NEW: This is getting interesting—it now appears that ex–Trump lawyer Cohen was returned to prison because he refused to agree not to publish the book about Trump he's already written. Cohen's lawyer now implies that the book publication condition came from the White House or DOJ.
PS/ In other words, there's a good chance that the news story from today that we thought was about Michael Cohen stupidly going to dinner outside his home and getting returned to prison because of it is actually a story in the vein of the Mary Trump and John Bolton book stories.
PS2/ The part I'm confused about: normally, a judge would be the one to set any conditions regarding book publication—and usually those conditions would simply be regarding where the proceeds of any book publication must go. A complete publication prohibition is highly irregular.
PS3/ In theory, a crime victim could specifically request that a judge order a convict not to publish any book whatsoever about the incident in question. But that doesn't appear to be what happened here. It seems instead that the government asked for this condition. That's...odd.
PS4/ I think we need to view the John Bolton, Mary Trump, and Michael Wolff cases as being extremely illuminating here, along with the repeated instances of Barr acting directly at Trump's orders. This seems to be DOJ trying to do what Trump failed to do in court with Mary Trump.
PS5/ All this said, we definitely need more info about where this condition came from and when and why. But this is what we can say for sure tonight: Cohen being ordered back to prison is a much bigger story than we thought it was this morning. Media needs to cover it that way.
