Michael Cohen's First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said during a telephone conference.

The text is from AP, carried by Strib, with this additional text:

Hellerstein ordered Michael Cohen released from prison to home confinement by 2 p.m. on Friday.

"How can I take any other inference than that it's retaliatory?" Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen's public communications.

"I've never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release," the judge said. "Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this ... unless there was a retaliatory purpose?"

In ruling, Hellerstein said he made the "finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory." He added: "And it's retaliatory for his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish the book."

Cohen, 53, sued federal prison officials and Attorney General William Barr on Monday, saying he was ordered back to prison because he was writing a book: "Disloyal: The True Story of Michael Cohen, Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump."

The Bureau of Prisons issued a spirited defense of its intentions after the ruling Thursday, calling any assertion that the reimprisonment of Cohen "was a retaliatory action is patently false."

[...] The Bureau of Prisons also said it was not uncommon for it to place restrictions on inmates' contact with the media. Still, it said Cohen's refusal to agree to those conditions or his intent to publish a book played "no role whatsoever" in his return to prison.

Were you the judge, would you buy that claim, the book and its likely impact was not a big thing? Were you born yesterday? This side play seems to serve to boost public interest in this tell-all thing to come out pre-election, with the history that after Cohen caved to pressures and cut a deal Trump/Barr left his twisting in the wind. Flynn and Stone got to walk, Cohen got a "sign this" and would you suspect that the request was anything but a top-down pressure attempt? A dumb one at that, but top-down does not originate at a particularly stable genius locale.