Welcome to Court Watch #186. Our weekly roundup of the most fascinating federal court filings is below, but before that, a quick detour to talk about a previously unreported criminal case.

On Tuesday, the FBI arrested a twenty-something man, Anthony Gagnon, in Florida for allegedly cyberstalking his former high school classmate and her family members. Apart from the extensive vitriol—dating back years and years—that is far too common in cyberstalking cases, another allegation caught our eye. According to charging documents, Gagnon reportedly used Gemini, Google’s A.I. assistant, to try to find out whether his threats to the cyberstalking victim were constitutionally prosecutable. Authorities say he sent a draft of his explicit texts to Gemini before he delivered them to one of his victims. To the LLM’s credit, its first response was that it would likely be cyberstalking.

Screenshot Gemini’s response to Anthony Gagnon’s alleged A.I. prompt on draft threat. Source: U.S. v. Gagnon

Though they came to the same prosecutorial conclusion in different ways (one using court-approved law enforcement investigative tools/the other using billions of gallons of water and dramatically raising your monthly electricity costs), both FBI and Gemini agreed that a charge was warranted for Gagnon’s alleged behavior. But the man’s purported use of A.I. to attempt to find out how far he could push the legal limit, while still carrying out his threat’s purpose, is something our docket- and terrorism-focused eyes hadn’t seen yet (editor’s note: efforts to reach Gagnon for comment were unsuccessful). We can add it to the list of other horrors that A.I. will intensify.

Thankfully, you won’t need to prompt A.I. to check if our docket roundup is legally and morally sound. We assure you, it’s at least one of those things. This week, a federal judge embraces the power of memetic communications, eBay lawyers are quite exacting, an appeals court waters down the most important parts of the English language, SDNY prosecutors may make things awkward for the United Nations, and, when he’s not writing an op-ed with a curious number of em dashes, David Ellison may want to ask et tu, Comcast? Those and other things in this week’s dockets. 

The Docket Roundup

• Honestly, not nearly enough of you are talking about footnote 51 in this order. We’re not sure how we feel about federal judges being more terminally online than us. The entire opinion by Judge Brantley Starr is a ride, complete with a reference to the greatest Christmas movie ever produced (footnote 37). 

• A man incarcerated at a federal prison in Oklahoma was indicted on charges of threatening the president and a federal law enforcement officer. His release date for the original crime he was convicted of is currently December 2055.

• Baltimore (hon) is now the happy owner of 550 counterfeit car tires. 

• “I am now hoist on my own petard,” says one federal judge. 

• A federal judge rules the government violated a preliminary injunction and ordered the release of funding to cover legal representation for migrant children 

• There’s a clever, Bollywood-inspired copper wire theft scheme in North Carolina.

• More J6ers are suing the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

• Your pro se of the week is from a man who claims to be an FBI agent and the victim of a “Brain Computer Interface” the bureau is running. The filing includes an X-ray of his brain.

• <whispers> It sure looks like Comcast quietly tried to throw a wrench into the Paramount merger. 

• A Maryland man lost more than $1.2 million to a pig-butchering scam. The feds have clawed some of it back.

• A Pennsylvania man, Eric Holman, was arrested for threatening a series of antisemitic attacks on twitter. His handle ‘jewscantstopme’ is still active on the platform. A search of his home on Wednesday found an end-of-life note. 

• We’re not saying that this is the best Lacey Act story of the year, but it’s at least pretty close.

• A guy who was reportedly caught jumping the turnstiles at the Roslyn metro stop near Washington, D.C., led to a larger ICE case.

• The Administration is testing out a new legal strategy to not have union posters at government offices. 

• Lawyers got nearly half a million dollars in fees for beating the Department of War in the only combat nowadays that Americans routinely get a clear victory on: Lawfare. 

• It’s not every day that a Wall Street Journal correction triggers an attorney general lawsuit correction. 

• It’s never a good idea to talk to witnesses when you’re being investigated. It’s an even worse idea to allegedly threaten them.

• We couldn’t help but notice that the right honorable U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois has a copy of his own book on his office coffee table. Kind of a boss move to be honest. 

• An Asheville man was purportedly a huge scary creep to his ex-girlfriend. 

• We’re not sure TikTok is the right market to sell machine gun conversion devices, but one North Carolina man allegedly gave it a shot.

• 9,000 emails (allegedly) is honestly way too many before catching a cyberstalking charge.

• The Eleventh Circuit floated a PG version of FAFO: “Mess around and find out.” We do not approve of their attempt to dull the best parts of the English language. 

• Lots of folks only know the Pogues for their Fairytale of New York song, but you’re really missing out on some of their deep tracks. For this week’s song of the week, we went with a slowed-down acoustic cover of one of our Pogues’ favorites. We lowkey had it on repeat while we worked through most of this week’s issue at 10:53 pm on Wednesday evening and 5:37am this morning. 

• One of us wrote about how we spent last Thursday and how their Court Watch editor always correctly assumes court nerds intuitively understand two-letter no-context texts. 

• Here’s the criminal complaint against an FBI counterintelligence agent who reportedly admitted to siphoning off hundreds of thousands in stolen crypto proceeds. We’ll say out loud what bigwig lawyers only tell us in disappearing messages: DOJ’s detention argument was quite weak. A judge apparently thought so too and the agent is set to be released pending trial. 

We put out the bat signal, and you all answered. We still need a few more paid subscribers to more comfortably support our independent journalism, but we appreciate everyone who was able to step up so far. You can upgrade to a monthly or yearly subscription here or consider making a one-time donation. 

• Law enforcement in Louisiana is quietly working a multi-million dollar medicare fraud case.

• An alleged pedophile reportedly wrote “pedo” in black marker on his body. We feel bad for whoever has to defend it. Content warning on the filing.

• OpenAI and the Justice Department reached a settlement about hiring procedures that favored visa holders.

• A Georgia man was indicted for threatening ICE agents, though prosecutors may have their work cut out for them with his “I have no specific plans” line. 

• District Judge to Appeals Judges: Pound Sand. 

• ICE agents can keep covering their faces in New York. 

• eBay Lawyers had to explain a judge’s order to the Boies Schiller Flexner attorneys representing Trump businesses suing to enforce trademark laws. 

• Prosecutors say a cybersecurity consultant won’t help them find the money he stole. 

• A Georgia man was charged with threatening the head of New Jersey's FBI office. The threatening message makes the implication that his wife works for the Bureau. 

• Plaintiffs suing over conditions at an ICE detention center want a judge to recuse himself because he’s also a military officer. 

• The Belarusian leader of the “ransom cartel” was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

• A man accused of lighting Tesla chargers on fire in Charleston, SC, pleaded guilty.

• We are mildly surprised that no reporter picked up that the Justice Department called Al-Khair Foundation a “sham charity” allegedly connected with raising money for Hamas in a criminal complaint. Side note to material support legal nerds who like hypotheticals: the foundation gave half a million dollars to the United Nations during the time of the alleged criminal offense. (Shoutout to the international body for not yet scrubbing their website).

• Capitol One Bank would just like to clarify for the court that it did not shut down President Trump’s financial accounts because of January 6th. Instead, they say they were worried about money laundering in the accounts.

• Unrelatedly, POTUS doesn’t have to turn over his financial records to the BBC, at least for now.

• Continuing the trend of child abuse cases coming out of the D.C. area the past few weeks, a sheriff’s deputy was charged.

• A man in prison who needed (but allegedly did not get) medical care after a hip surgery believes the Bureau of Prisons should have to pay for their neglect. 

• For folks that are interested in ransomware, this sentencing memo against J.P. Morgan is interesting. (Editor’s note: before we get a cease and desist letter from J.P. Morgan, the company, lawyers, the hacker’s online handle was J.P. Morgan).

• A Texas sheriff’s deputy who previously served as part of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force was convicted of tipping off suspected drug traffickers.

Thanks for reading. A final scheduling note: We’ll be taking this weekend and next Friday off for what an honest outside observer could reasonably argue is well-deserved vacation. We will be back with a new The Rabbit Hole on Sunday August 16th involving a federal judge, a U.S. marshal investigation, and a now awkward workplace environment. 

Five weeks after the Supreme Court struck down so-called geofence searches in its landmark Fourth Amendment decision in Chatrie v. United States, the ramifications for other broad law enforcement investigative techniques are coming into focus. On Wednesday, August 5, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves reaffirmed a magistrate judge’s ruling quashing federal law enforcement’s ability to obtain “tower dump” warrants. 

Judge Reeves’ decision in the Southern District of Mississippi may signal a turning point in the post-Chatrie era against non individualized electronic searches. Both state and federal law enforcement authorities have commonly used tower dumps to pull large amounts of data from cell towers located near crime scenes. The data, which reveals the cell phones connected to a cell tower during a set time block, has historically allowed investigators to examine recurring cell numbers at multiple crime scenes.

Last year, investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives successfully used a tower dump to identify a man accused of a string of gun store robberies in Pennsylvania. This year, investigators asked a federal judge for approval to perform a tower dump while investigating vandalism at a Federal Aviation Administration facility in Vermont.

In the Mississippi case, FBI agents investigating a series of violent crimes committed in the Jackson area submitted four warrants for a magistrate judge’s approval in February 2025. The magistrate judge, however, denied the warrants, citing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Smith, pre-dating Chatrie, striking down geofence warrants. In March 2025, the government appealed the magistrate judge’s order to Judge Reeves.

Opening his thirty-page opinion, Judge Reeves writes: 

In the order, Judge Reeves cited the Supreme Court’s holding in Chatrie thirteen times. The Justice Department now has to decide whether to appeal the order to the Fifth Circuit. 

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) previously told Court Watch that “dragnet surveillance” tactics such as tower dumps make “a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. Cell tower dumps sweep up the personal data of tens of thousands of innocent Americans. But for too long, courts have rubberstamped surveillance dragnets by ignoring that innocent bystanders have privacy rights too.”

In July 2025, the docket was inexplicably sealed, and all past open court filings were made unavailable to the public. Repeated inquiries to the clerk’s office and the judge’s chambers to determine the reasoning behind the newfound secrecy were unsuccessful. Court Watch filed an August 2025 motion in the district to unseal the docket. Responding to our motion, Judge Reeves said that the docket was sealed due to an “inadvertent error” by the court and ordered it available to the public yet again. 

Court Watch’s motion was drafted by noted First Amendment lawyer and Court Watch subscriber, Christopher Beall. We thank him for his support. Additionally, Court Watch bore the costs of local counsel and filing fees. You can support our independent journalism through a paid subscription or one-time donation. 

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If you’ll indulge us for a moment, let’s recap the last month for Court Watch. Our reporting was cited in the New York Times, CBS News, NOTUS, CNN, Axios, Associated Press, Politico and Newsweek. We, and this seems like it can’t possibly be true for a two-man money-losing reporting shop but somehow is, discovered a previously dormant federal court’s first ever case. 

Since July, we have produced more than a dozen original stories ranging from our weekly roundups, breaking news, and deep dive stories. During all of that, we also trained hundreds of reporters on how to find stories in the federal court records system. We completely revamped our website to make it more reader-friendly to find our reporting. Finally, we rolled out a Slack-like channel where we break news nearly every day. 

We did all this on a budget that is a rounding error for most other news organization.  A budget that, to be clear, simply covers our back-office reporting costs like PACER fees. We don’t pay ourselves a salary. We don’t have investors. There’s no runway of funding to keep the lights on. We didn’t start Court Watch to get rich, but it sure would be nice not to lose money every month doing this type of journalism. We love doing this. We need your support to keep it going. 

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In order to make this news site viable for the next few months, we need a hundred new paid subscribers. We could tell you that doing so will get you access to our Sunday series - The Rabbit Hole. And that you could ping us on any court-related case questions. Or that you would be supporting independent journalism with documented impact. Those things are true. But also, increasing our paid subscribers gives us the room to chase the stories we currently cannot because the cost of purchasing court transcripts and running down leads is currently too expensive to do for our small news organization. 

Court Watch has led the news this last month. That may not happen again without your help. 

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Editor’s note: The success of a healthy world economy relies heavily on countries accepting a series of norms. For today’s The Rabbit Hole, reporter Peter Beck takes us through the legal consequences of the growing shadows that cast over global trade. -Seamus 

On December 20, 2025, an oil tanker flying a Guyanese flag was navigating through the Caribbean Sea when a U.S. Coast Guard cutter emerged. The tanker, called the Bella 1, had a course set for a Venezuelan port, where it would pick up oil, just as tensions between the U.S. and the Maduro regime appeared to be heading toward an inflection point. Four days earlier, on December 16, President Trump had declared what he called a “TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS.”

On social media, Trump wrote, “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”

The Bella 1 was about to put that armada to the test. The Coast Guard announced its presence, ordering the Bella 1 to cut its engine and submit to a boarding party. The Coast Guard had a warrant to seize the boat and its cargo. The Bella, however, didn’t respond. It kept sailing, beginning a high-stakes chase that would draw international attention as the peoples of Venezuela and the United States anxiously waited to see if the runaway tanker would trigger a war.

Now, the man who captained the tanker is set to be sentenced in a U.S. district court. On Friday, Judge Beryl A. Howell will decide whether to send Avtandil (“Avto”) Kalandadze to a federal prison or back to his native Georgia. 

For the first time, federal court records tell the story of the Bella 1’s captain and the rest of its crew. To federal prosecutors, Kalandadze is the man who defied U.S. forces and put their lives at stake, while in control of a tanker at the heart of a shadow network of assets that fills U.S. enemies’ coffers. At the time of his guilty plea, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro noted, “This defendant [Kalandadze] put American sailors’ and Coast Guardsmen’s lives at risk while attempting to evade U.S. sanctions and move illicit oil. By refusing lawful orders from the U.S. Coast Guard and leading them on a chase across the Atlantic Ocean, he not only obstructed federal law enforcement, but forced our service members to carry out a dangerous boarding operation in heavy seas.”

Conversely, Kalandadze’s defense attorneys paint a compelling picture of a man who found himself on the wrong boat, at the wrong time, and who sacrificed for his family and crewmates, time and time again. Defense motions, by their very nature, show a client in the most favorable light. In their sentencing memo, his attorneys describe how Kalandadze ended up at the heart of an international crisis and argue the most just punishment is to send him home. 

The 47-year-old Kalandadze, according to his attorneys, is the eldest son of a civil engineer and a teacher, whose compassion and sense of duty apparently wore off on Kalandadze. Growing up in Georgia, Kalandadze’s school and college years coincided with the economic shocks brought by the deterioration and then dissolution of the Soviet Union. Rather than hunker down and conserve resources, Kalandadze’s parents welcomed their displaced friends and community members into their home. 

Kalandadze, meanwhile, always dreamed of becoming a sailor. He attended a maritime academy in Georgia before serving in the country’s navy. He had a knack for it, rising through the ranks steadily until 2020, when he was promoted to captain. One of his colleagues, in a letter addressed to Judge Howell, wrote that he had “never met anyone as . . . dedicated to his profession as Avtandil.” In another letter, his mother wrote, commending how, “through selfless dedication, continuous study, and unwavering commitment to his goal, he achieved the highest rank—that of Captain.” Kalandadze went on to receive a master's in navigation.

He sailed across the globe. All the while, he sent money back home, supporting his parents, siblings, family friends, wife, and kids. When he was home, his defense attorneys and letters sent to Judge Howell describe incredible acts of bravery: On two separate occasions, he dove into rough waters to rescue people in danger of drowning. In another instance, he reportedly delivered first aid to a neighbor’s child during an emergency. 

IMAGE: President Trump's TruthSocial Post.

Kalandadze initially found work through contracts with crewing agencies, which connect sailors to shipping companies. But the war in Ukraine hurt the Georgian shipping industry. The imposition of Western sanctions against Russia restricted where ships could go and what they could carry. Even the safety of the ships themselves was now a question, with fighting between Ukraine and Russia spilling into the Black Sea. Insurance and other operating costs rose. Shipping contracts dried up. 

His attorneys say Kalandadze was out of work for more than a year, unable to give the usual financial support to his three-generation family and friends.

Welcome to Court Watch #185. Our weekly roundup is below but please indulge us for a moment as we attempt a strained analogy.  It’s not every day you get to see a court have its first public hearing ever so we made a point to attend Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC)’s inaugural kickoff yesterday.

The whole thing reminded us a bit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. For our less pretentious readers, think Brad Pitt’s late 2000s movie. The premise of Fitzgerald's yarn is simple, babies are born young and grow old, with the one exception being Button, who was born old and grew young. The ATRC has Button-like qualities, things that should come naturally to a 30-year old court cause some consternation. It is still learning how to read (its own statute) and how to write (filing orders without an actual docket number). 

In their infancy, typical courts work out the kinks: the constitutional questions, how to list things on the docket, where to file motions, and how to set up the courtroom tech, so it doesn’t interrupt a historic and nationally important hearing. Walking for babies and docketing for courts are pretty much the same, you learn by repetition and practice. These courts have their early years to figure this all out. Watching a federal court work out basic courtroom procedures in real-time in front of a packed courthouse can be a bit jarring, especially when the stakes of getting the process right are so high. Admittedly, our biggest takeaway from yesterday is Judge Ericksen is making an earnest effort to age the court’s experience quickly and not end up in the principal’s office (appeals) in its first days at the school of the judiciary 

Like many thirtysomething millennials, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court has trouble finding its own housing still living in its parents’ basement (Courtroom 27a in the E. Barrett Prettyman federal building to be exact), its judges have to work multiple jobs (senior judge in Minnesota, chief judge of ATRC), and has (at least in its first hearing) shown a healthy skepticism of the government. Though similar to others experiencing the onset of a quarter-life crisis, it is struggling with the existential question of what its purpose is.

The next hearing is set for August 11th where it will decide if its first defendant can go home while our Button-court learns how to live in a world that will quickly expect it to act like its true age. 

The Docket Roundup

• Surprised no one noticed this story yet, but here you go: In January, the Pentagon’s Assistant Secretary for Health Affairs, Keith Bass, filed a defamation lawsuit against journalist Jeff Stein. Stein, who runs a news site called SpyTalk on Substack, was the subject of the lawsuit due to a story last year that reported that Bass was "effectively fired” from the CIA. According to a transcript reviewed by Court Watch from a hearing held in Alexandria federal court in mid-July, a judge questioned whether Bass’ lawsuit had reached the threshold proving true defamation. The court was ultimately unconvinced and let Bass leave to refile an amended complaint by Monday. He did not, and the case was dismissed. The next step will likely be Stein’s lawyers filing for lawyer fees for the lawsuit. Keeping the scooplet going: Substack confirmed last night that its Defender reporter defamation program covered Stein’s legal representation.

• A former legal assistant at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas was indicted on state charges of tampering with evidence and terroristic threats related to allegedly doxxing an immigration law enforcement officer.

• D.C. water and the feds are in talks about whether to enter into a consent decree over the Potomac sewage spill.

• Flying under the radar: a jailhouse interview with one of the defendants in the Antifa Texas ICE case. 

• A new civil complaint targets ICE’s use of force policy involving vehicles.

• The Secret Service clawed back some of the money stolen from a multimillion-dollar law enforcement spoofing scam.

• A purported senior leader of an Iran-backed militia in Iraq is having some trouble getting mail in New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center.

• Salman Rushdie’s attacker was convicted. 

• Elon Musk’s lawyers have issues with discovery in a case involving his political PAC.

• “This is a direct threat. Come do something about it DoJ.” Never a winning strategy, Alaska man.

• It’s footnote 2 for us. 

• Wilmer Hale was sued over a purported data breach.

• There’s a bit of a chain of custody fight brewing in a case of a man accused of aiding the October 7th terror attack. Some additional background is in the defense filing.

• Investigators say egypt[dot]com was a front for an illicit market on the dark web.

• This sentencing memo from the captain of the Bella 1—an oil tanker that tried to evade the blockade on Venezuela and then the U.S. Coast Guard—is a fascinating read, including the part where 23 of the 28 crewmembers signed a letter refusing to work on a Russia-flagged ship. The government filed its sentencing memo, too. 

• Judge Bastian channels his inner Wolf of Wall Street.

• It’s Bo Time. A man is suing the City of Charlotte after he says he was arrested for smoking a hemp cigarette at a bus stop after his Bojangles shift.

• Two Chinese men pleaded guilty to smuggling hundreds of turtles to Hong Kong.

• A pro se plaintiff’s telecoms spam case fell short against WinRed, the Republican fundraising operation which leans heavily on text messaging.

• xAI sued Minnesota over its state law prohibiting AI explicit content. We wrote about the phenomenon for the Rabbit Hole a few weeks ago.

• A federal law against drug users possessing firearms appears to be on the ropes in the Eighth Circuit.

• One New Jersey federal judge ordered all BTS bootleggers to show up to court. We doubt they’ll need an overflow room.

• Online right-wing influencers learned about shotgun complaints this week. 

• The Third Circuit’s reminder that its definition of the end of the day is not as fluid as most lawyers would appreciate. 

• This tune has less than a thousand views on YouTube, so let’s call our song of the week a scoop (and definitely a bop).

• Lots of tea in this one lawsuit. Among them, according to the filing, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his chief of staff are apparently involved in some intra-office drama at a crypto company.

• An Oregon state prison guard allegedly cyberstalked his ex.

• Out with the old (MAGA Burger), and in with the new (President Burger).

• A shareholder sued a solar panel company, claiming its executives misled stockholders about the impact of President Trump’s tariffs on the company’s earnings.

• Crypto scams strike again.

• A man was arrested at the Atlanta airport after he allegedly gave a CBP agent a password that deleted all of the contents on his phone during a secondary search.

• We don’t tend to go into the state courts, but when we do, it’s because the Louisiana State Supreme Court has officially gone off the rails.

• Defense attorneys filed another motion to undo the Justice Department’s pyrrhic victory in the Abbey Gate case.

• Metro bus hitting a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier vehicle resulted in a lawsuit.

• Warner Brothers says hands off the Harry Potter merch.

• There’s a cyanide threat case out of Illinois.

• This week brought us to never-before-seen levels of Florida-ness, featuring an airboat tourism company suing another airboat tourism company based in the Everglades for hijacking its Google results.

• A “street takeover” led to an explosive bust in Wisconsin. 

• The feds charged a Texas man after he reportedly walked into a VA clinic and held a gun to his head before surrendering.

Thanks for reading. In Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we took a single line from today’s roundup and went deep on it. 

ISIS: Alien Terrorist Removal Court Case Revealed

Earlier this month, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court was activated for the first time in its thirty year history.  Late this evening, new court records were posted on the court’s website which revealed the Justice Department is seeking to deport an Afghan woman in Texas, Nazira Haji Zada. A FBI summary of the investigation was included in the application:

This is a developing story and will be updated on our site.

Editor’s note: In Washington Irving's famous story, after a night of heavy drinking, Rip Van Winkle wakes up to discover he’s been asleep for two decades and the world that was before his long slumber has completely changed. Irving’s protagonist finds himself by the end of the story content with a life of mundaneness, unbothered by the constantly changing political landscape. Through movies and television shows, the story of Rip has been repeated in some form in pop culture since its 1819 publication. But very seldom is there a real-world example that parallels the fictional story. 

For this week’s The Rabbit Hole, we’ve teamed up with our colleagues at Lawfare to dive into the history, process, and frankly weird quirks of a federal court that has never been used in its 30-year history. The national security and immigration landscape has changed significantly since the Alien Terrorist Removal Court was first formed. After the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, America has created a counterterrorism apparatus and legal framework that would drastically alter how authorities approach threats posed by noncitizens. It’s with that as the backdrop that we think of the nation’s newest, but somehow old, court as it faces its first case. 

Awakened from its long sleep and trying to get its bearings in a country once again reconfiguring its national security apparatus. Though the Justice Department may gamble with the fact that the Alien Terrorist Removal Court could take a similar view as Van Winkle did at the end of his story, noting dispassionately that “the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him." And with that in mind, The Rabbit Hole explores what happens now that Rip Van Winkle’s courthouse is officially in session. - Seamus

Thirty years ago, an eager, twenty-something journalist named Benjamin Wittes walked into one of the United States’ newest and already most secretive courts. Created in April 1996 under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC), Wittes, who was one of a handful of journalists covering the new court at the time, wrote that it was secure and bureaucratic-looking enough to fit into a spy movie. 

It made for an unusual courtroom, with double doors that sealed into the wall at the touch of a button and a single conference table, instead of the usual dais, lectern, and tables for the prosecution and defense. Unlike most other federal courts, it didn’t even have its own building; it was located within the Department of Justice’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The seals of various intelligence agencies hung in the hallway outside.

But for 30 years, the ominously named court lay dormant, never hearing a case. That was until this month, when a website for the court suddenly appeared with two single-page documents.

The first document was the title page of an application filed by the Department of Justice’s National Security Division to the court: a document so heavily classified that only the application’s title and filing date survived redactions. The second was a two-paragraph order issued by ATRC Chief Judge Joan Ericksen (whose full-time job is serving as a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for Minnesota), which asked the government to provide additional information to the court on its application. The third document, posted a week later on July 23, was the title page for the government’s supplemental materials in response to Ericksen’s request.

News of the court’s inaugural case, which Court Watch reported first, spread quickly. For some, the ATRC’s sudden awakening stirred fears that the court may be used to undermine civil liberties to help carry out the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration agenda. For others, the first case signaled a significant development in national security law—and that prosecutors believed a matter was critical enough to do what their predecessors had repeatedly opted against in invoking the ATRC’s authority for the first time. 

The filings listed on the court’s website became a black box, easy to project onto but impossible to discern due to their classified nature. In the time since it launched, the court’s website has been updated only three times: to update its description “as a special court” to “a specialized court,” to add the title page of the government’s supplemental materials, and to post frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the court titled “Message From the Chief Judge.”

To better understand the possible reasons why Justice Department officials decided to bring a case now, this article unpacks the ATRC’s history, how the court operates, its parallels to another secretive federal court, and why the court may have lain inactive for so long. The outcome of the ATRC’s first case will likely signal whether the Justice Department adds the court to its immigration and counterterrorism toolkits, or lets the court return to its slumber.

Chief Judge Ericksen, through a spokesperson with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, declined a request to be interviewed about the process of standing up a dormant court. 

The Road to an Empty Court

The idea for a “specialized” court to handle immigration cases of suspected terrorists dates back to the waning days of the second Reagan administration. In 1987, agents with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was later restructured into the agencies for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection, arrested a group of eight noncitizens living in Los Angeles, who came to be known as the L.A. Eight, for their alleged activity in support of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). 

INS initiated removal proceedings against the eight, citing classified evidence that they had raised funds and distributed literature in support of the PFLP. The immigration judge presiding over the case, however, refused to consider evidence that was not made available to the L.A. Eight. The executive branch, in turn, responded that it could not publicly disclose its classified information. At an impasse, the immigration judge ordered the L.A. Eight to be released. 

In response to the botched effort to deport the eight, the Reagan administration proposed a specialized federal court that could hear classified evidence and weigh whether to deport noncitizens suspected of terrorism. But Congress did not immediately move to establish such a court until February 1995, when then-Senator Joe Biden introduced a bill with President Clinton’s support to create the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. The proposed design for the court—consisting of multiple federal district judges, with a chief judge, and all assigned by the chief justice of the Supreme Court—closely resembled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Also known as the FISA court, the FISC had already existed as a federal court hearing classified matters since 1978. (The ATRC is believed to share the same courtroom as the FISC for nonpublic, classified hearings. The FISC’s courtroom moved to the federal courthouse in D.C. after Wittes’s 1996 visit.)

The bill gained momentum two months later, in April 1995, when domestic extremists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. More legislative proposals were drafted to counter the newfound extremist threat, which culminated in the AEDPA that Clinton signed into law roughly a year after the bombing.

Other subsequent events could have underscored both the need to protect state secrets closely during judicial proceedings and to prevent extremists from manipulating the immigration process. In 1997, when a witness testifying in the trial of Ramzi Yousef, the lead plotter behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, let slip in open court that the government had been monitoring a cell phone, the terrorist group immediately shut down the cell phone. That same year, two men were arrested in Brooklyn for a plot to bomb the New York City subway system, one of whom was out on bond pending immigration removal proceedings and had filed an asylum application.

The court’s potential importance was raised again in March 2025, when Chief Judge James Boasberg of the D.C. District Court, who served previously as the ATRC’s head judge, pressed Justice Department officials over having never filed a case to the court: “In fact, Congress has an answer for us, doesn’t it? Because they created the Alien Terrorist Removal Court.” The exchange took place during a contentious hearing over whether the Trump administration had improperly invoked the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of noncitizens to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. Boasberg continued, “So if there's a national security concern with having these hearings … you can always go to the ATRC, which would be a first, but that's what it's there for, right?"

Seal of the ATRC

The Justice Department, however, never filed an application to the ATRC. From 1996 until this month, the chief justice consistently assigned five federal judges to serve on the court, but they never heard a case. All those years, the Justice Department and public largely overlooked the ATRC, except for the odd article in a national security law review every few years. 

Former U.S. District Judge Alfred Wolin, who was one of the first five judges assigned to the court, told NOTUS this month that he recalls a high-ranking court official explaining that the ATRC never received a case because “the FBI blocked any cases being sent to us.” 

“As far as I was concerned, it died,” Wolin said.

A Court Without Cases

Any reports of the death of the ATRC, however, were greatly exaggerated because on July 15, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division filed the first application to the ATRC. Thus began the first of a multi-step process that could lead to public hearings and the removal of a suspected terrorist.

Here’s how that process is supposed to work, according to the AEDPA. Per statutory requirements, the attorney general or deputy attorney general has to certify that the government’s application to the ATRC establishes probable cause that the defendant is an “alien terrorist” and that traditional immigration removal proceedings pose a national security risk. The next step, which is where the process appears to be now, is for a single ATRC judge to determine whether the application establishes probable cause for all three factors that the defendant is a) a noncitizen, b) a suspected terrorist, and c) an imminent national security risk. All of this takes place with just the government and the judge present; almost all records are filed under seal. The government can appeal an ATRC judge’s decision that an application lacks probable cause to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

If the ATRC judge agrees that the government met its burden for probable cause, a warrant is issued for the noncitizen’s detention. If the defendant is a lawful permanent resident, the noncitizen is entitled to a release hearing before an ATRC judge pending the removal hearing. The defendant is advised of a general account of the charges against them and notified of the time and place of the removal hearing. He or she is also entitled to a free lawyer who is a member of the Criminal Justice Act and who has security clearance.  

Then things get tricky. If the government seeks to introduce classified materials into evidence against the defendant, which the defendant will not be able to examine, the government must submit an unclassified summary of the classified evidence for the defendant’s review. The government turns over both the classified evidence and the unclassified summary to the judge, who determines whether the summary is “sufficient to enable the alien to prepare a defense.” If the judge deems the summary adequate, the evidence can be used against the defendant in a removal hearing. 

If the judge finds the summary inadequate, the removal hearing doesn’t go ahead. However, the government doesn’t have to produce a summary in cases in which the government establishes that both the noncitizen’s continued presence and the disclosure of the unclassified summary “would likely cause serious and irreparable harm to the national security or death or serious bodily injury to any person.” In these “irreparable harm” cases, the government can move forward to introduce the classified evidence, without ever disclosing its nature to the defendant, in the removal hearing.

At the ATRC removal hearing, the defendant has most of the rights of a traditional criminal defendant, including the right to be present, subpoena power, to present their own evidence, and cross-examine the government’s witnesses. If the noncitizen is a lawful permanent resident, the ATRC judge must appoint a defense attorney—at the government’s expense if necessary—who possesses a security clearance and can review some of the classified materials. The punishment for a “specially appointed attorney” with a security clearance who reveals the classified information to the defendant is a steep 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentence (or a fine). Noncitizens who are not lawful permanent residents are not entitled to the same “specially appointed” defense attorney but may hire one or get a pro bono attorney.

For this piece, we spoke with half a dozen legal experts and attorneys, reviewed far too many academic journals and law briefs, and almost convinced a judge on the court to talk to us about process. In any other news site, this story would be behind a paywall to reflect the time and resources required to produce it. But it’s not today because we’re bad at business but love reporting. Support our independent journalism, upgrade to a paid subscription or drop a one-time tip.

The noncitizen and their defense attorney can challenge evidence through the nonclassified summary (although it’s not clear how such a challenge would play out in practice). The defendant and their attorney, however, cannot attempt to suppress evidence for being illegally obtained, as with Fourth Amendment challenges in traditional criminal proceedings. The Federal Rules of Evidence also do not apply. 

Despite the cloak-and-dagger nature of the proceedings so far, the removal hearing is open to the public at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C. The statute provides for it to be scheduled “as expeditiously as practicable.” The hearing begins with the government’s case against the defendant. After that, the noncitizen can put up their own evidence. The government then should have an opportunity for rebuttal to close out the removal hearing. The government has to meet a “preponderance of the evidence” standard that the noncitizen is “an alien terrorist” for the noncitizen to be deported, lower than a traditional criminal court’s evidentiary standard for guilt—proof beyond a reasonable doubt. 

After the hearing, the ATRC judge should issue a written order explaining the court’s ruling. Both sides can appeal the ruling to the D.C. Circuit. An appeal is automatic if the noncitizen was not provided a summary of the classified evidence. The direct appeal to the D.C. Circuit is an expedited review process compared to appeals in traditional immigration courts, which go through the Board of Immigration Appeals before ending up in a regional federal court of appeals. Removal is paused until the appellate process is completed.

But almost all of this, of course, has never happened before.

“Secret” Courts

A week after the ATRC received its first case, on July 23, Chief Judge Ericksen published a brief message with a list of FAQs in an attempt to respond to the increasing number of media inquiries to the court. One question asked, “Is it a secret court?”

Ericksen responded that it was not, citing the public nature of the court’s “existence, makeup, and procedures” (which begets the question of whether there are courts whose existence, makeup, and procedures are not publicly known). But the ATRC closely models another court whose process is shrouded in secrecy despite its existence and procedures being very much in the public eye: the FISA court.

The FISA court was established in 1978 to hear classified applications for government surveillance. The chief justice selects its 11 judges to serve seven-year terms. The ATRC followed so closely after the FISA court that Congress intended for the five ATRC judges to come from the same pool of FISA judges. Currently, all five judges on the ATRC have served on the FISA court for at least two years, although the statute doesn’t formally require such overlap.

For years, civil libertarians have been critical of the FISA court for its secret proceedings and perceived lack of pushback against the government. Its classified hearings and the applications submitted to the FISA court rarely become public. From 1978 until 1996, the FISA court approved all of the government’s 8,827 requests for surveillance. Its appellate court, the FISA Court of Review, never convened. 

IMAGE: First order issued by ATRC.

In June, Congress failed to reauthorize FISA’s section 702, the statutory authority the government uses to bring many of its applications to the FISA court, in part, because of tensions over how rigorously the FISA court reviews government applications. Section 702’s critics argue that the FISA court lacks transparency and meaningful oversight from Congress or lawyers outside of government. Its proponents, on the other hand, point to the court’s reforms and the FISA judges’ past willingness to publicly criticize the government for cutting corners on FISA procedures. The FISA court has begun to reject some applications.

Supporters of the ATRC similarly highlight the FISA court’s expertise handling classified government applications to assert that the same judges, sitting in their position on the ATRC, will preside fairly over the process. But while the surveillance applications to the FISA court are kept under lock and key, what it reveals has to be disclosed later to the criminal defendants who face charges related to the surveillance. Classified materials submitted to an ATRC judge may never see the light of day.

So, Why Not Before?

Two decades ago, the 9/11 Commission’s staff report found that the Department of Justice had reviewed at least 100 cases for a possible application to the ATRC. Yet no applications were filed of the 100, or for the likely dozen cases to come during the Global War on Terror. The report attributed the inaction to “internal Justice Department deliberations” that appeared to be “overwhelmed” and “stalled” because of the ATRC’s “procedural complexities.”

Some of the court’s proponents, such as Aram Gavoor and Timothy Belsan, have argued the Justice Department and FBI may have been reluctant to introduce classified information without the confidence that the case would be a precedent-setting slam dunk. They point to the ATRC’s requirements to be able to introduce classified evidence without a summary for the defendant as being a high bar: The government has to prove that both the noncitizen’s presence and the disclosure of the summary would each “likely cause serious and irreparable harm to the national security or death or serious bodily harm to any person.” That standard of “serious and irreparable harm,” however, doesn’t appear in any terrorism provisions in the U.S. Code, or in any relevant court decision.

The summary itself, according to Gavoor and Belsan, also poses challenges for the government. A former high-ranking Department of Justice official reportedly told the pair for their 2020 law review article

The Department of Justice did not respond to a Court Watch request for comment in time for publication but told CNN that “This Department of Justice will use every tool available to bring alien terrorists to justice and remove them from the United States, including this court established by Congress in 1996.”

Meanwhile, the ATRC’s critics have argued the court is unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment and cited evidence of “secret courts” being more inaccurate than courts in which the prosecution and defense have equal access to information. As John Niles writes in a 2008 law review article, noncitizens have a sliding scale of constitutional rights based on their lawful status and time spent in the United States, with lawful permanent residents entitled to greater legal protections. Niles, however, argues noncitizens besides lawful permanent residents often have just as many ties to the community and liberties at stake as legal status holders, and contends Congress should extend the same special-attorney safeguard to them to avoid a constitutional challenge.

But the Department of Justice had another fundamental reason not to seek removal from the ATRC: its foremost duty to enforce the law. If federal prosecutors suspected a noncitizen of terrorism offenses, their first inclination is not likely to remove the citizen, but to prosecute and detain them in a federal prison, where officials can guarantee the threat is contained and that the noncitizen won’t try to re-enter the country. And under anti-terrorism laws expanded in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, including the USA PATRIOT Act, the scope of terror-related conduct was expanded. 

Justice Department officials likely saw a conviction for material support to a foreign terrorist organization as much more preferable than navigating a new court and its procedural pains, especially as Congress twice expanded the geographic scope of the material support statutes after Sept. 11. Meanwhile, traditional immigration courts still existed for noncitizens accused of lesser conduct or for cases that did not entail classified materials.

Why Now?

So, why did the Department of Justice decide to give the court life for the first time after 30 years?

First, the culture inside the Justice Department has shifted. There is more of an emphasis on ridding the United States of perceived terrorist threats rather than expending significant tax dollars to prosecute and keep them detained on U.S. soil. The Trump administration has also demonstrated its eagerness to argue novel strategies and to push legal boundaries as part of its immigration agenda. And the administration regularly touts its efforts to deport “Anti-American radicals.” These conditions likely encouraged National Security Division officials to believe they could take a chance on initiating ATRC proceedings without facing much institutional blowback if the case failed.

But the Department of Justice and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had to sign off on the application, may also feel confident that it possesses the factual predicates to bring such a case. Without knowing more, there are several reasonable guesses about the underlying facts of the case. The defendant is likely to be a lawful permanent resident because of subsequent legislation under the USA PATRIOT Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, which made it easier for the government to remove noncitizens who do not have lawful status for suspected criminal activity.

IMAGE: Shortly after receiving inquiries from Court Watch and Lawfare about the court processes, the ATRC released a FAQ on its site.

The classified information at issue may be derived through FISA-authorized surveillance or from a foreign intelligence service. The government wouldn’t want to burn a successful tool to monitor suspected terrorist activity unless it absolutely had to; the FBI itself might resist participating if it believed the matter could risk thwarting its investigation. Similarly, a foreign government would likely oppose revealing its own intelligence source, or having its officials testify in a U.S. court about its intelligence methods. The ATRC process allows the government to freely introduce FISA and foreign intelligence without notifying the defendant of its nature, unlike traditional criminal courts.

Gavoor, who previously served as senior counsel for national security in the Department of Justice’s Civil Division and now teaches at George Washington University Law School, told Court Watch, “My first gut instinct is that it wouldn’t make very much sense for the Justice Department to invest a major allocation of resources for litigation that is so novel unless there was good cause. The court didn’t even have a website before it was filed.” 

Gavoor continued, “That would lead me to conclude, because there is a FISA-similar reason, that the target of the case is in national security parlance a very bad guy, not just a bad guy.”

Judge Ericksen’s order requesting additional information from the government, and the Department of Justice following through in supplementing its application, appear to indicate that both are giving the ATRC’s first case the scrutiny it deserves. One curveball, however, could be if the Trump administration seeks to use the court as part of its strategy to crack down on left-wing activity, which some U.S. intelligence officials dispute the need for and allied countries have resisted embracing.

Answers about the case’s contents and its likelihood for success may be on the horizon. Gavoor told Court Watch, “This is a fast-track court. We’re going to know more within weeks or months, and certainly the entire matter will be entirely adjudicated at all of the appellate stages, presumably within a year.” 

Judge Ericksen will rule imminently on the Department of Justice’s first application to the ATRC. If she rejects the application, the Justice Department will have to decide whether to appeal to the D.C. Circuit. If, on the other hand, the application is accepted, the court will have its first public hearing in its history.

The ATRC was always an afterthought. When Congress debated the AEDPA, which established the court in 1996, Wittes reflected that legislators and the press “largely ignored” the court. “The Bluebook,” the standard citation manual for the legal field, didn’t even have a citation for the court. (A law student, Luke Frisco, recently suggested one following the news of the court’s revival: ATRC.) 

“Secret courts require great faith that the Justice Department—and future Justice Departments—will act with integrity,” Wittes wrote in 1996. “In the absence of more openness, nobody outside the national-security establishment will know how much freedom the secret court structures really cost,” he continued.

Now surfacing for the first time, the ATRC will have to determine for itself if it will become a major new instrument for national security cases or return to its long slumber. 

-30-

Welcome to Court Watch #184. We’re reliably told it’s a lot of pressure when a small news organization breaks big news. And sure, one could call us the Magellan of the Federal Courts (editor’s note: “many people are saying this”), discovering new marble-encrusted judicial hallways previously unexplored. But like Leo McGarry talking about a hole, we’ve been here before, and we know the way out. No less than a couple hundred times before. 

So, while we brought in more than 300 new subscribers who joined us since we broke the news of the previously dormant Alien Terrorist Removal Court having its first case while we wrote up some admittedly questionable prose (Law professor Steve Vladeck admittedly had the better writeup) as we sat on the tiled floor of a Bethany Beach house kitchen at midnight desperately hoping no family member walked in on the sad scene of a frazzled reporter who should be asleep on vacation trying to be first on a big story, we mostly just want to say welcome to the greatest newsletter you’ve never heard of. Every weekly writeup is a journey; after four years at Court Watch we’re still figuring out the destination. 

If you’re new here, you’re asking yourself three questions. First, how do we write such banger run-on sentence-induced ledes that perfectly weave 2000s TV show references while coyly mentioning our accomplishments? Second, upon reflection, shouldn’t you have broken up the sentences a bit for a better reader experience? And third, what did I just sign up for?

Oh, new reader, do we have an answer for you. Every Friday morning we highlight all the most fascinating court filings. This week in the federal dockets brought the heat. There’s a post office fight, a nepo baby getting his electronics seized, and Alaska had a week of no federal crimes till one angry bigot decided to ruin the streak for everyone.  Among other things.

Before we do all that, a quick note for people that think we should pivot to video. You got your wish, at least for a moment. We talked to Creator Spotlight about how we almost built a viable independent news organization but then decided to spend all our money on reporting expenses like idealistic idiots. Our bottom line’s loss, your gain. 

The Docket Roundup 

• There was a workplace beating that allegedly involved a metal pipe at a USPS mail processing facility in Philadelphia because a co-worker was “talking behind my back.” In other mail news, prosecutors say a postal carrier in Virginia was bribed for 200 dollars to steal mail for a purported scammer. 

• A man who allegedly went around to a church, hospital, and Temple University wearing a tactical vest and armed with a gun, claiming to be a federal agent, was indicted this week for impersonating a federal officer.

• The Justice Department successfully denaturalized an alleged Bosnian war criminal. We wrote about the uptick in denaturalization cases in April. He’s one of more than 65 since the start of the Trump II administration.

• Folks deported to El Salvador’s CECOT have sued the airline contractors that took them there. 

• A TikTok account named “trouble8650” led to exactly what you’d expect.

• An ex-FBI agent turned podcaster being sued by Alexis Wilkins, FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, has decided to defend his case pro se.

• The Department of Justice announced that it took down more than 1,000 illegal livestreams during the World Cup. To be fair, we don’t think there’s anything criminal about trying to find futbol coverage that doesn’t spend most of the first half of every game explaining to Americans what offside is. 

• Max Blumenthal sued the Department of Homeland Security after he said CBP agents took his phones after arriving back in the U.S. from a trip to Iran.

• “Ziz” Lasota’s attorney asked to be taken off the case, citing an “active conflict.” We’re fascinated by the upcoming trial of the alleged leader of an extremist deadly cult.

• A judge is beginning to lose patience with the U.S. government for detaining people they’re under a court order to not detain.

• A witness to an ICE-involved shooting in Houston asked for his habeas petition to be sealed, fearing retribution.

• Someone in the courts owes us 40 cents. 

• Our song of the week involves clapping and whistling. Just go ahead and dance like no one’s watching. Though if you’re feeling a bit melancholy, then go with this song. 

• The Justice Department’s Energy and Natural Resources Division made the government attorney version of ‘how I spent summer vacation’ and we’re very much here for it.

• Taco Bell was sued for Cyclospora. It’s one of more than a half dozen filed in the last few days.

• Another man was charged for allegedly messaging minors on X/Twitter.

• The feds seized a house in Missouri they say was paid for with funds embezzled from a kids’ daycare and summer camp.

• It made for good clicks when accusations became public, but there may be more to the story of a DHS official accused of having a sugar daddy and perhaps, just perhaps, it speaks to a media landscape that should occasionally skip an initial easy layup for views.

• “Unbeknownst to undersigned counsel, authorization to file the brief was provided to counsel without the brief having gone through a required internal review process…” is a something we’ve never seen before. 

• Congrats to Alaska for having a ten days completely devoid of new federal criminal cases. We’re sorry the streak was broken because some guy had to (allegedly) threaten the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan.

• For the record, all courts are special to us.

• The D.C. Circuit is accepting reviews of the Office of the Federal Public Defender for D.C. It's also accepting applications to be the next head D.C. federal public defender. The temptation of having a job with a free PACER expense account is calling to us. 

• There’s a new case against the FDA over sperm banks. 

• Your pro se of the week is a man from the Tar Heel state who calls himself “certainly a brighter legal eagle than anybody on Cable News Network (CNN)” and wants $500 billion.

• A Michigan man caught a charge for purportedly attempting to structure his bank deposits to avoid anti-money laundering reporting.

• Speaking of which, a bank in Florida is accused of failing to file the same anti-money laundering reports.

• Answering the age-old question, if you make a threat on a platform that no one uses does it still count as a crime? Apparently yes. Welcome to one of the first threat cases from Threads. 

• A store’s SNAP benefits were ended over a $3 bottle of Clorox. 

• The government filed its response to a defense motion in the case of a man accused of participating in the October 7th attack in Israel. In its response, the government pushed back that it should not have to turn over materials about the defendant collected by Israel.

• A man with a swastika flag in the background of his video allegedly threatened to kill jews, “gringos”, and “yankees.” 

• Litigants in a case about Elon Musk’s America PAC say the trillionaire and his crew are playing games over discovery.

• There was an ATM skimming scheme in Texas allegedly run by two men who went by “Giuseppe” and “Rinaldo.”

• Even ICE has to pay for PACER.

• Attention flacks and prosecutors, we’d welcome an invite to the Department of Justice’s new museum, which released a hype video as part of its grand opening this week.

• A crypto company’s pivot to AI apparently didn’t go well.

• Florida man threats (allegedly) strike again. This time at the National Archives and Records Administration. 

• Mahmoud Khalil sued the feds under the Federal Tort Claims Act. In the last month, he’s averaging a new lawsuit filed a week. 

• Always a bit jarring when the U.S. Attorney has to file a letter with the judge about a case in his district and includes the line, “I was not the decisionmaker for the motion to dismiss and I had no participation in drafting…”

Thanks for reading. For this Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we’re teaming up with Lawfare to understand what startup life is like for a new court. Finally, we quietly revamped our entire website, making it easier to find weekly roundups, Sunday series, and other stories. Reply to this email with any additional changes you think we should make to our site. Best suggestions get free Court Watch branded stadium cups and koozies.

Editor’s Note: A key legislative priority of First Lady Melania Trump, the recently enacted ‘Take It Down Act’ seeks to provide prosecutors and law enforcement with new legal options to help address the rising number of AI-generated nonconsensual intimate images. In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporter Peter Beck examines the first federal criminal cases brought under the new law and what the U.S. government is doing to protect victims of the Internet’s newest federal crime. - Seamus 

A woman in Ohio ended a romantic relationship with a guy she was seeing. And then the texts started.

At first it was texts from unknown numbers. Then it was violent voicemails and images of her nude. She recognized some of the pictures she received over text as ones she had taken. But other images not so much: they portrayed her changing her clothes and using the restroom, she had never seen before. Her mother began to receive the texts and images, too.

The woman was then sent more videos and images. This time, they depicted her having sex with various men, including her own father. But she could tell the images didn’t look right; they appeared glossy and mismatched. The body of the woman intended to be her didn’t even look like hers. The images were generated through artificial intelligence (AI).

After waiting almost two weeks for the texts to stop, the woman went to the local police in Hilliard, Ohio. She told her friends about what was happening. One of them, James Bradley Strahler II, was especially sympathetic to what she was going through and offered to leave his phone on so that she could get hold of him all the time. Strahler texted her:

However, the sympathetic support was all a ruse. In fact, Strahler went on to be the first person to be convicted under the Take It Down Act for his messages containing AI-generated harassment sent to at least six women. Passed in 2025, the act was the first major legislative push by Congress to criminalize illicit conduct—such as harassment in Strahler’s case—made more severe by AI. 

Strahler’s conviction and other recent prosecutions mark a test of how federal law enforcement and prosecutors will handle the growing number of AI-enabled crimes. The cases also offer early signals of how Congress and the courts will handle the constitutional and practical challenges to policing the greatest technological development of the twenty-first century.

Strahler was questioned two days after the woman contacted the Hilliard Police Department. Law enforcement said he admitted to sending the text messages, images, and voice mails, including one in which he threatened to rape her. He was arrested, charged with a municipal offense, and served with an order of protection, prohibiting him from contacting the woman. The texts seemingly stopped.

Then, three months later in April 2025, one of the woman’s coworkers began receiving text messages with the images. At least one of the images, according to a criminal complaint in the case, Strahler had admitted during his interrogation to previously sending. Local police reportedly warned Strahler to stop contacting the woman, her family, coworkers, or friends, but the messages didn’t stop. The woman started to receive calls from phone numbers spoofing the numbers of her bosses.

Local law enforcement allegedly discovered during a forensic examination of Strahler’s phone that she was just one of three women targeted by him. Strahler had dated the other two women, too. As with the first woman, Strahler's harassment extended to their mothers as well, finding their contact information and pictures online.

Strahler purportedly used the pictures to generate media with AI of the women engaged in incestuous relationships. He sent them the manipulated media and demanded actual nude images, threatening to send the AI-generated ones to their friends and family if they didn’t comply. 

He continued to escalate. “Did ur daughter [adult victim-4] get her big natural tits from your side of the family? Do you actually have big family tits or are they just deflated? Send a picture of them to me,” one text reportedly wrote. Another series of texts included in the criminal complaint stated, “Is this really you? Send pic of ur boobs or friends, family and co-workers will get this. You have hour. Tik tok Plenty to go out. Stop it all by sending ur boobs.”

IMAGE: FTC's TakeItDown Website. https://takeitdown.ftc.gov/

Meanwhile, Strahler uploaded the manipulated images of the first woman and her mom to an anonymous adult website. The same website was taken offline by Dutch authorities in May 2026 after reports that it was implicated in gender-based violence, trafficking, and assault. Twenty-three of the AI-generated images that Strahler uploaded allegedly depicted the woman and her mom engaged in inappropriate conduct with minors. 

A grand jury in the Southern District of Ohio indicted Strahler for publication of digital forgeries, two counts of cyberstalking, and production of child abuse. The first of the three charges, 47 U.S.C. § 223(h)(3)(A), was the criminal offense enacted under the Take It Down Act, designed to address AI-generated and other manipulated forms of adult media. Strahler pleaded guilty to all four on July 14, making him the first in the nation to be convicted under one of the U.S.’s most recent criminal laws. 

Federal prosecutors said he created more than 700 images of “both real victims and animated persons” to post to the now-removed adult website. Another 2,400 images on his phone were reportedly flagged for depicting adult content, child abuse material, or violence. 

All told, prosecutors said Strahler had installed more than 24 AI platforms on his phone and accessed more than 100 AI web-based models, a number far exceeding the frontier models hosted by the leading AI firms, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. The nature of the content created and the number of models Strahler accessed likely indicate he sought out AI models specifically used to generate adult content. 

In October 2023, less than a year after OpenAI’s ChatGPT publicly launched, reports began to emerge of high school students using so-called “nudify” tools to manipulate actual, innocuous images of their classmates into explicit materials. Public pressure for Congress to act mounted following the reports and brave testimony before congressional committees by minor victims and their families, including that of Elliston Berry, who was 14 when a classmate used AI to generate explicit images of her. 

Welcome The Rabbit Hole, our Sunday series where we take one docket, court document, or topic touching on the federal courts and dive deep. The Rabbit Hole is typically reserved for paid subscribers of Court Watch, reflecting the time and effort required to report the story deeply. However, with the influx of hundreds of new subscribers after we uncovered a previously dormant federal court, this issue is paywall-free so our new readers can get a sense of what this series is all about. If you want to receive next week’s The Rabbit Hole, consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

In response, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) introduced the Take It Down Act, which senators of both parties quickly rallied to support. The bill had two components. The first, the “take it down” portion, required covered platforms to establish a process to notify victims and remove explicit images of them published online without their consent. It also gave the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the ability to pursue enforcement action against providers that fail to meet their obligations, and the Department of Justice the ability to seize the websites that publish the media.

The FTC has since launched a website for people to report platforms that fail to remove deepfakes. The website also provides guidance to victims on how to report websites, ask platforms to take down nonconsensual images, and contact the FBI.

On June 12, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security announced that the act has been used since its May 2025 enactment to remove adult websites that reportedly publish nonconsensual images from the internet. Officials said the websites, which were brought to the U.S. government’s attention by Italian authorities, had been used to publish digital forgeries that were manipulated to portray images of famous women, including politicians, journalists, television presenters, anchors, athletes, entertainers, royalty, and even several countries’ first ladies. 

Visitors could reportedly search for videos with tags that included “rape,” “forced,” and “degradation.” The Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is conducting its own investigation into the sites, arrested a 47-year-old man in Nice, France, on June 10 who allegedly helped run the sites. The two websites targeted—CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com—now have notices citing the Take It Down Act and declaring that the Justice Department and other federal law enforcement agencies have seized them.

As Robert Frazer, the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, which handled the seizure, said, “For the victims whose images were distributed without their consent, the harm is not virtual — it is deeply personal and often enduring.”

The second part of the act prohibited “any person, in interstate or foreign commerce, to use an interactive computer service to knowingly publish a digital forgery of an identifiable individual.” The bill defined “digital forgery” as “any intimate visual depiction of an identifiable individual created through the use of software, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or any other computer-generated or technological means.” An “identifiable individual” was to be someone “who appears in whole or in part in an intimate visual depiction” and “whose face, likeness, or other distinguishing characteristic (including a unique birthmark or other recognizable feature) is displayed in connection with such intimate visual depiction.” The penalty was capped at a two-year prison sentence for offenses involving adults and a three-year sentence for those involving minors.

Amidst the bipartisan outrage over AI’s growing misuses, the bill moved quickly through Congress compared to other legislative attempts to overhaul online speech regulation, which raise myriad thorny issues both for the left and the right. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) briefly slowed down the bill’s process, raising concerns about several of the act’s provisions for using vague language and potentially overbroad criminal penalties. Several civil liberty and internet advocacy groups also voiced skepticism about the bill. 

Booker, however, soon reversed course amidst strong public pressure to pass the bill, allowing the Senate to pass the Take It Down Act with unanimous consent. The House passed a companion bill in April 2025, and President Trump signed it into law on May 19, 2025. Before Congress acted, almost every state had enacted at least one law regulating deepfakes.

Since the law was enacted in April 2025, the Department of Justice has filed charges in at least two other cases in addition to Strahler’s prosecution in Southern Ohio. On May 20, federal prosecutors announced separate charges against two men in the Eastern District of New York. One of them, a 51-year-old from New Jersey, allegedly uploaded AI-generated content to an adult website, depicting famous female politicians, actresses, musicians, and others. According to the criminal complaint, the FBI connected the 51-year-old’s DMV records to his profile picture on the adult site.

Law enforcement identified at least two of the politicians the man allegedly uploaded AI-generated videos of, including one based on her nickname in the article’s title. Prosecutors said the site listed his page as being visited at least 2.1 million times. A judge allowed the man to be released on a $50,000 bond before his trial.

The third defendant charged so far under the Take It Down Act, a 20-year-old from Texas, allegedly targeted famous and nonfamous victims alike. His accounts on adult websites, which prosecutors said have been viewed more than a million and a half times, allegedly advertised the content as depicting real people the account holder knew. One album reportedly included images that were manipulated from a series of innocuous graduation pictures taken from a high school yearbook to engage in sexual content. The 20-year-old allegedly published approximately 113 albums on an adult site, with at least 50 separate female victims.

So far, the Take It Down Act has provided the Department of Justice with a useful enforcement tool for the most prolific offenders, who use AI and other deepfake technology to create tens of thousands of nonconsensual images, generating millions of views on adult websites. Prosecutors have also shown a willingness to charge it in the most persistent cases, when a defendant allegedly continues to use AI to harass his victims, despite multiple interventions by law enforcement. These are the offenses that impact the largest number of victims and appear most on law enforcement’s radar.

What’s unclear, however, is how effectively the Take It Down Act will be able to be used to prevent the more isolated and targeted creation of nonconsensual adult content. As long as there are AI models available to “nudify” subjects, there will be ex-boyfriends, classmates, colleagues, and complete strangers who use the technology for nefarious reasons. 

These AI applications don’t just operate in the dark corners of the internet. They advertise on the largest adult websites and regular social media platforms. On X, where its owner has encouraged users to interact with Grok—xAI’s chatbot—on “spicy mode,” users frequently leave comments on women’s innocuous pictures asking Grok to generate inappropriate images of them. And on July 16, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu sent cease-and-desist letters to Apple and Google, demanding that the companies remove 13 “nudify” applications from their app stores. X itself also sued a Grok user this week for misusing the AI following his arrest for inappropriately exploiting minors.

As the the Justice Department begins to create a prosecutorial apparatus to address the growing number of instances in which AI has been used to create nonconsensual adult content, there will undoubtedly be a flood of new criminal cases. Strahler’s case is but the first step by prosecutors to stem the flood that is undoubtedly coming.

Created by Congress in 1996, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, has five federal judges appointed by the Chief Justice, to “to review applications for the removal from the United States of alien terrorists.”

The attorney general submits applications for removal to the court under seal. According to the Federal Judicial Center, it has never received an application since its founding. Until this week.

According to a court order posted on the newly-created Alien Terrorist Removal Court website, on July 15 the Attorney General submitted the court’s first application. On July 16, the court had a hearing with the government regarding the submission, the contents of the order have not been previously reported. Writing in the order, Judge Ericksen notes that the Justice Department’s answers “persuaded the Court that the government could benefit from the opportunity for more thoughtful consideration.”

The court has requested more information on the sealed application. DOJ has until July 22nd to do so.

This is a developing story.

07/30/26: Editor’s Note: This piece has been updated to correct language in a sentencing submission request for U.S. v. Laiss.

Welcome to Court Watch #183. Before we dive into the dockets for the week, we’re expanding a bit for Court Watch. First, we launched a consulting arm for those who need individualized research support or PACER training (oh hey newsrooms!) about how to use the U.S. court records system. Inquiries about hiring our expertise can be made here. 

Second, our friends/benevolent hosting overlords at beehiiv rolled out a new feature for our site called Community. Think of it as a slack-like channel for the Court Watch. As stories develop in-between the Friday roundups, we use that to post breaking court record news in that free channel. We already broke a few stories that went national through it in the last 24 hours, though we were mostly posting to an empty room. Let’s change that. If you’re an assignment editor or reporter, you probably want to join. If you’re in the private sector, think of it like our free version of this. In that Community, we also set up a channel for paid subscribers to ask us any questions you may have about finding a docket or document. And you can direct message us to alert us to the typo in our ninth bullet below. You can access the slack(ish) channel here. 

If it’s easier to keep up with, here are some step-by-step directions on how to make the channel an app on your phone for ease of use. We’ll be rolling out more channels and features in the coming days but drop us a line if there’s something you’d love for us to add. 

The Docket Roundup 

• A woman was indicted in Louisiana for giving a public official a bottle of Patron Silver Tequila, a $100 visa gift card, and the promise of a couple thousand dollars to help get a person out of immigration detention. 

• On Wednesday, some clerk or judge in the Eastern District of Virginia federal court system unlocked 58 dockets that should have been automatically unsealed in 2025. We see you and appreciate you. 

• Speaking of which, a search warrant in the Southern District of Texas was unsealed quickly after it was filed, something that has not happened in that district for years. We appreciate the U.S. Attorney's office transparency when it comes to search warrant filings. We look forward to citing their actions in future unsealing motions in that district and assume they’ll happily join us in our pleadings.  

• Apple sued OpenAI, alleging two former employees stole trade secret information on their way out.

• A congressional candidate in Florida who posted a bizarre online video this week in his Marine uniform about how the President was the antichrist was charged with threatening the President. Side note, we think this may be the first time anyone’s ever caught a federal charge because a journalist asked the Secret Service for comment. 

• A federal judge ordered the the U.S. government to stop using aggressive force against journalists.

• Judge Faruqui, with a particularly clear-eyed opening about how antiquated adoption laws are in more than a dozen states, orders the unsealing of birth records for a 72 year old man who wants to know who his birth parents were. 

• It’s a bit unusual for a terror suspect to win part of a motion for a bill of particulars, but a man accused of being part of the October 7th attack did this week. 

• One man in Georgia combined his reported love of antisemitism and anti-gay setiments into his hatred of Flock video cameras. 

• We like to think that the FBI agent had a fun time repeatedly explaining slang to a federal judge.

• A former chief operating officer of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence agreed to pay $20,000 for violating her post-employment agreement by contacting an employee at the office about a government contract bid.

• Anyone up for a story about international cocaine trafficking involving the Hell’s Angels?

• A former Afghan general and lawmaker was extradited to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges.

• The eight men accused of plotting to attack the UFC event at the White House were indicted by an Ohio grand jury.

• This case about a fraudulent deed comes out swinging: “Does a grandfather know the names of his grandchildren? Is perjury acceptable?”

• The Ninth Circuit upheld a district court judge’s order issuing a preliminary injunction on a Department of Treasury anti-money laundering rule that required banks located near the border to spend copious amounts of time on paperwork.

• Judge Kathleen Williams had some words for the administration about its settlement between President Trump and the IRS.

• We’re not money laundering experts, but moving more than hundreds of million dollars through an IT company clearly raised some eyebrows for law enforcement

• The government’s case in the Abbey Gate bombing prosecution may be in trouble (again).

• Arizona federal court system was down this morning so we can’t link directly to the court document, but we’d be remiss if we didn't note a local gun store there is accused of thousands of straw purchases. 

• Virginia Giuffre’s father sued Penguin RandomHouse over allegations made about him in her book, which recounted her abuse by Jeffrey Epstein.

• The photographer who captured Tupac Shakur’s shooting says Complex Magazine plagiarized his picture of it.

• An anti-Islamism conservative think tank appears to have had a pandemic fraud whistleblower case against it dismissed by this administration. 

• Let’s see if writing “I DO NOT CONSENT TO BE GOVERNED BY THE UNITED STATES” turns out well.

• The Department of Homeland Security was sued over a $1.8 million fine it reportedly imposed on an undocumented parent for seeking refuge in the U.S. with their minor child.

• Speaking of which, a whistleblower says he was unduly pushed out of DHS by Corey Lewandowski.

• The Justice Department announced the extradition of the leader of a transnational human smuggling ring.

• A dual U.S. and Iranian citizen was convicted after a nearly three-week jury trial of violating sanctions to export electronics to Iran.

• Watch out for those toilets at the Waffle House, a new lawsuit says.

• Mahmoud Khalil sued the Heritage Foundation, invoking the KKK Act of 1871.

• A pro se plaintiff who identifies himself as “Trump Genius” blessed us with 1,200 pages of exhibits.

• The D.C. Circuit said a federal judge didn’t have the power to block the U.S. Postal Service from making logistical changes that could have slowed down mail-in voting in the run-up to the 2020 election. 

• We’re simple folk. If you put a guy on a tractor in 2026 and make a song that sounds like it’s from the 1980s, we’re gonna automatically make it the song of the week. 

• A nonprofit media organization says the FCC is moving too slowly on applications to contest local Fox News stations’ broadcasting licenses.

• There’s an old-fashioned gold smuggling case brewing in Illinois. 

• The FBI says a former San Jose State University student drew racist and bigoted graffiti in bathrooms around campus as a hoax, trying to pin it on conservatives. A footnote notes that the alleged individual’s TikTok bio says he's “100% woke.”

• A foreign national pleaded guilty to returning to the U.S. after already being arrested and deported this year.

• Citing <checks notes> Trump v. CASA, K-Pop performers are seeking a multi-district injunction against selling bootleg shirts outside of concerts. 

• Prosecutors are seeking 3 to 6 months in prison in the case of a man who voted in the 2020 election in both Pennsylvania and Florida. Meanwhile, a judge denied the defense’s motion for a new trial. 

• The feds want to look for drugs in a van that was involved in a fatal shooting by ICE agents.

• A D.C. judge declined to grant emergency relief to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health after it petitioned the court to block the FTC and several states’ enforcement action over allegations that the association engaged in unfair or deceptive advertising.

• There’s a money laundering case out of Massachusetts.

• OFAC, India, and a demand for $275 million are all in this pro se case in New York.

• A 64-year-old former advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was sentenced to 38 months in prison for sharing “restricted information” with Chinese intelligence operatives.

• The alleged January 6th pipe bomber’s lawyers are continuing to press claims that a former Capitol Police officer is the actual culprit.

• Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary was sued over data center defamation.

• An interesting challenge to Tennessee’s death row process, which was filed in D.C., fell short.

• (whispers) A particularly clever media lawyer may wait till they file the sealed documents in the Trump/Capital One debanking lawsuit and then file a motion for consideration to unseal because it's of public interest. 

• There was an attempted arson at a Philadelphia mosque.

• If you made it this far, come nerd out with us over at Lawfare about the implications of a major terrorism appellate ruling.

Thanks for reading.

The Washington Post says we’re “the masters of PACER.” Politico notes we’re a “renowned expert at scouring unsealed court filings for overlooked news.” CBS remarked that we are “credited for discovering some of the most high-profile indictments of our time that could have very easily been overlooked.” The Columbia Journalism Review posits that our “research and investigative work has repeatedly broken news that the press would have otherwise missed.” Even the Justice Department concedes we’re ‘well-known PACER watcher[s].” 

We appreciate the praise, but let’s put it more succinctly: we are very good at what we do. In hushed tones we may even argue that we’re the best in the world at it. And while our expertise makes for boring dinner conversation, it is a valuable skill to have at a time where people are desperately seeking someone to provide verifiable facts instead of online slop. Using more than a decade of experience with the U.S. courts system, we have a keen understanding of the 94 federal districts, how they file documents, and how to find the seemingly unfindable in the byzantine court records system. It’s also why hundreds of journalists a year seek our counsel for their news stories, and how we routinely break national news on our site. 

And we’ll let you in on a little secret: because the PACER paywall makes mass accessing court filings comically cost-prohibitive, no A.I. system can replace our research methods. Only dedicated expertise can find the right court documents in a sea of filings.

Which is why we’re happy to announce the newest initiative, The Research Desk. It was built on a simple premise: the most interesting stories in America are sitting in federal court dockets. The Research Desk allows us to put our expertise to work for your organization through records training, docket monitoring, and custom research.

Records Training

We offer specialized training for newsrooms, law firms, financial institutions, non-profits, and research organizations on how to navigate the convoluted world of federal court records. Years of daily work inside PACER and RECAP have taught us where the system's gaps are and how to exploit them to surface new cases and filings before anyone else knows they exist.

Organizations we've trained include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Reuters, CNN, ProPublica, USA Today, CBS News, ABC News, and FoxNews. 

Continuous Monitoring And Databases

Need eyes on a specific issue, industry, or defendant? We provide ongoing docket monitoring using a combination of manual and automated processes refined over years of practice. Our method identifies new federal court records and trends that matter to your organization, and often faster than the alerts you're paying for now.

Past monitoring engagements include:

• Identifying new federal money-laundering cases for a financial due diligence firm

• Monitoring ongoing and new court cases involving artists and celebrities for a major music magazine

• Real-time updates on new federal cases for an nongovernmental organization tracking wildlife smuggling in the United States

• Tracking ongoing hacking criminal cases for a cybersecurity company

Custom Research

Have a question buried somewhere in the federal docket? We build structured datasets, track case categories across districts, and verify claims against primary court documents. We’re happy to tailor our expertise to your project idea. 

Get in Touch

Interested in training, monitoring, or custom research? Drop us an email here. 

Editor’s Note: The term ‘influencer’ conjures up thoughts of brand deals, quick-cut videos, and a constant stream of content designed to keep you watching. One viral video spurs thousands of copycats in an endless and fleeting quest for online engagement.  For this week’s The Rabbit Hole, we look at how that influencer culture has seeped into the U.S. courts. - Seamus 

We live in an era of clicks. Social media influencers record flashy 30-second videos with impeccable lighting. Journalists craft the perfect headline full of buzzwords for search engine algorithms. Accounts on X, like Polymarket and Popbase, add “BREAKING” and fire alarm emojis to game engagement. And press shops—both for political and corporate interests—lean into gimmicks, piling onto the latest wave of virality. 

It’s cute, and it sometimes even makes the subject relatable. But it lacks sincerity because the unstated purpose of “growing the brand” is so transparent. 

Recently, there’s been a steady stream of court cases that follow this pattern of flashy, often spurious legal claims coupled with coordinated media roll-out campaigns. Many of these cases appear intended to maximize the impact on public perception as much as, and even occasionally more than, winning in court.

Mr. Shakespeare got it almost correct. All the court’s a stage, and all the lawsuits are merely players. 

Which brings us to a cat, a couch, and the Vice President of the United States. 

On July 7, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a civil complaint in the District of Maine on behalf of a woman who claims she was denied entrance to an official event for criticizing Vice President JD Vance on her cat-themed Instagram account. At face value, the complaint had some merit and constitutional significance in its claims: Elected office holders have to open their official events to the general public, and the Secret Service can’t prevent someone from attending an event for First Amendment-protected speech.

Amanda McGonigle, the plaintiff and the person behind the “CatsOnACouch” Instagram account, was set to attend the event in Bangor, Maine, on May 14, where Vance would tout the newly formed White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. McGonigle registered to attend the event through the official website for the Office of the Vice President.

McGonigle’s CatsOnACouch, which “exists purr-ly to troll the current administration & have more followers than JD Vance,” has more than 600,000 followers on Facebook and 1.9 million on Instagram. McGonigle calls it a “petty cat account.” She reportedly launched it in response to Vance’s comment about Democratic voters consisting of “childless cat ladies” in 2024.

IMAGE: Screenshot from ACLU of Maine’s website.

According to the lawsuit, McGonigle has a habit of attending Vance’s official events and voicing her criticism of the administration. At another event in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in July 2024, a Secret Service agent purportedly said that “of course” they knew about her CatsOnACouch account.

The agents reportedly denied McGonigle entry into the Maine event in May and told her, “We know where you stand.” McGonigle and her lawyers at the ACLU asked for a judge to rule that the Secret Service excluded her based on politically protected speech and bar the Secret Service from prohibiting her future attendance.

The same day that the ACLU filed its complaint on behalf of McGonigle, it issued a press release. In the release, a staff attorney on the case stated, “Ms. McGonigle's satirical social media content is purr-tected speech. Punishing her for her catty commentary is a cat-aclysmic blow to the First Amendment.”

No fewer than six ACLU lawyers are representing ‘CatsOnACouch’. The same day the lawsuit was docketed in Maine, there were 12 habeas corpus lawsuits filed in the Western District of Louisiana for people requesting release from immigration detention for being held for more than six months, a status that, in past times, would have triggered immediate release, but now is up against a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that views each case as an individualized set of circumstances. The majority of the plaintiffs are arguing for their freedom without the assistance of any legal counsel.

In April 2020, the conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch filed a civil complaint in the Western District of North Carolina, alleging that counties in North Carolina were “not taking the steps required by law to remove ineligible registrations from the voter rolls.” The complaint, citing the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), argued that the counties, including Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, were clearly in violation of the NVRA, which requires election officials to purge ineligible voters, because the number of voters exceeded Judicial Watch’s estimates for the eligible voters in a given county.

As Judicial Watch filed its case in federal court, it issued a broader press release, announcing its findings in North Carolina and four other states. The organization claimed it had uncovered an astonishing 2.5 million extra voter registrations from 378 counties nationwide. Conservative websites, such as the Epoch Times, lauded Judicial Watch for its election integrity efforts. The legal watchdog included the North Carolina case in a fundraising email sent several weeks later as part of its “campaign for clean elections.”

However, in August 2021, a federal magistrate debunked Judicial Watch’s claim that high voter registration rates indicate a violation of the NVRA, writing that the rates were expected “because of the long time period involved in removing ineligible voting records required by NVRA.” The judge also noted that Judicial Watch had filed the case, despite the State of North Carolina writing back to the organization just eight days before about its process for removing ineligible voters. The magistrate judge recommended that Judicial Watch’s complaint be dismissed.

Then, Judicial Watch and the State of North Carolina appeared to enter into settlement negotiations to end the case. However, the State of North Carolina—riding its win in front of the magistrate judge—didn’t agree to any stipulations beyond dismissing the case. In the end, Judicial Watch agreed to voluntarily dismiss the case, which a U.S. District Judge ordered with prejudice, and North Carolina continued its regular process for removing ineligible voters from its rolls.

Judicial Watch, however, touted and fundraised off of the result. In February 2022, the conservative site The Gateway Pundit described the case as “another huge win for Judicial Watch.” Judicial Watch, meanwhile, said it had successfully pressured North Carolina to remove more than 430,000 ineligible registrants from voter rolls. It continued to fundraise off of the decision, citing it in press releases as recently as May 2026 as an example of its legal pressure leading to “election roll clean-ups.”

Judicial Watch was previously sued in 2007 when a whistleblower it had agreed to represent for allegations related to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign in New York accused the organization of using his case for fundraising while doing little to litigate his case. A judge partially narrowed the suit in 2008, ruling that Judicial Watch’s president, as a nonlawyer, couldn’t be held to an attorney’s fiduciary duty. The case continued against the organization itself until it was fully dismissed a year later: After the whistleblower’s attorney was disqualified over a conflict of interest, the whistleblower never obtained new counsel, and the case was thrown out for failure to prosecute.

President Trump’s own litigation strategy has often appeared to many to be more bluster, tying in political and financial messaging, rather than concrete legal claims. His recent defamation cases, including those against Paramount, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the New York Times, have frequently combined flimsy legal claims with a torrent of public pressure on the companies to settle. So far, the strategy has only succeeded in pressuring ABC News and Paramount, the later of which is in the midst of a major merger with Warner Brothers Entertainment, to settle. But the defamation suits have also been an effective tool of political messaging, pitting Trump against his long-running foes in the “mainstream media” and providing an opportunity for his campaign to fundraise off of it.

But partisan-leaning organizations and politicians aren’t the only ones that deploy lawsuits as part of their public relations strategy. In August 2020, Epic Games, the developer behind the immensely popular video game Fortnite, sued Apple in the Northern District of California over its control of the App Store. The saga began when Epic Games updated the Fortnite app so that users could purchase “V-Bucks,” Fortnite’s in-game currency, directly through the company rather than through Apple and Google, which runs its own app store for Androids. 

Speaking of performative public acts, last issue we said if ten people became paid Court Watch subscribers, we’d drop our usual paywall for today’s piece. You all answered the call. If we pick up another ten new paid subscribers or tips, we’ll make next week’s open to the world too. Support independent journalism, become a paid subscriber or donate to our tipjar.

This move cut Apple and Google out of the picture, as both charge a fee for purchases through their app stores, violating the terms of service companies have to abide by in order to sell on the app stores. Apple and Google responded by removing the Fortnite app entirely from their app stores. Epic Games, in turn, sued Apple, arguing that it exercised a monopolistic control over its app store, and asked a judge to order Apple to restore Fortnite to the store and award Epic Games damages.

The whole tit-for-tat, however, appeared to be orchestrated to create a backlash against Apple and its hold over the App Store. By some reports, Epic Games had begun planning the lawsuit and an ensuing public relations campaign, dubbed Project Liberty, in 2018, two years before the civil case was filed in California. The company reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the run-up to the case, paying public relations firms to prepare its media strategy. One internal document purportedly described the upcoming legal battle as “fun!”

IMAGE: Screenshot from Epic’s lawsuit against Apple

Shortly after Epic Games announced the civil suit against Apple, its account on X (then Twitter) posted a video spoofing Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial announcing its Macintosh computer. In the video, Fortnite players are portrayed as standing up to an animated apple. The text then reads,  “Epic Games has defied the App Store Monopoly. In retaliation, Apple is blocking Fortnite from a billion devices. Join the fight to stop 2020 from becoming ‘1984’. #FreeFortnite”

As part of its media strategy, Epic Games also helped establish a “Coalition for App Fairness” targeting Apple and Google. Apple, for its part, took notice and crafted parts of its legal arguments to call out Epic Games for Project Liberty.

The litigation over the case is still ongoing. Both sides have come away with modest victories, with Epic Games winning its claims under California’s Unfair Competition Law but Apple prevailing on the antitrust issues. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in the case over a civil contempt order against Apple.

Apart from two major corporations feuding, some up-and-coming businesses have crafted marketing ploys around their legal strategy. In 2023, the Supreme Court unanimously sided with Jack Daniel’s, the iconic whiskey company, against a dog toy company, VIP Products. The dog toy company sued Jack Daniel’s in 2014 to protect its trademark on a dog toy called “Bad Spaniels,” which resembled Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottles. 

The lawsuit against Jack Daniel’s, a much larger company that has many times over the legal resources and funds of VIP Products, appeared illogical. But the lawsuit against Jack Daniel’s led to tons of free media and press attention that a small dog toy company would otherwise only dream of. The attention compounded as the case wound its way through the district court, the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court for more than 10 years.

When Justice Elena Kagan announced the opinion of the Court in favor of Jack Daniel’s in 2023, she held up the Bad Spaniels chew toy. The gallery erupted in laughter as Kagan held up the toy and read the ingredients inscribed on it, advertising “43% poo by volume, 100% smelly” instead of Jack Daniel’s 40 percent proof.

To be sure, litigation has always been tactical and had some fanfare behind it. The Supreme Court’s notorious 1896 case condoning segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson, arose when a citizens’ committee composed of Black men in New Orleans raised funds for a private detective to arrest Homer Plessy in a whites-only train car, who was 7/8ths white, and represent him in the litigation up to the Supreme Court. The strategy backfired in upholding segregation, but the lone dissent, written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, set the pathway for the legal strategy that eventually overturned it. However, searching for the strongest defendant to overturn a systemic injustice is different from filing a dead-on-arrival lawsuit covered by every major news organization about whether the Trump administration can host a sporting event. (‘Could a Federal Lawsuit Stop the UFC Fight at White House on Trump’s Birthday? Here’s What to Know’, one of many news reports designed to hit on every search term optimization possible while simultaneously noting the lawsuit has a snowball's chance in hell of receiving a favorable ruling).

The hero myth of the performative lawsuit has seeped into all aspects of our culture. We cheer the Saul Goodmans of the world and smirk when Julia Roberts has the water brought in special for the opposing counsel. The rivalry between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla in their race to innovate electricity, and the ensuing patent litigation around it, made enough headlines at the time to resurface in the 2017 movie “The Current War,” featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Michael Shannon.

The drive for clicks and litigation as a form of fundraising or advertising mechanism makes for a good story. It hits on all of our favorite tropes. There is some aspect of ridiculousness or seemingly precious tea that pulls us in. Then an overwhelming sense from our social media feeds and favorite news opinion sites to pick a side in the legal fight. Are you Team Justin or Team Blake? Take our quiz; society demands it.  

If you cover the courts long enough, over time, the endorphin hit of the flashy clickbait lawsuit slowly loses its high. And what’s left is a judicial hangover where only slightly more than one in four low-income citizens trust the U.S. legal system. And who could really blame them? Some of the best lawyers in America would never touch a case if it doesn’t result in TV cameras, and some of the worst lawyers in America can only win if it does. If the current wave of performative lawsuits feels inherently gross, it is because it is. It gums up the system such that the true daily injustices never have a chance for the sunlight. A place where people’s freedom is limited by lack of counsel. It causes storied nonprofits to represent trolling Instagram accounts and politicians and advocacy groups to chase fleeting headlines explicitly designed to enrage their supporters. 

The courts, at their very best, are a place for serious debate. It can decide who is a citizen, who can vote, and in some select cases, who can live. Lawsuits that are filed specifically to drive online engagement cheapen that immense responsibility. 

However, as Shakespeare’s traveler, Jacques, notes so eloquently, eventually the stage ends, and we’re left sans cameras, sans clicks, sans everything. 

-30-

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Welcome to Court Watch #182. We took last week off for America’s birthday. Looks like the U.S. men’s soccer team decided to take this week off. Unlike theirs, our week off was at least defensible. But to each their own. Our seven-day reprieve from the courts means that this roundup is packed with copious amounts of ridiculousness. From internet memes to AI defamation lawsuits to repeat stowaways, and everything in between. 

Unlike a certain American soccer star, this issue does not underperform.

The Docket Roundup

• Name any other media organization that in the defense of transparency beat the Justice Department <checks notes> twice in federal court in a week. The rest of the Fourth Estate can pivot to video; we’re pivoting to being awesome. Help us keep fighting for transparency by becoming a paid subscriber or leaving a tip. 

• Speaking of which, the U.S. Courts announced they’re doing a “modest temporary increase in fees” to access court records. We ran the numbers, if we pulled the same number of records next year as we did this year, the “modest temporary increase in fees” the increase will cost us an extra $3,600. 

• Every judge in the Middle District of Tennessee recused themselves in a Candace Owens/Charlie Kirk related lawsuit. No reason was given but we’re pretty sure it’s because Owens' lawyer sued the court district last year.

• Judge Sparkle Sooknanan signed off on a settlement between Elon Musk and the SEC, despite her instinct that something was off.

• Another group of J6ers sued the government. The 93-page civil complaint is something.

• A new immigration suit says the State Department gave sensitive information about asylum seekers to the Iranian government.

• The Wall Street Journal wants a judge to force a Berkeley professor to comply with their copyright subpoena. 

• There’s a power struggle at the Professional Tennis Players Association. 

• A nanny who was accused of squatting in a million dollar house has sued Vox Media for defamation. Eagle-eyed readers, or maybe just us, would notice that the motion’s file name was “CoCounsel Skills Results.” Shoutout to Thompson Reuters AI programming.

• Camp Mystic, the Texas camp where dozens of children drowned during catastrophic floods, asked for a judge to let it do payroll after declaring bankruptcy.

• Pardon attorney Ed Martin is trying an Uno reverse card in his D.C. bar disciplinary proceedings.

• A judge in the Eastern District of New York said not so fast to prosecutors’ request to dismiss a case brought under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

• Look, until we can figure out what ‘6 7’ means, we shouldn’t be arguing over who can put it on chicken nuggets.

• A man was arrested for the second time for allegedly trying to sneak into the U.S. as a stowaway.

• Last year, there was a public outcry after it was revealed that a federal judge teaching at the University of Florida’s law school gave an award to a student based on an essay that espoused white supremacist ideals. As part of that outcry, one woman allegedly commented on Instagram, “I wish someone would in alive him,” which the judge apparently noticed and reported to the U.S. Marshal’s Service. Now the woman’s defense attorney and federal prosecutors are quibbling over whether it amounts to a direct threat and whether “him” refers to the judge and the “in alive” was really a “un alive”.

• The South Carolina magistrate judge accused of possessing and distributing child abuse material pleaded guilty.

• It’s buried on page 22 of a bankruptcy filing so every reporter missed it, but interesting that President Trump told the FCC Chairman to make a deal with the EchoStar Chairman about keeping their spectrum.

• A jury in the Eastern District of Virginia convicted a 23-year-old man of posing as a girl on X/Twitter to message and extort a 14-year-old.

• The Feds took 32 dogs from a breeder in Iowa and placed them at a local shelter.

• A 37-year-old New York woman is accused of sending over $30,000 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

• If you’re the type of person like us who has wondered what would happen if a sovereign citizen tried to go through TSA at the airport, we have the answer for you.

• The FBI says a 19-year-old helped lead a group of ransomware hackers. Also, including the Sopranos edit in the filing was a nice touch.

• A judge declined to grant a temporary restraining order against the State of Florida over its forthcoming state-level designation of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a terrorist organization. And their motion for reconsideration. Here’s their original civil complaint.

• Speaking of Florida, there’s a First Amendment case over beachgoers and no-trespassing signs.

• Federal prosecutors in California may have to dismiss an anti-money laundering case after a defense attorney says they screwed up their timeline. 

• The alleged J6 pipe bomber is not covered by President Trump’s pardons, according to a D.C. judge.

• We apologize in advance to introducing you to a song of the week that won’t leave your head all weekend. 

• Federal defenders are challenging the superseding indictment charging a man accused of participating in the October 7th attack. The Justice Department pushed back.

• An Ohio judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s new immigration policy, which gave preferential treatment for benefits based on nationality.

• Three guards at Rikers were allegedly caught up in a fake check scheme.

• A Wisconsin 19-year-old pleaded guilty to material support for trying to travel to join ISIS. And a Maryland 22-year-old was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the same.

• The case in the Eastern District of Virginia over the Department of Justice’s purported anti-weaponization fund has officially gone off the rails, with two pro se litigants trying to jump into the fray. Judge Leonie Brinkema, however, says they can’t be considered for compensation because the fund doesn’t exist.

• An alleged fentanyl ring in the Eastern District of Virginia was busted. The investigation took some interesting twists and turns, beginning with a homicide.

• Texas Tech University was sued in a First Amendment case over new classroom content guidelines.

• The Justice Department secured a 30-year sentence against a Lebanese man who used his ties to the Assad regime in Syria to run an international cocaine empire.

• We’re a little at a loss for words about the guy who allegedly stole both a truck from Virginia’s parole office and a bunch of chainsaws from the U.S. Forest Service all in the same day.

• A former Cornell PhD student reportedly stalked other members of his church, including two other students who participated in a campus ministry with him at Cornell. He appeared to be suffering from a mental health crisis.

• Two more men were accused of participating in the plot to attack the UFC event at the White House.

• Your pro se of the week takes on DOGE.

• On that note, a judge in New York wants DOJ to confirm that DOGE is dead.

• A woman who represents herself as an expert on January 6th cases sued more J6 defense attorneys for allegedly plagiarizing her. 

• An Arizona police officer allegedly tipped off a local drug ring about future search warrants.

• A leader of the online terror network 764 was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

• The government could not convince a D.C. judge to stay her order preventing the U.S. Government from creating a national voter database.

• The feds will take your house if you lie on your resume (and allegedly run a multimillion-dollar investment scheme).

• In surprising news, a man with the handle ‘PoisionDartPepe’ was arrested for being a bigot. 

• Robert Hlovchie, a self-described Nazi in Pennsylvania was indicted for threatening mass shootings against democrats, transgender individuals, Muslims, and Mexicans.

Thanks for reading. For Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we will begrudgingly argue for more performative lawsuits. 

Editor’s Note: The world of sports brings out raw human emotion unlike anything else. The last minute goals, the walk-off homeruns, the one-handed endzone catch. There is an intensity and a competition of it all that is infectious and by its very nature demands conflict. On TV, on online messaging boards, and social media, sports commentators and fans alike will endlessly argue about who are the greatest players or teams. But for all the bluster, it comes down to a simple question: what is that person’s legacy? In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporter Gabrielle Russon brings us from the tennis court to the federal court to try to answer the question. -Seamus

The adult children of a legendary tennis leader are serving the United States Tennis Association in a legal battle over their seats for the U.S. Open. 

William “Bill” Hester III  and his sister, Katie, sued the USTA for breach of contract this year in a federal lawsuit that has been transferred from Mississippi to the Southern District of New York.  

“We look at this as a David versus Goliath thing, but we've got a pretty big slingshot,” Bill said. 

The story begins in the late 1970s when their father, William “Slew” Hester, pushed to move the United States Open from a small, private club to a new, bigger tennis facility constructed at Flushing Meadows in partnership with the city of New York.

It was a controversial move, and Slew faced plenty of critics at the time in addition to a tight 10-month construction timeline to complete the facility before the Grand Slam tournament began. He quipped it would be his biggest accomplishment or mark his end. 

But Slew’s son also described his dad as an internal optimist and a natural risk taker, completely devoted to his beloved game of tennis.

“If he set his mind to do something, he was going to do it,” Bill said. “Not achieving the goal was not even a discussion.”

And Slew succeeded. A record-breaking crowd of 275,000 people attended the first 1978 U.S. Open in the new tennis facility that would change the game forever and become a big moneymaker for the UTSA.

Slew, the president of USTA and the U.S. Open, got credit for singlehandedly doing the political maneuvering for the construction of the National Tennis Center that was later dubbed “the House That Slew Built.”

A bronze plaque with Slew’s face puffing on one of his famous cigars with the words “His vision and boundless energy created this center” was posted on the main entrance to welcome the visitors to the U.S. Open.

“That's how important he was,” his son said.

As a thank you in 1980, the USTA Board gifted Slew lifetime box seats at the Louis Armstrong Stadium, the later home of the U.S. Open’s most high-profile matches.

Slew accepted the box and asked for the lifetime rights to be passed down to his three children.

It was an amazing view.

“The box was located at the back of the court, down the middle service line — the best seats in the house,” the Hesters’ lawsuit said. “Slew and his family attended every U.S. Open. It is not just a sporting event for the Hesters; it is a family ritual.”

Getty Images

Bill remembered sitting in the box and watching John McEnroe and Björn Borg and other famous matches in U.S. Open history, 

Four years after Slew’s 1993 death, the tournament’s main matches moved into the Arthur Ashe Stadium. That’s when the Hesters’ legal fight began. 

“Instead of offering the Hesters seats in Arthur Ashe Stadium that were comparable to their box seats in Louis Armstrong Stadium, the USTA stuck them in a corner with sightlines blocked by the umpire’s chair,” the federal lawsuit said. “At the same time, the USTA told them to open their pocketbooks to attend.”

The Hesters sued and reached a 1998 settlement that gave them lifetime subscription rights for a premier box at Arthur Ashe for an “applicable annual charge,” which cost $45,000 the first year, according to court records. 

“In the thirty years since, the USTA has at every turn worked to undermine the settlement agreement and freeze the Hesters out,” the lawsuit said.

The annual charge to use the box steadily increased over the years, and the Hesters said they paid about $215,000 last year for the fee.

"We appreciate and respect the contributions Slew Hester made to the U.S. Open,” the USTA said when reached for comment for this story. “While the USTA does not comment on pending litigation, it is important to note that the USTA has honored its commitment to the Hester family by offering them the opportunity to purchase seats in a location comparable to their previous seats under the same terms and conditions offered to other purchasers.”

Last year, the Hesters said they learned their box would be completely removed as part of an Arthur Ashe Stadium renovation. They were offered eight tickets in Row E, Section 112.

“Incredibly, after unilaterally eliminating the box seating it promised the Hesters, the USTA put a $460,000 price tag on the new, non-box seats for the 2026 U.S. Open,” the lawsuit said, adding the cost will increase to $584,000 by 2030.

Bill, a 79-year-old retired labor lawyer from New Orleans, has never missed a U.S. Open (except for the pandemic), and he plans to be there again this summer, although he isn’t thrilled with his seats. He said he worries about other people walking in front of him. His sister from Jackson, Miss., was also a lawyer and specialized in the casino gaming industry.

Their father “was gifted a box for his life and our life as a reward for having done what he did for the U.S. Open, and they've taken that away,” Bill said. “And we're not going to give up.”

Meanwhile, the Hesters complained that the organization is also wiping away their dad’s legacy.

Slew’s plaque, originally on display at the main entrance of the National Tennis Center, was moved to the side of the Louis Armstrong Stadium, the Hesters said in the lawsuit. The plaque finally ended up at a dead-end exit ramp, but when they looked for it during the 2025 U.S. Open, the plaque had disappeared, they said.

“Quite frankly, he's out of sight, out of mind,” said Bill, who wants the plaque returned to what he considers its rightful spot in the U.S. Open’s main entrance.

The USTA told Court Watch that “the plaque recognizing Mr. Hester's contributions was taken down, along with numerous other plaques and signage, to protect them from damage during the extensive construction and redevelopment work currently underway on the grounds. The removal related to those construction efforts and was not intended to diminish our appreciation for the legacy of former USTA President Slew Hester, but to preserve its integrity for the future."

-30-

Welcome to Court Watch #181. We’ll get to the weekly roundup below, but first, let’s get Kafkaesque. Long time, or let’s be honest, even short-term readers of Court Watch may know that we have a healthy disdain for the current state of the public’s ability to access federal court records. In recent weeks, we’ve lamented about the hoops the public has to jump through just to read court records and highlighted a nationwide movement to unlock thousands of dockets. You may also recall that at the beginning of May, we wondered out loud whether law enforcement had, by way of interagency confusion or change in facts, may have been about to release a man from ICE detention who the government previously tagged as a “known or suspected terrorist.” Two weeks later, we had an answer. 

But, because it was a habeas case, we only had a small glimpse into the docket. In order to get the full picture, we would have to travel to El Paso, Texas. And while we appreciate any location that is the purported birthplace of the margarita, the idea of taking two flights and a day of travel to pick up documents that are public but only available at a courthouse seemed a bit much. Also, the costs associated with such travel would be more than our small news organization can bear. So we needed a hero. Enter Christopher Beall, a lawyer who, among other things, specializes in First Amendment cases. He also happens to be a long-time Court Watch subscriber. He reached out and offered his pro bono services to file a motion to allow for public remote access to the docket. Given that Beal has a history of winning cases for us, we jumped on the opportunity.

In our 18-page motion to unrestrict the docket, we noted that “In particular, the Order of Immediate Removal (Doc #19, May 13, 2026) indicates that the Government had designated petitioner as a ‘Known Suspected Terrorist’ and had listed his removal matter as ‘High-Profile Removal.’ (Doc. #19 at 2.) These designations demonstrate a heightened interest in the petitioner’s case, and they underscore the need for full, unrestricted public access to the court file.”

The judge agreed with us and ordered the documents to be available online. We didn’t think we should have to hire a lawyer and file a motion to get access to documents that were already public, but you play the cards you’re given in the federal courts.

We reviewed the newly unrestricted documents, and to be honest, they don’t really rise to the level of another standalone story. That should have been that. Our readers get a sense of the labor-intensive exercise it takes to even evaluate whether something is newsworthy. We were content to move onto other reporting. But alas the story wouldn’t end there. Shortly after filing the judge’s order, the Justice Department filed a motion to reconsider the decision. We were keen to respond to their arguments in our own new motion, but pending the reconsideration, the docket was locked again. As such, and we can’t believe this is a sentence we have to write: We didn’t have access to the DOJ filing on the docket responding to our own filing.

If this all seems ridiculous, it’s because it is.  

So off Beall went to write a late Wednesday motion to respond to a motion we couldn’t read. In our response motion, we noted in a footnote that “Court Watch can only say that it ‘appears’ the Government has filed a motion for reconsideration solely because the PACER docket for this case says so. No such motion has been served on undersigned counsel for Court Watch, nor is the motion itself accessible on PACER. Indeed, the Notice of Electronic Filing for the Government’s filing of this motion shows that it was sent only to counsel for the Respondents through the ECF-CM e-filing system, and not to counsel for Court Watch.”

Based on previous communication with the clerk, we had reason to believe that the DOJ filing would raise concerns that we didn’t alert the original petitioner to our motion to unrestrict. But DOJ’s own filings say they couldn’t reach the petitioner themselves. Writing in our new motion, we noted that “any argument by the Government that Court Watch’s motion should be held in abeyance until the Petitioner is given an opportunity to respond is an exercise of Kafkaesque futility because the Government itself has already confirmed to the Court that it too has no ability to communicate with Petitioner. In the Government’s filing on May 20, 2026, the Government informed the Court that the phone number it has for Petitioner “was not valid, and the call would not go through.” (Doc. #22.) Thus, the Government already knows that it is not possible to confer with Petitioner regarding issues in this case.”

On Thursday morning, DOJ finally sent us a copy of their motion. In it, they do raise the concern about alerting the petitioner. They also raise concerns about the potential for ‘doxxing’ government officials because the names of officials deciding the petitioner’s release would be available in the filings, an argument that was never previously raised by them when we filed originally. Again, these government documents were never filed under seal. They were not even filed in any redacted form. They are currently available to the public at the courthouse and have been for the last two months. We assure you, you don’t hate the state of public access to the courts enough. The Justice Department’s motion and our motion are pending before a judge. 

And with that, let’s dive into the rest of the dockets this week.

Docket Roundup

• Since you got through that long wonky lede, you deserve a scoop. A Puerto Rican man, Robinson De La Cruz Hilario, created a “tactical map” to commit a mass shooting at a local gay bar. He allegedly wrote online that “Omar Mateen [The Pulse Nightclub Shooter] is and always will be a hero.” Authorities say he believed the LGBTQ community was “destroying traditional families.”  Robinson was charged with possessing child exploitation videos. 

• A former Florida Fish and Wildlife officer sued the state after she was reportedly fired for commenting on a Facebook group called “Velvet Guillotine” about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

• An FBI supervisor at the bureau’s microbiology lab at Quantico, Virginia, was indicted for allegedly distributing child abuse materials. Investigators say his abuse may have coincided with his work trips for the bureau.

• The feds say there’s a $13 million Medicare fraud case down in Miami. And another one whose office was also in Miami, where the dead giveaway may have been that the receptionist at the company spent two years in prison and had to pay $1.3 million in restitution for a health care scheme.

• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Jeanine Pirro can stay on the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter’s case, despite a defense motion attempt to disqualify them because they attended the dinner.

• A 27-year-old Israeli-American man, who allegedly sold his services to call in bomb threats at Jewish Community Centers and schools across the United States in 2017, was arraigned this week in Florida. (editor’s note: We broke the story back in 2017.) The man, who was a teen at the time, was extradited to the U.S. from Norway after serving a sentence for related conduct in Israel.

• Things got out of hand on a flight from Dublin. No, for those wondering, it didn’t have anything to do with the World Cup.

• A disgruntled professor says a Maryland college’s bridge program is a sham.

• Citizens of Humanity wants its piece of the tariff refunds. But yes, it is a real company that sells vintage-designed clothing.

• A New York man says he threatened to kill President Trump believing it would help stop James Comey from hurting him. 

• Camp Mystic, where 28 people died during catastrophic floods in Texas last year, filed for bankruptcy. 

• Your song of the week has a hook that will stick with you. But if you need something entirely different, may we humbly suggest this song. 

• The FBI arrested an alleged pedophile in the D.C. neighborhood of Adams Morgan. 

• The operators of a 7-Eleven in Pennsylvania purportedly ran a SNAP racket, trading food stamps for cigarettes and other items.

• Two judges in the Northern District of Texas maxed out the defendants in the Prairieland Detention Center shooting, sentencing them to between 30 and 100 years in federal prison.

• A judge declined to grant a pro se litigant a preliminary injunction to block the U.S. Mint from printing Trump coins but the lawsuit forced the Treasury Department to admit they wouldn’t have enough time to print the coins by the July 4th deadline they originally aimed for.

• The League of Women Voters blocked the administration from creating a national database of voters’ Social Security numbers and citizenship status.

• On a similar note, a judge in Massachusetts granted summary judgment in a case brought by 23 states and D.C. challenging President Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots.

• Two more men were charged in the purported plot to attack the White House’s UFC event and the World Cup was allegedly a target as well.

• A bitter ex-employee at a tech company that partners with Microsoft is set to plead guilty to cyber stalking his boss.

• Former Fox News and CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge will have to pay $800 every day for refusing to testify to reveal a source after the D.C. Circuit said it wouldn’t intervene. We’re not sure why more folks in the fourth estate aren’t yelling from the rafters on this one. Shame on the silence.

• A man reportedly threatened to shoot up an Ohio police department.

• There were some big immigration decisions this week. Here’s one that flew under the radar, a judge ordered the release from immigration custody of five people who were covered under a Biden-era settlement to not be in custody. 

• Hands off our farms, says one Massachusetts judge.

• The New York Times wants to know more about what FBI Director Kash Patel has been up to.

• Our friend Justin at the Independent has the write-up about how an 84-year-old Florida man sued Waffle House after becoming “distracted” by its sign and tripping. The topic of Waffle House allows us to bring up our favorite segment from the erstwhile Late Show with Stephen Colbert: No shirt, no shoes, no knuckleheads.

Thanks for reading. A programming note, we expended most of our energy fighting for public access principles this week. We’re going to take off next week and celebrate America’s birthday by ignoring one of the coequal branches of government. We will, however, have a The Rabbit Hole piece this Sunday, though. If you think World Cup tickets are expensive, get ready to read a story that will make those prices feel like a steal. 

Editor’s Note: By its very nature, there are no other crimes that come with more finality than murder. We’ve been trained by decades of Hollywood movies and TV dramas to believe that all crime may be local but all major crimes are federal. However, a review of murder prosecutions quickly dispels that myth. In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporter Peter Beck walks us through the various federal statutes that are available to prosecute capital offenses and explains why using them is exceedingly rare. -Seamus

A 21-year-old cold case on a U.S. Army base in Germany. The fatal shooting of a lover by an aspiring OnlyFans model in a national park. And a 16-year-old strangling their step-sister on a Carnival Cruise line. These are a few among the handful of federal murder cases each year.

In March, FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X a chart showing the sharp decline in the U.S. homicide rate since 2020. Patel captioned the post with “Leadership matters.” Commentators online quickly pointed out that the latest spike in homicide rates, coinciding with the onset of the pandemic in 2020, occurred during President Trump’s first term, and that the declining homicide rate had begun under President Biden. 

Somewhere lost in the political tit-for-tat was the remarkable fact that the homicide rate in the United States has plummeted to a century low. In a nation full of weapons, with its own unique set of circumstances in which crimes occur, and that frequently appears to teeter on the edge of political chaos, people in the U.S. managed to exercise greater self-restraint and remain peaceful toward their neighbors. 

The federal government undoubtedly had a role to play: through grants for gun violence interdiction initiatives, targeting criminal networks that span across states, supporting local investigations through state-of-the-art forensic facilities, and interagency cooperation with state authorities. But the FBI and the Department of Justice seldom pursue murder cases entirely themselves. 

The overwhelming majority of homicide cases—the killing of a person by another—are handled at the state level through murder and manslaughter investigations. One researcher counted just 75 murder-related cases at the federal level in 2014, compared to the total number of 14,249 murders in the U.S. that year. That puts the rate of murder cases that federal prosecutors handle at just a little more than half a percent. 

Under the Constitution’s federalist framework, states have the “police power,” meaning that federal officials lack the jurisdiction to investigate crimes that do not involve a federal nexus. But for the murders that do involve the federal government, their allegations are often the most audacious and consequential, involving terrorism, assassinations of federal officials, transnational cartel violence, federal property, and killings that cross state lines.

Federal prosecutors primarily use six statutes to pursue murder charges that rise to the level of federal interest. The first of these statutes, 18 U.S.C. § 1111, has to do with federal land itself, prohibiting murder within the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” One of the places that falls under this “special” jurisdiction is national parks.

Chelsea Perkins and Matthew Dunmire had a fraught relationship. By May 2021, according to federal prosecutors, the two had known each other for years. In 2017, Perkins accused Dunmire of rape, and in February 2021, she messaged a friend on Facebook, “How… does he live with himself?” and “he will get his someday.” The friend’s response, which was later revealed in federal court, stated, “Karma is an evil bitch.”

A few weeks later, the two became friends on Facebook on March 2, 2021. In the next few days, Dunmire signed up as a paid subscriber to view Perkins’ OnlyFans page. He also visited other adult content sites to look at additional media of her.

On March 5, 2021, Dunmire met a group of coworkers at a bar called the Tiki Underground in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where he told them that a woman was coming to pick him up to film “OnlyFans content” in a graveyard in the woods nearby. Prosecutors’ filings characterized Perkins as having an unusual, morbid attraction to cemeteries. In separate messages to friends on Facebook, she allegedly wrote, “I like the cemetery at the end of the street where Banks St. Bar is. Once I snuck into St. Louis Cemetery at night climbing up the wall but that’s prob super illegal.” She also posted about wanting to “do a NSFW shoot at the Arlington Cemetery.”

Perkins left her husband and two kids at their home in Arlington, Virginia, and drove to meet Dunmire at the Tikki Underground that night. The two went to an Airbnb near Cleveland that Perkins had reserved for the night and created content for Perkins’ OnlyFans and Twitter. She also reportedly messaged a tattoo artist in Michigan, whom she had an appointment with the next day.

At 9:30 the next morning, Dunmire and Perkins climbed into her car and left their Airbnb for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. They started hiking toward a cemetery in the park but wandered off the established trail path. After hiking for more than two hours, deep into the woods, Perkins held a 9mm pistol to the back of Dunmire’s head and fired. 

Perkins then left the park, unfriended Dunmire on Facebook, and texted the tattoo artist that she was on the way. She reached Michigan and texted her husband a picture of her new tattoo, writing, “I had the best day!” 

Hikers discovered Dunmire’s body three days later. Perkins' new tattoo was of a noose. She was arrested in December 2021. Almost four years later, a judge sentenced her to 22 years in federal prison for committing a murder in a special jurisdiction of the U.S. Her mental health history was redacted in federal court records but appears to have been a mitigating factor in the case.

The other locations that qualify under the federal government’s “special” jurisdiction include federal properties, military bases, the high seas, and aircraft. The federal connection to government properties and military bases makes sense: the federal government should be able to investigate crimes that quite literally happen on its land. In 2024, a former U.S. Army soldier was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the 2001 killing of a 19-year-old fellow soldier, who was pregnant at the time. A separate law, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, allows prosecutors to charge crimes that allegedly happened at military installations outside the United States.

The more perplexing cases are the deaths that occurred on an aircraft or on the high seas. Given how planes and vessels frequently traverse state borders, federal officials regulate maritime operations and air travel. The fact patterns of these cases are often bizarre.  

Although cases of mid-flight assaults and interfering with air travel are more common, murders that happen on airplanes are exceedingly rare and usually involve the hijacking or bombing of the plane, which implicates separate statutes than § 1111’s “special” jurisdiction. A query by Court Watch could not find any § 1111 cases involving airplanes. 

The maritime jurisdiction, however, is much more commonly used because of the U.S.’s major role in global maritime trade and its cruise industry. In 2018, a Mexican man killed a crew member and attacked two others with a shucking hammer and a long fishing knife on a scalloping vessel 55 miles off the coast of Nantucket. After the struggle, prosecutors say the man climbed to the top of the fishing vessel with the hammer and refused to come down until the Coast Guard arrived and took him into custody. He was later sentenced to roughly 20 years in prison. 

More recently, in April, a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida indicted a 16-year-old as an adult for the alleged murder and sexual abuse of his teenage stepsister on a Carnival cruise ship. The two reportedly shared a cabin aboard the 4,000-passenger ship sailing to the Caribbean and Mexico. A judge ordered that the 16-year-old be detained until his trial. 

The second statute giving federal prosecutors the ability to charge murder cases is an area that is traditionally located within states, but falls beyond their usual authorities: Native Americans living on tribal lands. In the 1883 case Ex Parte Crow Dog, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out the murder conviction of a Native American man who had killed another tribal member on the Great Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, holding that Congress had not given federal courts the jurisdiction to adjudicate cases involving crimes perpetrated by a Native American against another. 

Congress reacted to the decision by enacting the Major Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. § 1153) in 1885, giving federal courts the jurisdiction to hear cases of Native Americans accused of committing murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, sexual assault, incest, and felony assault on tribal land. Beyond the Major Crimes Act, tribal courts handle lower-level cases carrying less than a year in prison and are allegedly committed by Native Americans. Tribal courts, on the other hand, lack jurisdiction over non-Native Americans. Crimes on reservations committed by non-Native Americans are primarily handled by state authorities, with major cases involving Native Americans referred for federal prosecution. In 2022, the Supreme Court held in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta that states can prosecute non-Native Americans for crimes in which Native Americans are the victims.

The complicated jurisdictional setup contributes to the small pool of federal murder prosecutions. Two Native Americans who were separately members of the Zuni Pueblo and Navajo Nations were federally charged in 2022 for murder and kidnapping on tribal lands. One of them, Kendra Panteah, was on a road trip through Mexico and Arizona with a group when an altercation began that ended with one of the passengers being beaten and placed in the trunk of their car. 

Panteah then drove to the house of the other man charged with the murder, Gilbert John, on the Navajo Nation’s reservation. John drove the car around for another day, stabbed the man inside the trunk, drove it into a canyon, and then set the car on fire. Panteah pleaded guilty to kidnapping and was sentenced to 18 years, while John pleaded guilty under the Major Crimes Act to murder and was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

In September 2025, a federal judge sentenced a member of the Osage Nation to 30 years in prison for the murder of a non-Native American woman in Oklahoma. Prosecutors stated the man had arranged to meet up with the woman near Tulsa to pay for sex, and that he admitted to shooting at her in order to scare her after she refused to have sex with him because he did not bring enough money. In McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Major Crimes Act and that Native Americans can only face charges in federal courts for crimes committed on tribal reservations rather than state courts.

Several of the other federal statutes for murder cover offenses that are interstate in nature. 18 U.S.C. § 1958, the statute for murder-for-hire using interstate commerce facilities, is perhaps the most notorious for its sinister tales of hitmen traveling hundreds of miles to target embittered paramours or mob bosses. In November 2021, a Nashville-based grand jury indicted Erik Maund, the scion of an Austin car dealership empire, and three other men for a murder-for-hire plot that left two people dead.

Prosecutors said it all began when Maund, who was married, had an affair with a woman named Holly Williams. According to federal court records, Maund would travel from Austin to Nashville to stay at hotels with Williams. But she also had another lover—William Lanway, who found out about the duo’s rendezvous. Rather than simply cutting things off with Williams, Lanway told Maund that he knew about the affair and demanded that Maund pay him off, or else he would tell his family. 

Last week, we tried a social experiment. Our Sunday Series, The Rabbit Hole, is typically behind a paywall. But we stated that if ten free subscribers became paid subscribers on Sunday, we would make this week free again. Being the beautiful supporters of independent journalism that you are, you valiantly answered the call, and we hit our ambitious goal. Thank you. We’d like to continue that streak. We can only continue Court Watch with the paid supporters, but we genuinely hate the concept of paywalling the news. If ten more readers become paid subscribers today, we can make next week’s The Rabbit Hole free too. And then keep the momentum going every week. Make the jump. 

Instead of just paying the ransom, Maund contacted Gilad Peled, the owner of a private security company based in Austin, who advertised his expertise as a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces and Mossad. The men then allegedly concocted a plan with the help of four other private security contractors to spy on Williams and Lanway. But the plan soon shifted to kidnapping the couple from their apartment complex in Nashville, and then to murdering them. Two of the hitmen shot Williams and Lanway execution style, discarding their bodies at a construction site. Maund had paid over a million dollars for the hit.

Maund, Peled, and the other hitmen were charged 20 months later. In November 2023, Maund was convicted of murder-for-hire after an almost three-week jury trial in Nashville. A judge later granted his defense attorney’s motion for a new trial after it came to light that unadmitted exhibits were inadvertently sent to the jury during its deliberations. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, however, held that the error did not structurally influence the jury’s deliberations and reinstated the conviction in February 2026.

Two other federal murder statutes trace back to the Reconstruction Era and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments: 18 U.S.C. § 249, a hate crime resulting in death, and 18 U.S.C. § 242, deprivation of civil rights under color of law, resulting in death. The legal theory behind these acts was that the Reconstruction-era amendments empowered Congress to pass legislation guaranteeing that people’s civil rights and lives would be protected, regardless of their group identity. 

Under Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on “badges and incidents of slavery,” federal prosecutors have the authority to file § 249 charges for murders allegedly motivated by race, ethnicity, religion, and national origin without an interstate jurisdictional hook. However, for other protected categories, such as gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability, federal prosecutors have to tie the alleged murder to activities crossing state lines in order to invoke the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which Congress often uses to justify federal intervention. 

The Department of Justice has used § 249 to pursue federal hate crime cases against some of the U.S.’s deadliest extremists. In 2017, Dylann Roof, who massacred nine parishioners at a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, was sentenced to death after being convicted of § 249. The antisemitic shooter who attacked Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018 was also convicted and sentenced to death under § 249. The men are two of the remaining three members on federal death row—besides Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—after President Biden commuted other members’ sentences. Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people in a hate-fueled rampage at a Walmart in Texas in 2019, agreed to plead guilty to § 249 in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty.

As with § 249’s civil rights history, the statute for the deprivation of civil rights resulting in death while under the cover of law, § 242, was enacted to hold government officials criminally accountable when they used the power of their office to violate someone’s constitutional rights, closing a gap left by state systems that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, police their own. Today’s Justice Department rarely charges it. In March, however, a jury convicted a former San Diego Sheriff’s Deputy of § 242 for fatally shooting a 36-year-old unarmed man in the back four times as he ran away from law enforcement in 2020. A judge sentenced the former deputy to 12 years in prison.

Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, was also charged with § 242. He ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2022 to more than 21 years in prison, which he will serve simultaneously with his state sentence of 22.5 years for murder.  

Finally, the last of the statutes that federal prosecutors can use to file murder charges has to do with the victims themselves. The president, members of Congress, federal officials, and foreign diplomats all have statutes that federal officials can use to prosecute their assassins. Yet the statute that prohibits the killing of a president, 18 U.S.C. § 1751, has never been used to charge a successful assassin. Enacted in the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s death, the Department of Justice has charged it against attempted assassins who targeted presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors charged Elias Rodriguez with 18 U.S.C. § 1116, the murder of a foreign official, and § 249, the hate crimes statute. Rodriguez allegedly killed two diplomats stationed at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., as they left the Capital Jewish Museum. Prosecutors said he stated, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza,” after the murders. On May 15, prosecutors formally notified the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and Rodriguez’s defense attorneys that they plan to seek the death penalty. If it goes to trial, the case will mark a significant test of the Justice Department’s ability to pursue capital murder cases, especially in a jurisdiction where just 40 percent of residents support the death penalty, the lowest level of support nationwide.

Pop culture often glorifies the role of federal law enforcement in investigating violent crimes past the point of reality. The television show Criminal Minds depicts a squad of roving federal investigators who seemingly have jurisdiction wherever they go. The Silence of the Lambs features an FBI agent on the hunt for a serial killer. CBS has three whole series dramatizing the FBI by the mega producer Dick Wolf. 

But the truth is that murder prosecutions are few and far between at the federal level. When they do happen, it’s because of a narrow, limiting set of circumstances. These cases are also revealing for their differences from state murder prosecutions: Federal cases usually involve greater resources at both the prosecution’s and defense’s disposal and tend to end in more lenient prison sentences for the defendant. While incarcerated, these defendants also tend to have access to greater rehabilitation programs and education resources than people serving convictions in state prisons. 

The dramatization and hyperfocus on federal law enforcement also come at a cost. Efforts to increase funding for more violent crime investigations may be misplaced at the federal level. Initiatives to reform the justice system, such as lowering automatic sentences, shouldn’t focus their political capital at the federal level, where just roughly 10 percent of prisoners are incarcerated.

So on this lazy Sunday morning, we’ll grant you the joy of escapism that comes with watching your favorite TV FBI agent arrest a serial killer they’ve been tracking for years or the intense dramatic closing arguments of a federal prosecutor in a Hollywood movie convincing a jury to convict a wanton murderer. Just grant us this truism that it’s largely divorced from the history and realities of our criminal justice system. 

-30-

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Welcome to Court Watch #180. The most consistent thing about being a small news organization is that we will, on a semi-regular basis, discover a court filing before a plaintiff or the government is ready for its national media rollout. Being the old-school reporters that we are, we’ll ask for a comment and provide more than sufficient time to decide whether they want to offer a remark for the forthcoming story. And inevitably, they’ll completely ghost us in favor of larger media outlets and push out a hastily written press release before we publish. 

It’s a rinse and repeat type of thing. But as Detective Bunk reminds us, a man must have a code. Ours, it turns out, may ultimately amount to something like ‘they did not immediately respond to a request for comment.’ This is all to say, expect us to break a lot of news in the coming weeks. 

But before we take a flamethrower to everything taught in J-School 101, let’s take a moment to see what the federal courts brought us this week. 

The Docket Roundup

• We picked up forty new subscribers from this story entitled ‘Federal court newsletter sparks Wisconsin Watch sextortion story’. Which means there’s at least one reporter who will never be on our shame list. In honor of all the new Cheeseheads who joined us this week, we went fishing in your state’s federal dockets. Here's a denaturalization docket that no one noticed yet. That makes 44 such cases around the country in the last 60 days. 

• One of the largest Muslim American charities says it’s facing an “existential threat” to its existence if it continues to be associated with its overseas chapter. 

• NOTUS and the Washington Star have settled their beef over who owns the Star as a newspaper name. We’re putting all parties on notice that Court Watch is taken.

• A federal judge denied a pro-se motion to recuse herself from the anti-weaponization fund lawsuit, finding that “the fact that this Court sat on a Fourth Circuit judicial panel by designation with Judge Luttig over twenty years ago is far-fetched.” 

• The Chicago Mercantile thinks the CFTC carveout for Kalshi and Coinbase is a losing bet. 

• We’ve written extensively about a Texas man accused of threatening a Christian rock concert in the name of ISIS. In an exhibit asking for his home detention to be lifted, we get a window into what life looks like awaiting a terrorism trial.

• Michael Wolff took his drama with First Lady Melania Trump to the Second Circuit.

• The Atlanta judge who had an affair in her chambers with a high-ranking city police official granted the Department of Justice’s motion to recuse herself from an election case.

• Good news for people who hate sunlight. Local journalism is still dying. Shoutout to the major journalism foundations that can’t wrap their head around funding the type of reporting that attempts to fix it. 

• A New Jersey developer is accused of bribing Newark public employees and creating IDs with Homeland Security insignias on them. 

• A former contractor at an undisclosed intelligence agency pleaded guilty to accepting roughly $500,000 in kickbacks to help steer government contracts.

• CBS News and Paramount were sued by a former employee for discrimination.

• Here’s the order that let the UFC fight at the White House go ahead. It didn’t mention anything about fireworks at 1:30 AM, but whatever.

• A 25-year-old man was charged with a federal hate crime for alleged attacks on a synagogue and a Jewish Community Center in Albuquerque. 

• Well, folks, it’s official. The court case that will decide the future of the written English language: Shakespeare v. Anthropic.

• A sailor pleaded guilty to helping run an oil tanker in Iran’s shadow fleet.

• Google wants to use RICO to go after phishing scams.

• The feds pulled down two deepfake websites, using the Take It Down Act.

• A North Carolina man, who apparently hated the name Operation Epic Fury so much that he threatened President Trump, decided to make it easy on the Secret Service by listing his full name and date of birth.

• It’s way too wonky for anyone to notice or write it up (editor’s note: we assume that’s the point...), but Google is playing lawyerly games about having to pay for people to monitor its anti-trust settlement requirements. 

• Look, if you’re going to (allegedly) fly with a ton of drugs, don’t also fly with the cash.

• Speaking of drugs, we humbly suggest coming up with a hipper name than “daddybiden.” 

• If you want to start your weekend disappointed in society, there are details about a dogfighting case. The defendant is set to plead guilty soon.  

• Your weekly reminder that the line between real and fake crypto is sometimes vanishingly thin.

• An IT consultant allegedly tried to blackmail his company.

• On a slightly related note, your pro se of the week is from Alaska, suing Sabrina Carpenter, and boldly begins with, “The plaintiff is certainly a brighter legal eagle than anybody on Cable News Network (CNN).”

• A 26-year-old member of the online terror ring 764 pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child abuse materials.

• In case you need a weirdly upbeat tune about infidelity, here’s our song of the week. Give it till at least the 1:45 mark to gain steam. 

• We regret to report that even astronauts are receiving threats in this increasingly polarized environment.

• Two Florida men were charged for allegedly selling counterfeit Ozempic.

• A former federal employee with the inspector general’s office said she was retaliated against after claiming that the Health and Human Services placed unaccompanied minors with “MS-13-affiliated sponsors.” She says she had a whistleblower agreement with the current administration that they pulled back on.

• Despite the president’s lawyers’ repeated attempts, MAGA Burger will not go quietly into the night.

• In this week’s worst of humanity, a former director of an orphanage in Nepal was indicted in North Carolina for inappropriate conduct toward a minor outside the U.S.

• There’s a wild ride from an Oregon man who identifies himself as “Trump Genius.”

• A pro se litigant is upset that the FBI won’t respond to his FOIAs about bank robberies.

• Prosecutors are trying to convict an ‘innocent’ man. 

• Trump administration lawyers successfully got a lawsuit dismissed by a former FBI analyst who said she lost her security clearance for supporting Trump. 

• Apparently, TikTok, bad breakups, and the Postal Service don’t go well together.

• Matt Taibbi really doesn’t want to pay a reporter’s attorney fees for a lawsuit that may or may not be absolute garbage. 

• Let’s end the issue with a copyright case invoking the Fear of God.

Thanks for reading. A final note: last week’s The Rabbit Hole was all about access, or lack thereof, to the U.S. Court system. Our Sunday stories are typically behind a paywall, reflecting the time, effort, and resources involved in choosing a single federal court docket, filing, or topic, and diving deep into the details. But last week, we tried something different. We noted, “We’re going to try a social experiment of whether people are inherently decent human beings…We can only continue Court Watch with the paid supporters, but we genuinely hate the concept of paywalling the news. If ten readers become paid subscribers today, we can make next week’s The Rabbit Hole free too.”

We’re happy to welcome 16 new paid subscribers this week as a result. And even more happy to welcome our renewed belief in the human condition. If we get at least four more new paid supporters today, we’ll make the next two weeks of The Rabbit Hole paywall-free. Join the more than 650 (!) supporters who believe in this reporting project. Make the leap to supporting our independent journalism here. If you’re already a paid subscriber but inflation hasn’t absolutely destroyed you, you can always avail yourself of our tip jar.

Editor’s Note: In 2025, our PACER bill, the costs of pulling court records from an antiquated government database, was more than $11,000 dollars. We’ve gone so far as to call PACER an ‘online scam’ and the ‘only judicially-approved money laundering’ operation. And while that is not a matter of opinion, but instead a simple statement of fact, it could be reasonably said we may not be unbiased observers of newly proposed bipartisan legislation to make PACER free of fees. However, in this week’s Rabbit Hole, we tried to take an honest step back and review the bill’s language and the judiciary’s modernization efforts to see what may be improved for the public’s access to its courts. Stay with us till the end of the piece, where we opened up our reporting notebook to tell stories of late-night emails to chief judges, prosecutors playing fast and loose with local rules, and other outstanding issues of transparency that will still be with us even if Congress passes a free PACER bill. -Seamus

The Library of Congress meticulously records every bill introduced by members of Congress. The Federal Register publishes executive orders that contain presidential directives to the whole federal government. Both have websites that are comprehensible and easy to navigate. But when it comes to the Third Branch, the federal judiciary, records are blocked behind a paywall and virtually inaccessible to the public at large because of how difficult they are to find.

In Federalist No. 62, James Madison wrote, “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

Today’s problem is not that the laws themselves are unknowable, but that the entire corpus adjudicating and interpreting them is beyond the reach of Americans with average time and resources, and even the lawyers responsible for shaping them. Whether it be a court order restricting access to abortion drugs, upholding a state’s election map, or blocking national immigration policies, it takes effort and money—that adds up considerably over time—to read federal court documents.

However, a new bipartisan bill introduced by senators John Kennedy and Ron Wyden of Louisiana and Oregon, respectively, could be the most promising attempt in years to overhaul the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, the online federal court database known as PACER. (Editor's note: for clarity purposes, we’re using PACER and CM/ECF interchangeably because it’s a pedantic distinction for most of the public.) On June 2, the senators issued a joint press release announcing the Open Courts Act, which they plan to present to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If enacted, the bill could radically transform public access to court records. The bill proposes ending PACER’s paywall, allowing Americans to access millions of documents that currently accrue fees for every single page accessed. It would also modernize PACER’s website and searchability, which are so antiquated that they appear a product of the early internet age, a relic in an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.

IMAGE: Letter from the clerk of the Central District of California after Court Watch requested access to documents that should be available to the public

“Americans should not have to sell plasma or wrestle with clunky government websites just to read public court records. PACER is old, very expensive and extremely burdensome to use. The Open Courts Act would drag this outdated system into the 21st century, protect court records from hackers and give taxpayers a better deal. Government services ought to serve the American people – not make them want to put their head through a wall,” Kennedy said, announcing the bill.

“For far too long, unnecessary paywalls have kept the American people from freely accessing public court records. The Open Courts Act will deliver a long-overdue upgrade to PACER, saving taxpayers more than $60 million dollars in operating costs every year. Federal courts will then be able to remove burdensome paywalls and provide the public, including researchers and journalists, with free access to public court documents,” Wyden said.

But the bill has hurdles to face before its passage. And it’s not the first legislative attempt to fix PACER and end its burdensome fee structure. Even with bipartisan support, the bill has a long road ahead in overcoming both legislative gridlock and opposition from the judiciary itself.

PACER was revolutionary at one point. In 1988, the U.S. Judicial Conference first tested it through dial-up internet access, and it was launched for regular internet access a decade later. At the time, records in both state and federal courts could only be retrieved by physically traveling to the courthouses. Congress signed off on the plan, allowing the judiciary to fund it through user fees rather than appropriating taxpayer funds.

As it currently operates, PACER is maintained by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which charges 10 cents per search and per page accessed on the federal court database. The Administrative Office, however, offers two reprieves in terms of the fee structure: Any documents exceeding 30 pages will be capped at $3, and users who accrue less than $30 per quarter will have their fees waived. This leads to only 25% of PACER users having to pay the fee. However, among the 25%, the costs add up dramatically.

In 2019, litigation over PACER’s fee structure revealed that the actual cost to retrieve each page is $0.0000006. At the time, hosting the roughly one billion documents on PACER was estimated to cost about $600,000, about half a percent of PACER’s reported revenue of $146.4 million in 2016. Another source said that PACER’s operating costs were slightly higher at around $3 million. At the high end, a group of IT experts concluded that building a new federal court database would cost $10 to $20 million and then $3 to $5 million annually to maintain—still a large gap between the system’s costs and its profits. Before a 2020 ruling, the judiciary used part of PACER’s revenue to cover costs associated with courthouse maintenance and other filing systems.

IMAGE: In South Dakota district court, local rules request filing of public versions of search warrants after a certain time. Prosecutors routinely skirt the rules by filing pages of redaction. Court Watch was unable to identify any instance where a judge rejected the page long redactions as overly expansive. As a result, everything that should be unsealed is in effect sealed. In addition, federal judges in that district always order that the underlying documents should be "permanently seal" Source: United States v. 26-143-04 (4:26-mj-00066)

The operating costs and total revenue are stark, too, because of how poorly PACER functions. Its website has received minimal updates since its launch in 1998. The search bar does not allow users to query the text of the documents or even the dockets themselves, both of which users pay to access. 

In 2015, UC Berkeley Law Professor Jonah Gelbach reported that the federal judiciary estimated that law firms accounted for 63% of PACER usage. Litigants themselves and commercial users contributed 12% and 10% of usage, respectively. Academics were only 3%, which Gelbach attributed to the enormous costs that research projects using PACER would incur by pulling so many documents. In theory, PACER allows researchers to apply for a fee waiver, but it comes with a crippling caveat: Any document the researchers download can only be for their access, a requirement that is incompatible with basic research principles of citing sources. 

The result is that the people with the deepest pockets can access documents, as the public is largely walled off. Some initiatives, such as the Free Law Project’s CourtListener website, have attempted to fill the gap by allowing users to upload and access court documents free of charge that others have paid for. It’s impossible to know, however, how representative the documents stored on CourtListener’s website are of PACER, and what’s been left out.

Several civil suits have attempted to challenge the judiciary’s hold on PACER. Three nonprofit organizations filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all PACER users in 2016, arguing that the judiciary improperly collected fees from PACER users by exceeding the amount required to fund the running of the online database. The case, National Veterans Legal Services v. United States, dragged on for almost a decade, but resulted in a pyrrhic victory for the plaintiffs. In 2018, U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle ruled that the judiciary could collect fees beyond PACER’s operating costs, but that the additional fees had to be allocated to programs that enhanced public access to court records. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the ruling in 2020. Four years of litigation and negotiations later, the nonprofits and the judiciary agreed to a $125 million settlement.

Don’t bother trying to access courts records today. Image: PACER.gov 

Some advocates for ending PACER fees also point to a 2020 Supreme Court case, Georgia v. Public.Resource.org, as precedent against the judiciary placing legal restrictions on public documents. In Public.Resource.org, the Court heard a challenge to the state of Georgia’s attempt to copyright the annotations—but not the actual laws themselves—in the “Official Code of Georgia Annotated.” On behalf of the narrow 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “If everything short of statutes and opinions were copyrightable, then States would be free to offer a whole range of premium legal works for those who can afford the extra benefit. A State could monetize its entire suite of legislative history. With today’s digital tools, States might even launch a subscription or pay-per-law service.”

It’s doubtful, however, that federal courts would intervene to end a practice that Congress expressly authorized to fund the Third Branch. Such a move would undermine a core judicial purpose of applying the law as enacted by Congress, as well as their own self-interest. There’s likely no other path to fix PACER besides legislative action.

From 2018 to 2022, there were a series of legislative attempts to get rid of PACER’s fee structure. In 2018, then-Representative Doug Collins (who now serves as Secretary of Veterans Affairs) introduced the Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2018. The bill, however, gained little traction beyond the House Judiciary Committee, which led a bipartisan group of representatives, including Collins, to propose the Electronic Court Records Reform Act of 2019. Again, it went nowhere, as did its companion bill in the Senate and two others in the House.

In 2020, some progress was made with the Open Courts Act of 2020, which the full House passed. But the Senate never took it up. It led the Senate to consider another bill, the Open Courts Act of 2021, which the Senate Judiciary Committee favorably advanced. The House began the process to consider the bill on its end, and then the judiciary got involved.

We’re going to try a social experiment of whether people are inherently decent human beings. As a Sunday story, this piece would typically be behind a paywall. We can only continue Court Watch with the paid supporters but we genuinely hate the concept of paywalling the news. If ten readers become paid subscribers today, we can make next week’s The Rabbit Hole free too. And then keep the momentum going every week. Make the jump.

The Judicial Conference of the United States, the congressionally established body that represents federal judges nationwide and is headed by Chief Justice Roberts, began outwardly lobbying against the bill. In a letter to Congress, the Conference warned that eliminating PACER fees would negatively affect filing fees, the amount litigants are required to pay to initiate civil suits in federal court. Filing fees are already $405, making it a high cost for most Americans.

The conference asked Congress to pause the legislation to allow for “dialogue.” In a letter to Representative Hank Johnson, the Georgia Democrat and chair of the House Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, Judge Roslynn Mauskopf wrote on behalf of the Judicial Conference: 

The OCA would require dramatic changes to the backbone system upon which the federal courts depend for mission critical day-to-day operations. H.R. 5844, as introduced, would not only put at serious risk litigants’ access to justice, but also potentially disrupt the funding needed for modernizing, operating, and maintaining the very systems the bill seeks to improve. The judicial branch, the litigants desiring to have their cases heard in the federal courts, and the public seeking access to court case records, will bear the consequences if the legislation proves operationally or budgetarily infeasible…

Professor Jonah Gelbach was also critical of the 2021 Act’s funding mechanisms. Under the proposal, Congress would appropriate enough money to modernize PACER. The money to run the system in the future, however, would come from fees paid by federal agencies for their access. Gelbach estimated that federal agencies would not contribute enough in fees to fund PACER, meaning the judiciary would have to raise filing fees or absorb a loss in revenue. He encouraged Congress to appropriate the $150 million the judiciary currently earns from PACER, comparing PACER’s revenue to the amount Americans spend on wild bird food (25 times as much) and the overall funding for the judiciary in 2020 (50 times as much).

The Open Courts Act of 2021 stalled in both the House and Senate amid pressure from the Judicial Conference and as legislators shifted their focus to the 2022 Midterm Elections. 

Four years later, the latest edition, the Open Courts Act of 2026, plans to modernize PACER with a new database that will replace the current electronic filing and PACER. The bill includes a number of new proposals compared to the 2021 version, such as requiring permanent URLs for each filing, citations that don’t rely on Westlaw, open-source coding access, a public testing process, and making the database mobile-friendly. 

IMAGE: It took a federal motion and hundreds of dollars of filing fees to get the U.S. Courts to recognize their own error in restricting access to court records. Source: Southern District of Mississippi, 3:25-cr-00038

The Kennedy and Wyden proposal seeks to fund PACER through high-volume users, who spend more than $25,000 per quarter on fees, and federal agencies. The Judicial Conference would be able to decide an appropriate fee for high-volume users, many of whom are private legal research companies, including Westlaw and Lexis. Meanwhile, charging federal agencies would bring in at least several million annually. The Department of Justice, PACER’s largest user, spends roughly $5 million each year in access fees. Under the bill, any negative difference between the new system’s operating costs and its revenues would be made up by filing fees for high-earning litigants, who have incomes of more than $250,000 annually.

And while a free PACER would be welcome news to many academics, lawyers, and other court watchers, systemic issues would still hinder access to public records. 

Chief among them, every court district has a distinct set of local rules and standards for filing and unsealing court records. In some districts, cases are automatically unsealed after 90 days; in other districts, records are sealed indefinitely pending an expressed motion from the plaintiffs, which rarely comes. 

On Friday, a Court Watch reporter traveled to the U.S. Court in Alexandria, Virginia, to review dockets for free at a computer in the clerk’s office. In a little less than five minutes, we identified at least a dozen dockets this year that had been ordered unsealed by a federal judge but were not available on PACER. We requested paper copies but were told by the clerk’s office that even though there is a judicial order on each docket to unseal, we would have to file a motion with the court to get them truly unsealed for public review. 

With a fee of $405.00, filing motions in a dozen cases would cost roughly $5,000, and that is before accounting for the cost and time of hiring a lawyer and arguing the case. There is no formalized avenue to address these gaping holes. As a result, Court Watch has resorted to spending hundreds of dollars to unseal dockets, including one where a federal judge simply concluded the court’s "inadvertent error” sealed the docket. The judge did not offer to reimburse our filing fees and attorney costs for the court’s mistake. 

In other times, lawyers work the system without judges realizing it. Shortly after Court Watch broke a story of a corruption investigation into the L.A. City Council, which involved a recently unsealed search warrant, prosecutors in the Central District of California began filing all search warrants as automatically sealed, shielding them from the public and in direct violation of the court’s local rules. 

Recognizing that a game of cat and mouse was playing out over public access, our editor emailed the court’s chief judge to raise our transparency concerns. The result was a judicially-ordered comprehensive review of all past search warrants and their sealing status. All told, for the first time, thousands of pages of legal filings were made available to the public. However, that was 2020. Six years later, and a quick review of the current records in the Central District of California reveals that prosecutors are back to their old tricks of defaulting to sealing of search warrants. 

The system shouldn’t have to rely on a random reporter’s late-night cold email to a chief judge to fix itself. 

In the area of perceived security versus actual transparency, the courts have chosen security every time. In August 2025, when law enforcement investigators discovered that hackers aligned with the Russian government had breached PACER, giving them access to sensitive and nonpublic court records, some of which implicated Russia. (this was at least the second major hack of the U.S. courts in as many years). The judiciary responded by pulling the records off PACER, requiring law enforcement to file sealed copies physically rather than through the courts’ electronic filing system. The chief judges in most districts implemented local rules designating the records as ‘highly sensitive documents’ (or HSDs). These HSDs are filed with the court under seal, but never uploaded to PACER. They are typically filed on an air-gapped computer to prevent them from being hacked in the future. 

As we wrote in the past, HSD designations are all over the map. In some districts, an Assistant U.S. Attorney can decide what is a sensitive document and file it as such (with the judge's approval). In others, only certain documents can get that designation. But, in nearly all of them (if not all of them), there is no system to trigger the courts to review whether to ever unseal the documents, and as such, they languish in a forever-sealed land. 

Assistant U.S  Attorneys move on; they take fancy jobs at fancier law firms, they retire, they do all the things normal lawyers do. And if, by chance, and usually by standard, they do not file a motion to unseal the HSD documents that are no longer sensitive, the documents will never see the light of day. Even more so, the public can’t petition to unseal the documents because—and we can’t believe we’re writing this in an open democracy—they don’t know the documents exist.

In the vast majority of districts, there is no notice in the system that an HSD has been filed. You can’t file a motion to unseal something you don’t know is there. As such, highly sensitive documents are a perfect black hole for public access. In the districts where they do note that an HSD has been filed, one doesn’t have enough information to form a coherent unsealing motion to pitch to a judge. Additionally, just to add insult to injury, the courts charge individuals 10 cents to download a one-page document from the docket that literally just says HSD in big black letters.

A free and searchable PACER solves a lot of problems for the public's access to public records. If the judiciary is unwilling to part with its $145 million fee slush fund, it may want to consider how to standardize its rules to allow for more unsealed documents on its system and not permit a patchwork process to limit access. At the very least, it’s good for their bottom line. 

Access to public records is an inherent right in a functioning democracy. The judiciary’s status quo of exorbitant fees and labyrinth of disparate local rules is direct affront to that right. 

Welcome to Court Watch #179. This week, the U.S. legal system raised deep philosophical questions:

• Can you really get upset that your opposing counsel cited A.I.- hallucinated cases if your filings did too? 

• Do Utah twitter followers really matter? 

• Is it ok that a federal judge gave the plaintiffs a roadmap of where to file a winning lawsuit? 

• Should you defend your political enemies in court if it may protect your edgelord social media posts later? 

• And, for the S.E.C. lawyers, isn't the concept of time just an antiquated social construct? 

We might not have all the answers to those, but like first year philosophy majors cribbing Emerson, we believe the journey of docket discovery is more important than the destination. 

The Docket Roundup

• Taj Tarsha, Web3 and NFT guy and founder of ‘Few and Far’ (FAR) coin, was arrested for stealing money from investors. You can still watch an interview with him explaining his business model as part of CoinDesk’s sponsored content. 

• An ex-DOGE staffer at the Pentagon took The Guardian to court over an embarrassing report which said he bungled a leak investigation.

• A federal judge in Massachusetts put Texas’ Ken Paxton’s investigation into ActBlue on pause. 

• One defendant’s case was set to go to trial just as the government shutdown began. The trial ended up being postponed, and the SEC, which is prosecuting the case, never moved to reschedule it. He’s now motioning to dismiss the case for failure to prosecute.

• Secret Service says a Brooklyn man used the White House’s “Contact Us” page for all the wrong reasons.

• A legal ethics question for your Friday morning. If both sides use AI case hallucinations in opposing briefs, do they cancel each other out? 

• A Manhattan investment analyst allegedly used insider information to make $350,000 in biomedical and health investment trades.

• One has to appreciate a federal judge using a footnote to give the plaintiff a hint on where else to shop their lawsuit.

• The Trump administration successfully defended anti-Trump Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove against Matt Taibbi. The Department of Justice intervened in order to protect federal immunity clauses after Taibbi sued Kamlager-Dove for defamation. We’re only passing experts on federal immunity, but it seems like Taibbi’s case may have inadvertently expanded the legal precedent to include mean congressional social media posts. This won’t spell trouble for our country in the future. 

• Speaking of Matt Taibbi, in a separate defamation lawsuit, reporter Eion Higgins filed another brief arguing why Taibbi should have to pay attorney fees for his now-dismissed defamation suit.

• Four men, three of whom were reportedly known as “Yanna,” “Dink,” and “Juice,” allegedly bribed a U.S. mail carrier to help them steal checks in Virginia.

• Prosecutors say two clerks at a Utah state courthouse helped folks flee from ICE.

• The family of an epileptic man who died in a San Bernardino jail awaiting trial sued the county, alleging that jail officials failed to note the man’s medical needs.

• If you’re a journalist heading to next week’s Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, come swing by our training session. 

• One can kind of get a sense the ruling is not going to go your way when the judge writes “Give me a break” in his opinion. 

• A judge, who previously ordered attorneys for Southwest Airlines to attend a religious training run by the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, changed his mind. He now says that an apology is good enough.

• One Michigan doctor is suing after an agent with the Department of Health and Human Services falsely accused him of Medicare fraud.

• The Department of Justice announced an indictment against eight pro-Palestine protesters with ties to the University of Michigan. The activists are charged with conspiracy to transmit threats, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, and destruction of property allegedly related to activities on Michigan’s campus.

• The Florida magistrate judge, whom President Trump’s attorneys asked to recuse herself for representing a previous party in litigation with Trump, declined to recuse herself. Meanwhile, his attorneys replied to an order to show cause why they shouldn’t be sanctioned for failing to meet filing deadlines.

• Good fences make good neighbors? An Ohio man allegedly showed off his sawed-off shotgun and pipe bombs he built from his kitchen sink to a neighbor who came over to borrow some stuff. Law enforcement says he then threatened the neighbor with them when he didn’t bring his stuff back.

• Two college football players sued the NCAA over a cap on NIL earnings.

• A conservative former Senate candidate whom FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend sued for defamation is trying to get the case dismissed arguing that Utah isn’t terminally online.

• If you need a pep talk about how you’re doing, here’s our song of the week 

• In what’s probably our favorite headline this week, the City of Des Moines wants to end an alleged monopoly on fire trucks repairs. 

• Vercel, a U.S. cloud storage company, entered into an agreement with the Department of Justice for a stipulated dismissal of its civil contempt proceedings. The contempt proceedings were initiated after Vercel failed to respond to a federal search warrant.

• For our natsec nerds, it was a big week for 2339b, the statute prohibiting material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Two men in California and a third in Kansas were charged for allegedly swearing oaths and attempting to join ISIS. In New York, a 50-year-old former Taliban commander was sentenced to 42 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to 2339b and other charges. And in its neighbor in the tri-state area, the FBI arrested a man in New Jersey accused of pledging an oath and attempting to travel to join ISIS.

• A member of the “Goodfellas” gang in Georgia was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for a drive-by shooting that wounded three people, including a 14-year-old and a six-year-old.

• The FBI and the Department of Justice announced that they had disabled 13 websites operated by suspected Chinese agents seeking out former and current U.S. government officials with security clearances for “consulting” contracts. We wrote about how foreign intelligence agencies are targeting more U.S. officials in the Rabbit Hole last month.

• Here are the transcripts from the grand jury in the Broadview Six case.

• California is taking on an immigration detention center over environmental guidelines.

• The lawsuit attempting to put a stop to the UFC fight at the White House called it “a volcano of corruption.”

• A new shareholder suit says the finances at Beyond Meat, the vegan, plant-based protein company, aren’t all they’re made up to be.

• Here’s an interesting back-and-forth between a defense attorney and a prosecutor over whether the government can subpoena state license plate data or if it needs a warrant, as a state law requires.

• Apple fought a gag order preventing it from informing a republican congressional staffer that the Department of Justice had seized their information as part of investigation into foreign influence. Hat tip to Forbes for catching it first.

• In honor of hurricane season being upon us, here’s a dispute between a county in Pennsylvania and a disaster clean-up company after FEMA reportedly decided not to deliver full disaster aid because the contractor may have demolished a park and protected habitats.

• Several disability rights organizations sued to block New York’s new assisted suicide law.

• A guard is in hot water for allegedly helping smuggle hundreds of vapes into a Colorado federal prison.

• A China-based tech company is fighting the Pentagon’s designation of it as a “Chinese military company.”

Thanks for reading. A final note, we’re taking a flyer on a court hearing this morning. We give it a 50/50 chance it ends with a story that gets picked up by every news organization in America. We’ll let you know how it shakes out.