Looks like we won’t be getting a City Council report from Barrett Brown anytime soon. This morning he was arrested. After being called in to his halfway house for a drug test, the good folks from the Bureau of Prisons showed up and arrested him. What for? Are you ready for this? They arrested him for giving interviews. Barrett’s mom, with whom he’d been living under home confinement, sends the following note:
Barrett was re-arrested during routine check-in this morning and is being transferred to a BOP facility that is unknown. He has not missed a check-in over the last five months of his early release. He has not failed any of the random drug tests administered. He has been on home confinement status since February and has been home each and every time they called the landline at 1:00 to 2:00 a.m. for “bed check.”
He believes this is only because of his refusal to get “permission” from crews to film and interview him. He has had many interviews since his early release, on November 29, both by phone and in person. Last week VICE had a group in to film him for two days [ed: they filmed a bunch up here at D Magazine headquarters], and he was scheduled to be interviewed tomorrow by a group working on a documentary for PBS.
Ms. Luz Lujan, his BOP contact, refused to provide him with copies of program statement rules saying this is a requirement during halfway house and/or home confinement status. The forms that they finally came up with yesterday, after he had been requesting documentation for the past two weeks, are forms offered to media when requesting a visit with an inmate in a federal prison setting.
There was never any mention of these rules during the past four months of his federally approved employment at D Magazine when he was working with media and involved with a range of interviews.
His mom still has no idea where Barrett was taken. Her guess is that they’ll hold him till May 25, when his original sentence was set to end.
