you to give the democrats who are watching the answer they may not want to hear. to the question, how long could the ban in matter conceivably dry out? well, it s contempt, in a post to civil contempt. which is what we saw under trump was that if you helped people in criminal contempt it was just going to get referred to, bill barr s justice department. which inevitably would, most likely, take no action to actually hold these people accountable and complying with any sort of subpoena. that being said, the timeline here is really unclear, the justice department has not indicated one way or the other wet this process is going to
0 tonight s last word. the 11th hour with brian williams, starts now. good evening once again day 272 of the biden administration, and this evening flags at the white house, lives throughout washington and the u.s. facility throughout the country and around the world are at half staff in honor of colin paul who died this morning, general paul was 84 years old, he died of covid complications while battling both parkinson s and multiple myeloma. we will have more and much more of its life and legacy just ahead. tonight is also the eve of the first major legal showdown for the special house committee, investigating the january 6th riot and insurrection. and a little over 20 hours, the committee is scheduled to formally vote on whether to adopt a report recommending criminal contempt charges against trump advisor steve bannon, who had failed to comply with the subpoena. earlier tonight they released the report on ben interfusions. it outlines what the committee wants from him. and it rec
this case and the investigation? well, fred, this is yet again under bill barr s justice department a series of questions where we have a real scramble on the hill and from an inspector general watchdog of justice department trying to figure out how cases that had the potential to be politically charged or politically motivated, how they were handled under barr. so, what we know and what we ve learned from our reporting and the reporting in the new york times is that barr had brought in a prosecutor from new jersey in 2020 to really give some juice to leak investigations that had languished in the justice departments and barr wanted to prioritize them, bring them to a close or have them prosecuted. now, we know that the inspector general that was said he would be doing review of how these investigations were handled this week, we know he s not going to look at that but he s also going to look at court orders that required news organizations including cnn and
book, couldn t talk to the press, couldn t use social media, if that was only a condition in his terms of early release and furlough during covid. that the bureau of prisons had a problem. and that turns out to be what the reporting confirmed. no other releasee was required to execute this policy. in my 25 years as a federal prosecutor i never saw this restraint on the first amendment used. i think you re right, joe, this is a bad problem. the bureau of prisons is part of the justice department, the director of the bureau of prisons reports directly to the deputy attorney general and is spi supervised by the attorney general, there will be an effort to write this off as a low level mistake inside the bureau of pris prison. i think it deserves careful scrutiny. this is a black eye on doj, as you pointed out. let s talk about how bad this
by the way, joyce, we heard from people close to cohen and the cohen family, that he had gone in there simply to discuss the terms of his release and they were talking about the book, and he said he should be able to write the book. they said let s go check, they left, come back in, and according to reports, they immediately locked him up, sent him to solitary. if all of that is true, and that s what the reporting shakes out as true, another black eye for donald trump and for bill barr s justice department. they put a guy in solitary confinement because they didn t want him to write a book about the president. my immediate reaction to this situation was that if this was a provision applied only to cohen, this notion he couldn t write a