not a peep, no physical gestures. getting an suv and leaving the courthouse where the judge has ordered a gag order, saying that another peep out of you on this case. family members, press associates to stay similarly quiet. joining me as doug burns. is this too much? stuff leaks out on court cases and investigations. he can t say a word about it? i have been in a number of these situations over the last 30 years. what you call pretrial services. usually it plays out exactly the way he did today which is basically please explain yourself, why did you do this. what were you thinking? good old-fashioned tongue lashing. don t do it again or they are going to be more severe consequences. now to your question, yeah, of course you re going to get into certain first amendment expression issues but they are overridden by the conduct of an ongoing criminal case. when a judge in a criminal case issues a gag order, to the
extent it crashes or conflicts with the first amendment, that gag orders going to win out. speak to the judge did so because he was joking about putting her in cross hairs, little bit appalled by that. i wonder when things get out, whether things are leaked or not, if there s any avenue for him to state his side of the story or did he just bury himself with this? it s a point that you made, what i wanted to say as he went in and said i wasn t the one who put together this visual on the way the cross hairs appeared in the top left corner and he sort of explain what happened and somebody else had done it. to your point, absolutely. the values for him was the judge didn t like it. neil: not at all. thank you very, very much, doug. i apologize for the truncated version. not at all. very quickly, we are not missing the fact that we are
roger stone. the explanation that he was under financial and extreme stress and he accepted responsibility. according to the judge, she made a point it wasn t just about the social media post. it was about how those kind of images and messages could incite others to commit acts of violence that were related to the case, neil. neil: so she could have been tougher still, right? what do you think happens now? he s been making the media rounds. he cut back a little bit. now he s got to be operation silence, right? the judge is taking a traditional approach. she s making incremental modifications at this point to the gag order. the next step would be a modification of the terms of his bail. i think the judge is taking what i would counsel as a wise and incremental approach to punishing stone for what she sees as actions that really
the hush money payments during the campaign. the other thing that has happened as we ve seen an acceleration of the timeline in the manafort case for sentenc g sentencing. people sea this as another indicator that the special counsel investigation is winding down. our own reporting says that this is the end game now and the report could come in days or weeks. they don t foresee it being longer than that. a number of data points have finally aligned. the new attorney general neil: i m sorry. you can see roger stone leaving the courthouse. the judge said the gag order is in effect. don t talk to anybody. he s not. he s going to a waiting van. sometimes he does the nixon arms raised. none of that. in the car and away he goes to your point, catherine, he s
keeping to those orders. that s right. the partial gag order prevented him from making statements on the courthouse steps. we don t expect to hear anything from stone today. the silence with reporters is not second nature to stone. he is obeying the new order from the judge, which completely shuts down any media contact or statements about the case. back to the special county. data points have aligned the new attorney general william barr is in place. the nomination for his new deputy, a senior transportation department official, jeffery rosen has been announced. we have an end date for the current deputy attorney general, rod rosenstein, which is mid march. those close to rosenstein said hi wanted to stay until the mueller report was delivered. to really tamp down expectations, what we understand is that the report that goes to