covering up hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and ex-Playboy model Karen McDougal.

But the Bureau of Prisons released him due to the coronavirus crisis on May 20 — even though a judge had refused to reduce his sentence for the same reason two months earlier.

Additional reporting by Bruce Golding