That conduct appeared to irritate U.S. Court Judge Carl Nichols, who frequently questioned prosecutors about why they felt it was appropriate—or perhaps relevant—to surreptitiously record defense attorney Robert Costello’s private phone calls, text messages, and emails.
“What makes this case special is that the government didn’t just go out and obtain standard records,” Nichols explained. “What made you think that’s a good first move?”
The judge ordered on Wednesday that the government must comply with the judge’s demands for over-the-phone information as well as the actual phone data. The Justice Department received this information from Google, Comcast, and Yahoo, according to a report.
“Everything that was going on behind the scenes, everything that was going before the grand jury,” says the narrator. Bannon stated, “Everything should come out.” “All relevant material should be made public to the media and the American people; it is in your best interests, and it is worth fighting for.”
Even though it was uncertain why the Department of Justice would take this step—which could jeopardize established attorney-client communication systems protection measures implied that the criminal justice system was checking regardless of whether Bannon had been truly reliant on his attorney’s advice when he refused to testify before the House Committee on the 6th of January in October.
“In this scenario, Costello serves as a middleman. “It’s possible Costello never entirely described what was…here,” she told the judge, adding that “it may not be the most simple proof.”
The FBI’s broad probe, according to many legal experts, will restrict the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute Bannon personally. When The Daily Beast brought up these issues with Wadie Said, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, he said investigators did more than “create a lot of work for themselves and superfluous information.”
PBS interviewed Steve Bannon last year in the ‘America’s Great Divide’ video: