Welcome to Court Watch #194. It’s always the seemingly open-and-shut criminal cases that bring about the most interesting cases in the courts. Take for example, the prosecution of BASE jumper Jack Propeck who earlier this year was accused of illegally cliff jumping in Yosemite. There’s a license plate reader that tracked his vehicle coming in and out of the national park during a government shutdown and of course, video evidence of the illegal jumping (the video he allegedly posted to his followers on Instagram). In theory, it should be a relatively easy case for prosecutors to argue for conviction. 

But in an interesting twist, Propeck’s federal defenders are arguing that the U.S. Attorney’s Office fully ceded its prosecutorial decision-making (and plea negotiations) to the National Park Service lawyers. It’s a bit of a fascinating debate on who is in charge when it comes to charges in the parks.  For the Justice Department’s part, they found the defense’s argument meritless and the exhibits “laughable.”  

Maybe that’s too wonky for you all for a Friday morning. If that’s the case, maybe read about the three men (charging docs here and here) in Alabama who are accused of having a lot of guns, an anarchist cookbook, antifa flyers, and a strong hatred of ICE. 

The Docket Roundup

• A humble pitch to CBS programming gods. Drop the FBI series. Read footnote one of this complaint and then immediately greenlight a U.S. Postal Inspection Service show. They're the Sherlock Holmes of federal law enforcement. 

• Lots of government press releases and media stories about illegal voting this week. But here’s one you may have missed. Prosecutors quietly dropped the federal charges against a man they had secured an indictment against for illegally voting in the 2024 presidential elections. In their motion, DOJ notes that, “that a portion of the grand jury presentation was not recorded as required in Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e)(1), at no fault of the court reporter. Out of an abundance of caution, the United States seeks to dismiss the pending Indictment, without prejudice to preserve the possibility of presenting this matter to a different grand jury panel at a later date.” 

• The Justice Department is now using President Trump’s preferred “Super Intelligence” term for AI in press releases. Unfortunately barring a forthcoming treason charge, we will continue to call it AI under Court Watch’s very real and totally not made up style guide.

• A Chicago woman who was shot five times by a CBP agent during an immigration crackdown last year sued the government.

• In Minnesota, the eighth person was charged in federal court this week for supporting ISIS. It had all the markings of similar ISIS cases we’ve seen this year, allegedly including a gun buy, a plot for a mass terrorist attack when facing hurdles to travel overseas, Discord, and youth. According to NCITE, it’s the 282nd person charged in the U.S. for ISIS-related activities.

• A judge rejected a motion to acquit Salman Rushdie’s attacker on terrorism charges. The defense had challenged the conviction based on the Second Circuit’s holding in U.S. v. Ullah.

• The FBI arrested an alleged accomplice of the Tumbler Ridge school shooter, who killed six people in Canada. The arrest is part of a growing number of “true crime community” related cases.

• Even if the case is no longer active, the Seventh Circuit will never miss an opportunity to opine at length (while saying they’re not) about federalism. 

• This opinion from the Tenth Circuit is a wild ride, featuring a cult, a compound, pro se defendants, and a kidnapping conviction being vacated.

• Federal defenders are trying to disqualify the leader of another U.S. Attorney’s office. This time it’s in the Central District of California.

• Universal was sued over the log “Dudley Do-Right’s Rip Saw Falls” ride at its Florida theme park. The plaintiffs say an unoccupied log behind them crashed into them. 

• All of the judges in the Middle District of Tennessee recused themselves from Senator Marsha Blackburn’s lawsuit against former Special Counsel Jack Smith.

• An assistant religion professor at Haverford College allegedly used far-right X/Twitter accounts to post antisemitic threats against a colleague.

• There was a major gun bust in the Southern District of New York.

• A Texas man allegedly led law enforcement on a chase after threatening to attack the U.S. Capitol and AIPAC.

• Sean Spicer, Anti-SLAPP suit, 45 million dollar scooter scam, and Cameo. You honestly don’t need much more from a lawsuit. 

• X is not an investment app.

• A bar fight involving a threat and gunfire on Saipan reportedly led to a meth bust. Also, the courthouse for the U.S. District of the Northern Mariana Islands might win best (or at least most tropical) view.

• ICE is in hot water with a Trump appointee in the Eastern District of New York, who said agents may have perjured testimony and fabricated evidence.

• One guy in Alabama (allegedly) really doesn’t want to have to do any more cleaning at work.

• Our music tastes are as varied as this week’s issue. Ergo, our song of the week. 

• An alleged darkweb coke dealer registered his burner Proton email address to his real Apple account, making it easy for law enforcement to identify him.

• There’s (rightfully) been lots of talk about student journalism in the past few weeks. On that note, here’s a case about editorial discretion at the University of Texas at Austin’s student newspaper.

• Tennessee federal defenders in a death penalty case want a judge to order the Justice Department to turn over records about a 2008 mass shooting.

• A Wisconsin judge ordered ICE to immediately release a detainee after the bond hearing the judge had ordered was in front of a rookie immigration judge and lacked basic due process.

• The FBI pulled down two websites that reportedly hosted child abuse and other nonconsensual images under a new law. There appear to be hundreds of victims, and the FBI stated it has identified at least 163 people who live in the U.S. and bought images from the sites.

• One case out of Nebraska seeks to answer the age-old question of whether trolling a police department’s Facebook page is protected speech.

• A judge dismissed a charge in a terrorism case after the Justice Department didn’t feel up to the fight.

• The Justice Department secured another indictment against ex-Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

• Judge Leonie Brinkema denied a motion from one of the D.C. five to travel to Saudi Arabia, citing his relatively short time on supervised release and the government’s opposition. 

• Your pro se of the week is from a man who says he’s a “NATO asset” and has records from Jeffrey Epstein implicating all of the federal judges in Ohio.

• A Pennsylvania grand jury indicted a 21-year-old suspected extremist for receiving a firearm in order to use in a terror attack on behalf of ISIS.

• The Justice Department’s antisemitism task force is going on tour with its first stop in Southfield, Michigan.

• For folks who liked our Rabbit Hole last weekend about the first Oct. 7th case in the U.S., prosecutors filed a response to another attempt by federal defenders to block it from going to trial.

• TikTok is becoming the testing lab for what constitutes a true threat. Law enforcement says a woman commented “We only got one chance let’s take it” with a gun GIF, seemingly referring to President Trump’s upcoming visit to an Alabama college campus. Court records indicate they identified her, at least in part, through a babysitting app.

• It’s not exactly the Prince of Tides, but a bomb threat at a Georgia nuclear power plant, apparently over a 300-year-old oak tree being cut down, led to federal charges this week.

• There’s drama brewing in the IRS criminal division over an whistleblower agent’s disciplinary record—or perhaps lack thereof.

• You would think a holding company named “Canary” would heed the warnings about crypto.

• The feds used Flock on Tuesday to track a man in Georgia who allegedly said he was on his way to shoot someone in the face. Local law enforcement reportedly found a loaded gun on him after pulling the man over in the alleged victim’s town.

Thanks for reading. A programming tease, in Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we look at the ever-present corruption in one federal agency. 

Editor’s Note: This week, the Justice Department announced “coordinated arrests and charges” to “dismantle Hamas terror finance network” as authorities rolled up three people in the United States for allegedly funneling money to the designated terrorist organization. The law enforcement actions came under the auspices of the “Joint Task Force October 7”, an interagency coordination cell, set up by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to identify and prosecute cases against the perpetrators of the 2023 attack. However, the task force’s first arrest of an alleged participant in the October 7th attack occurred a few months ago in Louisiana, and a particularly active defense may test how far the task force’s efforts can go. -Seamus

Almost three years after the Hamas-led Oct. 7th attack on Israel, an alleged perpetrator of the attack is set to be tried in a U.S. court for the first time. Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub Al-Muhtadi, the 34-year-old Palestinian defendant, faces federal charges for conduct on that fateful day in Israel and for reportedly lying to gain admission to the United States. 

As the prosecution inches toward a trial date in the Western District of Louisiana, where Al-Muhtadi settled in Lafayette after arriving in the United States from Palestine by way of Egypt, federal officials signal an expanding takedown of alleged Hamas supporters in the U.S. In the past few months, federal authorities have moved to indict or arrest figures in Florida, Louisiana, New York, and California for allegedly supporting Hamas.

There were virtually no Oct. 7th-related arrests previously (though there were charges in absentia). But on Oct. 2, the Justice Department suggested the first wave of arrests in the U.S. was on the horizon, announcing the indictment of one man and the arrests of three others who live in America for allegedly funneling money to Hamas. “Anyone who finances or assists terrorist organizations responsible for the deaths of American citizens should expect to be prosecuted by the Department of Justice,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said alongside a retinue of senior Justice Department officials.

Al-Muhtadi’s case in Louisiana, however, marks a significant hurdle for the Justice Department’s push to prosecute conduct tied to Oct. 7th and a test for how the criminal justice system handles overseas acts of terrorism. Prosecutors’ principal claim is that Al-Muhtadi provided material support to Hamas, contributing to the deaths of Americans and Israelis on Oct. 7th. The bulk of the evidence prosecutors plan to introduce against him comes from Israeli intelligence, intercepted phone calls, clandestine investigations, and battlefield reports—for crimes that all allegedly happened outside the U.S. 

The federal defenders representing Al-Muhtadi argue his case undermines basic due process principles, writing that the government’s evidence relies on the Israeli government’s word and that the “proof that would corroborate [his defense] no longer exists,” lost to the ruins in Gaza. To prosecutors, he’s a terrorist who lived among us.

Welcome to Court Watch #193. This week was filled with surprises. Be it the U.S. government staffer allegedly sidegigging for a terrorist organization, or a purported gun trafficker who thought pointing a weapon at a police memorial while wearing a ‘Cop Killer’ jacket would go legally well for him, or even a federal judge finding the President’s chief criminal prosecutorial priority is actually unconstitutional.

But we have one more surprise, this week Court Watch’s Peter Beck was awarded the David Burnham Legacy Grant to examine “the Justice Department’s shutdown of civil rights investigations into local law enforcement and carceral facilities.” We couldn’t be prouder of all of Peter’s reporting accomplishments since starting with Court Watch a few years ago. We’ll have more to say about the plan for that story series in the coming months, but feel free to reply to this email if you have any tips or leads that we should run down.  

The Docket Roundup

• A Department of Energy employee is accused of helping the Houthis with bombs and drones. The entire criminal affidavit is an absolute ride. 

• The Chicago Cubs got swept this week on the field but take heart fans (and one pontiff), they won in the courts against a neighboring bar. 

• A federal judge dismissed charges against a Florida woman accused of voting illegally because she wasn’t a citizen and issued a sweeping opinion that the actual criminal statute is unconstitutional. Given the Administration's intense focus on these cases, expect an immediate appeal. 

• The White House’s public statements about shutting down a Justice Department program may have hurt the department’s courtroom argument that it didn’t shut down the program.

• The alleged January 6th pipebomber was indicted again.

• Keeping on the topic, a former FBI agent who was fired shortly after discussing the January 6th pipebomber case on a podcast is suing Patel.

• The tea won’t stop flowing in the “Broadview Six” case, now featuring UChicago Law Professor William Baude.

• Two new Hamas-related cases were unsealed this week in the Eastern District of Louisiana. The cases involve two brothers who allegedly helped funnel money to Hamas. Last week, we noted the wave of October 7th-related prosecutions after the federal courts were mostly quiet for the past three years. 

• On a related note, prosecutors are trying to admit geofence evidence into the October 7th case out of Louisiana despite the Supreme Court ruling it unconstitutional this summer. It is an interesting anomaly that so many of these cases are coming from Louisiana.

• A judge will hear oral arguments next week over whether Matt Taibbi has to pay attorneys’ fees in a defamation case he lost to journalist Eoin Higgins. There’s a public access line for the media reporters who want in on the drama.

• Things are getting interesting in a case over whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis can designate the Council on American Islamic Relations as a terrorist organization. Also, CAIR's national office filed its own lawsuit late last night.

• Another week, another pardoned January 6th defendant suing the government (More than a dozen so far). The law firm in the second case is building a record of filing J6 civil complaints.

• The Justice Department announced that an “elite team” of FBI and HSI agents successfully helped transport 18 men from Haiti to face charges for President Jovenel Moise’s assassination in 2021. We wrote about the assassination in January and how it wound up as a federal court case.

• Senator Marsha Blackburn sued former Special Counsel Jack Smith, arguing that Smith was unlawfully appointed and that he is liable for purported investigative missteps as a private citizen.

• Your pro se of the week is against the conservative site The Gateway Pundit.

• A threat case targeting a fashion show took a dark turn.

• There’s keeping a low profile, and then there’s whatever this alleged illicit gun dealer is doing, like wearing a jacket that states “Mobile AL. Cop Killer.”

• We imagine it must be a little awkward when a detained client’s FaceTime call with his mother goes viral on a pro-Hezbollah Telegram channel.

• This threat case from North Alabama will be a colorful one to read aloud in court.

• One Florida man allegedly went at his mailman with a baseball bat.

• DOJ says the Trump Institute of Peace isn’t planning on being a thing soon but admits maybe, just maybe, your honor, they kicked the tires on the idea a few months ago.

• A judge sentenced a man who tried to take a fishing boat manned by an undercover FBI employee from Connecticut to Syria in order to join ISIS in 2019 to 92 months in prison. DOJ wanted 150 months.

• Prosecutors quietly dropped a charge in the case of an alleged ISIS supporter from the Bronx after one of our favorite defense attorneys threw a heater of a motion.

• The FBI arrested a Georgia man for an antisemitic threat against Secretary Pete Hegseth.

• Judge Liman would like pro bono lawyers to hit his line and take on a denaturalization case.

• An Alaska National Guardsman said the local police department where he works retaliated against him for deploying on an emergency mission.

• This order, out of a case involving the Trump administration’s attempts to place anti-DEI restrictions on grants under the Violence Against Women Act, caught our eye. “The Court’s review of the record and the parties’ arguments reveal that Defendants’ issuance of the Conditions violated the APA. Specifically, Defendants’ lackluster—and at times nonexistent— explanation of their decision to impose the Conditions on the grantees demonstrates that they have violated the APA’s prohibition on engaging in arbitrary and capricious agency action,” Judge Melissa Dubose wrote.

• New First Amendment case law regarding threats just dropped in the Western District of Texas.

• The song of the week for middle-aged dads is understandably this. It is admittedly good. But if you want something that hasn’t hit the zeitgeist, try this other song of the week; give it till the 40-second mark at least. And because your world needs more music, give Bob’s new song some love. 

• CBP charged a Moroccan man after the crew of a shipping vessel reportedly found him stowed away under a cargo crane.

• A Philadelphia firefighter was indicted for allegedly abusing the city’s payroll system to approve more than $100,000 in fake overtime.

• According to this judge’s footnote, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California has apparently adopted a policy of simply not showing up to court in immigration habeas petitions it won’t oppose.

• Harvard will not go down without a fight in a case brought against the university by the Trump administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

• A bit of a different vibe than originally reported. A man in the Northern District of Texas pleaded guilty to threatening a suicide attack in “a personal dispute,” but the Department of Justice’s initial press release cast his statements filmed on TikTok as threats against all Americans.

• Happy FOIA week to all who celebrate. A judge ruled the Justice Department has to turn over an Office of Legal Counsel memo examining the constitutionality of military strikes on suspected drug boats.

• Some DMV teenagers aren’t going to get their fake IDs.

• If you’re missing mail in Arlington, “Slugga Franklin” might be the reason why.

• The anti-human trafficking nonprofit Hope for Justice sued a former development manager, accusing him of taking its donor list to his next gig.

• Edward Snowden and a filmmaker who made a documentary about him were sued under the <checks notes> Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.

• The SEC says an AI tool advertised to investors as “fully regulated” by the SEC was in fact not.

• Three prison pro se litigants want a judge to sign off on letting them learn the horrors of electronic filing.

• A judge ended a consent decree with the Oakland Police Department after 23 years of monitoring, the longest-ever federal oversight of a local law enforcement agency.

• “15 apples” a day does not keep the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General’s Office away. 

Thanks for reading.

Editor’s Note: There is an intangible benefit to covering the criminal justice beat over time. It takes a while, but you start to get a sense of the humans behind the stories. When the prosecutor brings a large coffee cup instead of a small one into the courtroom, you realize that typically means she thinks the case is weak and is prepared for a long detention hearing. Or that the senior judge subconsciously only schedules the cases he’ll rule against the plaintiffs in the morning, and the ones that end in a loss for defendants in the afternoon. You find, over time, that your local clerk always uploads newly unsealed court records on Thursday evening after the early workweek rush of responsibilities subsides. Maybe they don’t even realize their tells, but a good court reporter always does. This month, McClatchy fired dozens of reporters around the country, with a not-so-subtle pivot to A.I. to cover the gap. But Claude can’t read people, and it sure as hell can’t read a courtroom. For The Rabbit Hole this week, reporter Peter Beck interviews those recently laid off reporters and takes a look at what reporting is lost when one of the largest American newspaper chains decides it can do less with less, gambling with the belief that you’ll still buy the news, even in its diminished form. -Seamus

McClatchy laid off nearly a hundred journalists this month. Newsrooms in Charlotte, Kansas City, Miami, Fort Worth, Sacramento, and at least a dozen others across the country shrank. 

At first glance, the 90 journalists seem like just a drop in the bucket of a reporting industry that employs thousands. The better analogy, however, is yet another nail in the coffin. Since 2004, newspapers have cut 77 percent of their payroll, the worst among the 532 industries the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks. And since 2000, reporting and editing jobs have been slashed 56 and 63 percent, respectively. 

The recent round of McClatchy layoffs signals there’s more pain for newsrooms to come, but the picture of what the United States loses with the extinction of local news is already clear. It’s happening in Lexington, Kentucky, where half of the staff received notices last week. In Charlotte, North Carolina’s most populous area, the McClatchy-owned newspaper dropped to just 25 positions—the paper had 300 two decades ago. And it’s happening in Idaho and Washington state, where the cuts hit hardest last week. 

At the Idaho Statesman, the state’s flagship newspaper based out of Boise, the newsroom was more than halved during the cuts, from 22 to nine full-time journalists. The nine journalists now have the impossible task of covering Idaho’s 1.8 million residents, living across more than 80,000 square miles. 

The Idaho News Guild, a labor union representing most of the laid-off journalists, told Court Watch: “These layoffs create immediate holes in our state and leave it poorer. There are now fewer eyes watching your elected officials. There are now fewer reporters investigating shady businesses. And there are now fewer journalists to highlight and celebrate our community’s unsung heroes.”

Alex Brizee, a criminal justice reporter who’s been at the Idaho Statesman since 2022, said in an interview, “To lose more than half our newsroom, I don’t know how we’re supposed to do the paper anymore.”

In neighboring Washington, the layoffs impacted all the McClatchy-owned papers, including the Bellingham Herald, the Olympian, the Tacoma News Tribune, and the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick. Two local government reporters, an investigative journalist, and a two-time statewide award-winning sports journalist were among those whose positions were targeted, according to the News Guild, a national union for journalists.

Shea Johnson, a senior investigative reporter at the Tacoma News Tribune who was part of the layoffs, told Court Watch, “The News Tribune’s remaining staff, who are incredibly talented journalists, will be stretched even thinner. That can only lead to less time for in-depth reporting.” “In a larger newsroom, I was the [Tribune’s] lone investigative reporter, and I had to, even then, manage other workload, including a civil courts beat,” Johnson continued. His last day is October 9th.

Miami Herald. Example of McClatchy’s new A.I. informed stories.

McClatchy, for its part, appears to be experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) to attempt to fill the large shoes left by senior reporters. A week after the cuts, McClatchy executives sent an all-staff email introducing new hires in the private equity-owned company’s “Content Innovation Lab,” an initiative to publish more AI-generated articles at McClatchy newspapers across the country. Journalists quickly pointed out an uptick in AI-generated content on the websites of McClatchy-owned media outlets shortly after the layoff announcement.

During a contentious town hall with employees in May, McClatchy chief executive Tony Hunter warned of the company’s precipitous profits, warning that embracing AI may be the news conglomerate’s only saving grace. “We have a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise,” Hunter reportedly said. 

An email to a McClatchy spokesperson inquiring about the company’s future and requesting comment for this piece went unanswered prior to publication.

As with so many problems plaguing society, the courts underscore the reporting and transparency that have been lost. If you’re curious about societal problems such as education gaps or healthcare inequities, look to the courts. To learn about what divides families and how businesses fail, read public filings. To examine the state of local news, see the stories that media outlets are and aren’t able to cover. 

Since McClatchy’s cuts, the answer to what went uncovered in Washington and Idaho is glaring: a civil case alleging decades-old sexual abuse at an elementary school and YMCA summer camp; an insider trading plea deal; a civil liberties case accusing local police of a warrantless search, with corroborating video; and dozens of habeas suits challenging immigration detention.

Many of these cases are pending in the Western District of Washington, one of the state’s two federal court districts, which stretches the state’s Pacific coastline, from Oregon up to Seattle and the Canadian border, and into its interior as far as the Cascade Mountain range. President Biden appointed all of its seven active U.S. district judges, making it one of the federal judiciary’s youngest benches. 

The district is home to two federal courthouses in Tacoma and Seattle, as well as three of the McClatchy-owned newspapers in Washington. Only two of the seven judges primarily preside over cases in Tacoma, Washington’s second most populous city, where Johnson is a reporter for the News Tribune.

“The legal system can be complex. It takes experience to navigate and decipher it for readers. But underneath the courts’ framework and legalese, there’s often a mine of interesting stories,” Johnson told Court Watch. “The civil court system can reveal alleged wrongdoing by public agencies or how much taxpayer money is being spent to resolve cases or pay judgments,” he added. 

Brizee shared a similar sentiment about her reporting on the criminal justice system, “ It's a beat that the more time you spend in it, the more you’re gonna learn, the more you’re gonna understand things. I feel like I’ve gained a lot of trust from attorneys in the area because I've been talking to them for five years.”

Studies show fewer local journalists mean increased corruption, less transparency, higher polarization, and more wasted tax dollars. One case challenging government transparency in Washington’s Western District perhaps comes from an unlikely plaintiff: a 22-year-old former U.S. Army Soldier who was sentenced on Friday to 70 months in federal prison for a cyber extortion scheme that attempted to steal more than $1 million from Verizon and AT&T customers. 

The ex-soldier’s complaint in the civil case? His paper copy of The Wall Street Journal wasn’t arriving fast enough through the Bureau of Prisons’ mail intake process. Although a minor lawsuit, local media did not report the former soldier’s frustrations with his prison’s mail department or the more significant outcome of his sentencing hearing prior to this piece’s publication.

The public’s understanding of how a national security case concluded now entirely rests on the Justice Department putting out a press release.

Another civil case challenging bureaucratic opacity targeted Seattle’s school system. The plaintiffs, the parents of a 15-year-old daughter who is diagnosed with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and ADHD, accused the Seattle School District of conducting an arbitrary process to remove her from the district’s courses for students struggling with learning disabilities and ignoring an administrative law judge’s order to return her to the class. The case, too, went unreported.

“Meaningful reporting can be built off an issue first identified in a court filing,” according to Johnson, who covers civil cases in addition to his investigative reporting. “Now that I’ll be gone, The News Tribune will have to either task another reporter with adding civil courts to their already packed list of responsibilities or risk missing out on potentially impactful stories,” Johnson told Court Watch.

More than three other impactful stories from court dockets have flown under the media’s radar thus far. On Thursday, September 24, a man sued Oracle, the technology giant whose owner has also upended the media industry, over claims the company fired him after he had to take time off to care for his son while he suffered from a “serious health condition.” Oracle has not yet responded to the civil suit, and a judge has not ruled on its merits.

In Tacoma this week, the victim of an alleged abuser, who worked as a public school teacher and YMCA camp counselor, sued the school district and the YMCA for purportedly failing to prevent his “systematic” abuse in 1979 and 1980. In 2024, a state jury awarded a $7.5 million verdict to a different victim of the same alleged abuser.

Among the Washington state quartet of McClatchy papers, some of their proudest reporting has been their coverage of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration crackdown. The Tri-City Herald analyzed arrest data for insight into local ICE activity and examined whether immigration agents had misused municipal Flock cameras, a topic that rose to controversy over the summer. And on September 12, the News Tribune published an article titled, “Mass Transfers from Tacoma ICE lockup leave lawyers and families scrambling.”

Our Sunday series stories are supposed to be only for paid subscribers. Because of the thrust of the piece, we opted to lift the paywall. On average, we convert 3 free subscribers to paying members with each paywalled piece. Help us make up today’s gap and keep stories like this available to the public by upgrading your subscription or making a one-time donation to support our independent journalism.

That scramble has led to dozens of habeas cases filed each week in Washington and Idaho alleging violations of due process and civil liberties. On Thursday, a woman who court records state identifies as Eritrean successfully obtained a temporary restraining order preventing immigration officials from deporting her. She had been detained on Monday and was reportedly told by immigration agents that she would be sent to Cameroon. However, court records indicate that an immigration judge had granted her request to withhold removal in April 2020.

The Eritrean woman’s case went unreported, and so did the overwhelming majority of other habeas petitions. Court officials do not allow habeas petitions to be filed electronically, given that the forms often contain personal information, so reporters can only view the documents in person at courthouses. 

Fewer journalists means even fewer habeas cases will be noticed, which can have a life-altering impact. Reporting might draw the attention of a nonprofit network or a legal aid organization, and habeas petitions are much more likely to succeed with legal representation. With so many habeas cases and an ever-fewer number of reporters and resources allocated to covering immigration proceedings, the chance that a noncitizen’s petition for relief will gain outside attention is inching closer to lottery-level odds.

The story is similar in Idaho, but with even fewer dockets to cover. The state has just one federal judicial district with two active U.S. district judges, including Chief Judge Amanda Brailsford, a Biden appointee, and Judge David Nye, who has the rare distinction of having been nominated to the bench by both President Obama and President Trump. Created in 1891, Idaho's federal bench has had only 13 appointed judges in its history. 

Seven counties in Idaho lack a single newspaper; most of the state’s active local papers publish on only a weekly basis. The federal courthouses are in Coeur d’Alene, Pocatello, and Boise, where the Idaho Statesman is based.

Brizee, one of the seven reporters spared from this round of McClatchy layoffs, was candid about the challenges the cuts will incur: “ I don’t understand how this is going to work.” “I can’t imagine that I’m gonna be able to cover courts the way I do now,” she continued.

The biggest news on the docket this week—a local CEO and one-time Boise police officer indicted for allegedly running a Russian front company—drew some media attention. But that didn’t happen for several other cases filed over the past two weeks with possible repercussions for Idaho communities.

On September 14th, the Justice Department filed a complaint on behalf of the EPA accusing a couple of destroying $30,000 worth of habitat in a salmon restoration project run by Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game. On September 16th, a couple sued the City of Idaho Falls after a video of local law enforcement entering their home over protests went viral, prompting the police department to issue a press release. The statement led to a second video criticizing the officers’ conduct and the department’s response, which has received more than 2.5 million views on YouTube. And on Monday, September 21st, a man pleaded guilty to insider trading after reaching a deal with prosecutors in which he admitted to profiting almost $50,000 from a $99,350.27 trade.

United States v. Mettler. Another court case that will unreported because of the cuts to local newspapers.

None of these cases were reported. Neither was a case of a man charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. Brizee said she wouldn’t be surprised if the layoffs further decreased the Statesman’s federal courts coverage, adding, “I think our local coverage of state cases will shrink as well.” Brizee told Court Watch she didn’t know of any other reporters in Idaho whose job was solely responsible for covering criminal courts.

“ If I’m naming someone in a story, their life is now being changed because I've written about them,” Brizee said about the moral pitfalls of covering the criminal justice system. “It’s still my job to make sure I’m telling the story in the most fair and accurate way, whether or not they committed whatever crime they committed, and no matter who they are, or how high-profile their case is.”

She ended by saying, referring to the notorious alleged killer of four college students, “Whether or not they’re the Bryan Kohberger cases of the world or not, everyone deserves that equity and fairness to their case, and then they also deserve a story at the end that talks about why they did the crimes they did. The victims deserve that too.”

It’s a tall, and very human, task that McClatchy’s new Content Innovation Lab now might be used to fill.

The laid-off journalists at the Idaho Statesman had reported on dilapidated schools, leading to a $2 billion state investment. They had covered mass shootings. And written award-winning editorials and columns. The state of transparency and public accountability in Idaho will surely suffer without them. With the cuts, the same will now be true for a dozen other newspapers around the country. 

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Welcome to Court Watch #192. We’ll get to cable news fighting the good fight for public access (and not the case you’re thinking), flamethrowers and Shabbat services, and a Texas golf course with a pandemic problem. But first, let’s talk about a 25-year-old terror financing case that’s helping inform criminal prosecutions this year. 

It didn’t get a lot of coverage outside of a dogged criminal justice reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, but the Justice Department quietly secured an indictment this week against a 56-year-old man, Raed Yousef, in the Middle District of Florida for allegedly funneling money to Hamas. Prosecutors wrote Yousef used PayPal to send thousands of dollars to what he allegedly told an associate were intended for the “true men,” not just “the babies, public people, or the needy ones,” but “the other people-the men.”

There’s a lot to unpack in it, but we were particularly struck by a seemingly throwaway line in the government’s detention memo. In the filing, prosecutors mention that a search of Yousef’s residence found a composition notebook with the name of a now-defunct American organization: the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, which the U.S. designated as a terrorist organization and seized its assets in 2001 for serving as a purported fundraising front for Hamas. After a mistrial and then a successful conviction, a federal judge in Texas sentenced its founders in 2009 to between 15 and 65 years in prison after a jury found they funneled $12.4 million to Hamas. The Holy Land Foundation investigation has always been a lodestar of a case for those who argue that there exists a network of fundraising in the United States for Hamas and other Muslim-brotherhood link groups. Conversely, some civil liberties advocates see the Holy Land Foundation investigation as a lightning rod case and an example of government overreach shortly after September 11. 

Apart from the Florida case, the Justice Department has been tallying a series of October 7th and Hamas-related cases flying under the radar. In June, FBI agents arrested a man in California who allegedly acted as an online fundraiser and sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hamas. In New York, prosecutors accused the global director of a Muslim charity organization in the United Kingdom, the Al-Khair Foundation, of coordinating with Hamas leadership to raise funds for the terror group. In Yousef’s case, prosecutors allege a French non-governmental organization was a key money conduit for his conduct. The NGO, which we’ve identified but are waiting to give them a chance to comment until we name, had ties to many seemingly mainstream European Muslim organizations but a history of quiet connections to the Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Indeed, with help from its European law enforcement partners, it appears federal investigators are quietly dusting off a well-worn playbook for investigating Hamas funding and Muslim-brotherhood linked groups in the United States and Europe. But no one is noticing you’re all understandably focused on a lesbian bar in Massachusetts.  

Finally in Louisiana, prosecutors and defense attorneys are gearing up for trial in the case of a man accused of participating in Hamas’ October 7th attack itself. The man’s wife is also facing charges in Louisiana for allegedly helping him lie on a Visa application to enter the U.S. We asked Main Justice to weigh in on the seemingly newfound energy investigating October 7th, but we didn't hear back. 

On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Yousef to be detained until his trial in Florida after his defense attorney filed a motion for his release. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment. 

With that, let’s talk about the rest of the dockets for the week.

The Docket Roundup

• We’re pretty sure we’d quit lawyering forever if we ever got this order.

• For a brief shining moment CSPAN was the epicenter of the public-right-to-access resistance. That is, until some sad corporate lawyer realized they were blatantly violating a court order. We’ll remember fondly your efforts to spark a revolution. 

• We’ve never seen a text about a lawn service turn into an ISIS-related case, but there’s a first time for everything.

• BBC thinks one of President Trump’s former attorneys might be trying to duck a subpoena in the defamation case.

• The Department of Justice announced charges against 16 noncitizens for election-related crimes.

• On a related note, prosecutors charged a Utah mailman who allegedly said he threw out 300 primary ballots out of laziness, but have they considered how the mail never stops, Jerry?

• Folks, it’s been six years. Congress, the executive branch, and an innumerable number of teachers have all figured it out. If the courts don’t yet know how to mute Zoom, we don’t know how to help you. 

• Buzzfeed was sued over a purported data breach.

• Yet another pardoned J6er sued under the Federal Tort Claims Act. 

• The ATF reportedly caught an illegal drug seller by <check notes> looking at the screenshot of him during a FaceTime call as he was screen sharing his gun purchases.

• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service turned over some public lands in Southern Texas to SpaceX and NASA.

• There’s a threat case out of Tennessee involving FBI Director Kash Patel that takes some interesting turns.

• An Alabama librarian is suing over losing her job for refusing to move books. 

• A federal judge acknowledging that police may be engaging in racial profiling in their immigration stops but finding it not illegal is something. 

• Prosecutors in the alleged Jan. 6th pipebomber case are trying to get defense counsel thrown off the case, arguing their representation of the defendant in a civil case is a conflict of interest.

• The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security accused a UAE-based company and its Estonian owner of smuggling airplane parts to Russia. 

• We politely question the decision-making process of anyone who allegedly calls in a threat to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center. 

• A group of Columbia University students sued the university over a “teach-in” protesting the war in Gaza that purportedly devolved into a brawl.

• Some threat cases are more serious than others. In Florida, FBI agents arrested a man who had a flamethrower and was allegedly assembling a .50 caliber machine gun. The criminal complaint states he wrote about “hunt[ing] Jews” and suggests he may have been planning an imminent attack on a synagogue. We went down the Rabbit Hole of the purported Instagram post; there were multiple people there while he allegedly spewed his antisemitism.

• The DEA quietly arrested one of its most wanted fugitives after almost 20 years on the run.

• A man who was on supervised release in Utah reportedly caught a gun charge after confronting someone who borrowed his girlfriend’s car.

• The government is trying to block the release of Cilia Maduro, who has been in detention since she and her husband were captured in Caracas.

• We can’t say for sure, but we would bet good money that this Texas indictment is yet another reminder for defense attorneys to remind their clients that jail calls are recorded.

• Relatedly, a nonprofit legal aid organization sued the New York Department of Corrections to prevent it from monitoring prisoner phone calls to the group.

• There’s a purported fake coupon scam out of Michigan that netted almost $600,000. We’re curious just how many counterfeit coupons allegedly had to be printed.

• Our song of the week gets played in our newsroom every time someone emails us about a typo. Though the title is abrupt, as a whole it is lyrically beautiful. Feel free to point out our typos this week so we can throw it back on. If you need something even sweeter, maybe try the acoustic version of Isimo. 

• A Texas golf course appears to have gotten into some trouble with pandemic loans.

• Are you really trying if you’re not calling into city council meetings before the closing arguments in your bribery trial? D.C. residents want to know. Also, while we’re semi on the subject, please don’t ruin porchfest.

• There’s a discrimination case involving a science museum in Georgia.

• More than 50 years after the hijacking and ten years after a FOIA lawsuit was filed, DOJ is still working on releasing files about DB Cooper.

• An Orthodox Jewish summer camp lost its lawsuit against the state of New York over a law that prohibits possessing firearms at summer camps.

• Props to UC San Diego researchers who have figured out how many sealed cases there are in the dockets. We reverse engineered their approach and found some interesting court cases. Story to come. 

• A truck driver was indicted in Connecticut for allegedly stealing cargo.

• They haven’t announced it yet with all the others, but the Justice Department filed a new complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia to strip the U.S. citizenship of a naturalized citizen.

• Prosecutors say a Michigan man ran a Medicaid scam and forced employees to work without pay at a haphazard opioid treatment facility.

• Your pro se of the week probably exceeds the filing page limit. Also, if you’re a fan of public corruption cases, you probably recognize the filer’s name. 

• We had a lot of fun playing with Justice Connection’s new dashboard that tracks the Justice Department’s caseload over the past decade.

• Is a statement a threat if it’s said in the middle of an intense video game? The Fifth Circuit seemed to leave the question up to a jury. This case from Alabama about alleged comments made in the middle of a Fortnite round might give defense attorneys another shot at arguing it’s protected speech.

• The Justice Department announced the extradition of the alleged leader of an ISIS cell in Brooklyn who’s been on the run for more than a decade. He’s accused of providing material support to al-Nusrah. It was nice of the Bureau to wait a day till Syria's president departed the United Nations before arresting a member of the designated terrorist group he used to lead.

Thanks for reading. You probably got a dedicated email this week about filing out the reader survey. We appreciate those who did. Those who haven’t, there still a chance to be the change you want to see in the world. 

Editor’s Note: The summary of the D.B. Cooper FOIA lawsuit has been updated for clarity. (10/1/26)

Welcome to Court Watch #191. We've been trained over decades that a good headline and a story's compelling opening paragraph are the most important factors of whether a piece gets read. We did the former, we think that it’s a good enough one to ignore the latter. 

The Docket Roundup

• Let’s just start with this opinion and just get it out of the way early…A federal judge ruled that the “two coke can” size of a former NFL player’s genitals was a "legitimate public concern.” 

• A D.C. judge issued a preliminary injunction against DHS to prevent ICE agents from showing up at a man’s house after he sent an email to the acting director calling him a Nazi.

• Two Epstein victims sued his estate.

• On a related note, a woman who received $750,000 from a JPMorgan Chase victims’ fund after falsely claiming she was an Epstein victim pleaded guilty to fraud

• We propose a complete and total ban on judges trying to make jokes in opinions until they vet them through experts of such things like us. (Footnote 1.)

• If you want a deep dive on a Russian cryptocurrency site’s connection to underworld, there was a fascinating seizure notice filed this week.

• This Pennsylvania case of an alleged ISIS supporter set off all of today’s counterterrorism alarm bells, allegedly including the defendant’s past use of a school shooter as his handle on social media, child abuse materials sent over Discord, threats to commit a mass attack, Roblox, and communications with overseas extremists. The criminal complaint in the case paints a grim picture that the FBI may have averted an imminent attack. We’d also note that he was previously in custody for a similar crime and released. This is all to say, maybe re-read our now harbinger Sunday piece. 

• Speaking of ISIS and Roblox, the defendant in our favorite alleged threat case out of Texas will have to stay (?) in home detention after there was confusion between the judge’s written and verbal orders.

We’re looking for more readers to fill out a quick six question reader survey. If you’re a free subscriber, you get a temporary 30 day paid subscription with access to everything behind a paywall. If you’re a paid subscriber, you get our never-ending love. Thanks to the 150 or so of you that have already done so, we’d love to get to 1,000 by the end of next week. We spent a couple hours on this free roundup, do us a solid and spend 30 seconds on the survey.

• The District of Maryland federal court has decided electronics are not allowed in the building anymore. Which, for the record, is horrible and people that made that decision should feel bad about their decision.

• The New York Times moved to dismiss the President’s defamation lawsuit. 

• A 22-year-old pleaded guilty to bombing a Santa Barbara, California, courthouse. Three people were injured in the attack, which prosecutors say was in retaliation for local law enforcement seizing the man’s firearms earlier that year.

• Putting your fingers in the shape of a gun and aiming it at a Deputy Marshall in a courthouse is an easy way to spend more time in a courthouse. 

• It took us going through three different federal districts where the defendants were arrested, two of which had the charging documents still sealed, but we finally hit paydirt in New York to unravel an elderly scam in Texas involving gold bars, a former master chief, and a staged robbery to cut out their co-conspirators. 

• Mercer University is settling a lawsuit with a former hourly employee who they allegedly didn’t pay overtime.

• The Sixth Circuit decided that marijuana contracts aren’t federally enforceable, even when it’s done in states that have legalized cannabis. 

• CNN reporter Katelyn Polantz is doing the Lord’s work.

• We’ll soon see if gold bars get a senior CIA officer a golden plea deal.

• In a week when dozens of local journalists were laid off, putting yet another nail in the coffin of the state of journalism in this country, it was a local public radio that brought down the chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court after unearthing his involvement in a payout to an ally last year.

• Listen, we know it’s a tough read but we would really appreciate it if you spent some time with this piece and shared it widely. Just open it up in another tab and get to it when you can. We’d very much welcome any feedback.

• An exhibit in a Maryland case gives one a window into the closing of USAID and DOGE’s purported role in it all.

• The self-described largest Muslim American civil rights organization in the United States is continuing to fight a forthcoming November deadline to be declared a “domestic terrorist organization” by the state of Florida. 

• A Chemical company in Pennsylvania with corporate headquarters in the Netherlands was a victim of a 16 million dollar business email compromise scam, by way of a love-seeking Texan. 

• The Fifth Circuit had some strong opinions about M. Night Shyamalan movies (see footnote 13). To be fair, we don’t think the judiciary properly appreciated the subtle (and not-so-subtle) religious undertones about faith in Signs because it’s hard to overlook the plot hole of aliens who hate H2O choosing to invade a planet that’s 70% water.

• A Virginia judge kept a man detained who prosecutors say ran a massive Snapchat hacking (at least 1,000 accounts) and sextortion operation targeting minors. Prosecutors also filed a diary exhibit suggesting he may have a history of assaulting women.

• The Associated Press is taking on the federal courts’ practice of not allowing access to any habeas petitions online. If you want to get a better sense of why this matters, see our past story here. Also, fun fact and one we apparently forgot to tell our readers when we did it, we’re one of the only news organizations in America that sued (and won…twice!) to get access to a habeas docket thus inadvertently helping set some solid legal precedent for the AP’s lawsuit. Please invite us to your Christmas party, wire reporters.  

• If anyone wants to help redo the carpets on the fifth floor of D.C.’s Prettyman courthouse, we got you. (Hat tip to Lawfare’s Roger Parloff.) 

• The Justice Department announced charges against five Russian intelligence operators for an alleged murder for hire plot in the United States.

• There was a major fentanyl bust in San Diego.

• Two engineers at the hobbyist stock trader company Robinhood were charged in the Southern District of New York for allegedly using nonpublic information to make crypto trades.

• The FTC has been secretly jamming up Twilio for years. 

• Bell pepper fraud is a new one even for us.

• A South Carolina woman allegedly embezzled more than $6 million from an HBCU and a church saying she’ll build them a football stadium, using the money instead to live it up in Miami.

• In this week’s worst of humanity, a former youth minister in Falls Church, Virginia, was indicted on child abuse charges.

• The feds seem to have seized some crypto tied to IRGC oil assets.

• A group of victims from the October 7th and a series of Hezbollah attacks sued Iran and North Korea.

• The only defense attorney in America we’d immediately hire if the Justice Department came knocking on our door is quietly trying to re-envision what a crime of violence is in a terrorism case. 

• We just want to lay down a marker for New York prosecutors that it may not happen today, or tomorrow, or even four years from now, but one day we will get the details of what’s happening in this case. That’s a Court Watch guarantee. 

• A Colombian alleged serial killer and FARC leader was indicted for material support.

• Long time readers will know how much interest this indictment in Texas of a purported Moorish sovereign citizen cell brought us. Also, props to the SDTX prosecutors who got creative on the charges. (“False Claim to Be a Foreign Diplomat - 18 U.S.C. ' 915” is a novel on)

• Like most red-blooded Americans who possess discerning musical taste, we disapprove of anyone who sounds like, but is not, Brooks & Dunn as much as the next guy, so we were already primed to dislike this song, but then it hit the 42-second mark, and we were objectively jamming out. Ergo, here’s your song of the week. If that’s too high energy and randomly dancey for you, maybe we humbly suggest slowing down with this song. 

• A former TSA employee sued the government over claims the TSA uses a quota system with promoting senior air marshals. 

• Defense attorneys in the Abbey Gate bombing case out of Virginia asked the judge for a 17-year prison sentence. Prosecutors had requested a 20-year maximum sentence last week. The judge ended up going with the 20-year max.

• As a DMV-located newsroom, we really weren’t thrilled to read that our drinking water is hanging by a thread: “DC Water has also identified at least two additional PI segments in condition equal to or worse than the segment that collapsed, including a 1,750-linear-foot segment near the confluence of Muddy Branch and the Potomac River, in close proximity to WSSC Water’s drinking water intake serving more than one million customers daily.”

• There’s some intra-administrative drama brewing at William & Mary over a student’s testing accommodations. A vice dean sued the college.

• Next up in the October 7th case out of Louisiana: whether the government still gets to present geofence warrants. It’s mildly crazy to us that no one else is watching this entire docket, some quite creative legal defense arguments are being pushed around.

• A 15-year family feud over money led to an Ohio man catching a threat charge. 

• We have lots of questions about the murder of a Siberian husky in D.C.

• But in better animal news, DOJ saved a bunch of dogs in Alabama. 

• The government wants a judge to order that a group of FBI agents suing over their termination for kneeling during a 2020 protest can’t proceed anonymously, despite the Justice Department previously allowing them to be identified as Jane and John Does.

• The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office continues to be a mess. A judge disqualified DA Larry Krasner and an attorney he appointed from a habeas case over conflicts of interest.

• 80 years old is apparently still not old enough to stop allegedly being a pervert (editor’s note: trigger warning on the docket, it’s a tough read).

• Homeland Security Investigations say a Nigerian woman illegally voted in Massachusetts, but what really caught our eye is that the agent on the case is a former election administrator himself. And that the criminal complaint states HSI has examined Massachusetts voter rolls.

• It turns out, hats in the back of backpacks aren’t great places to (allegedly) store guns, especially when you have a murder conviction.

• A Charlotte, North Carolina, man was charged for allegedly mailing antisemitic letters, including to AIPAC, American Jewish Congress, a Holocaust memorial in Miami, an unnamed Secret Service protectees living in Jupiter, Florida. Shoutout to the news orgs which took our tweet and made it their exclusive.

• The Justice Department’s National Security Division issued a seemingly random press release announcing that it was still going to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, despite very few recent prosecutions under the act, several prosecutions being withdrawn, and a significant chunk of the division’s personnel leaving during the Trump administration.

• The docket is sealed, but authorities in the Northern District of California appear to be working a terrorism case.

• Since you made it all the way through this loaded issue, let us tell you the story of an almost brilliant scheme. According to prosecutors, a man awaiting sentencing in Missouri for a $31 million Ponzi Scheme hired a political consultant to help drum up support for a more lenient sentence. Prosecutors state the two settled on having a state politician write an op-ed arguing for leniency and, to make sure the judge saw it, they planned to purchase online ads for the piece geofenced to the judge’s house. Where did such a clever scheme go wrong? Well, court records indicate the two hatched the plan over a recorded jail call. The judge ended up sentencing him to 11 years in prison.

Thanks for reading. A final note, there won’t be a The Rabbit Hole this Sunday. We spent our week in Pittsburgh talking to survivors of terrorism attacks, victims of 764, and all manners of human sadness and noble resolve in the face of such depravity. Frankly, we’re mentally spent and we have a story in mind for The Rabbit Hole that deserves fresher eyes. We appreciate your patience.

P.S. We made the ultimate Court Watch meme for this week’s roundup. Feel free to use it gently shame news organizations that don’t cite our reporting.

On Nov. 4, 2025, Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy pleaded guilty to stabbing a corrections officer with a weapon he fashioned from a jailhouse desk. A written note law enforcement found shortly after the attack stated plainly, “This is a terrorist attack for the Islamic State.” El Bahnasawy, with a documented history of untreated mental health issues, was already a decade into a previous conviction of 40 years for plotting attacks in New York City on behalf of the designated terrorist organization. According to prosecutors, El Bahnasawy has never wavered from his violent ideology. He's not alone among convicted terrorists in refusing to renounce his fervent, violent beliefs—but he is one of the few. 

Movies and television shows often portray hardened extremists, committed to their ideology until their very last days of incarceration and first days back in society. But, in the real world, recidivism among those who are convicted of terror offenses in the United States isn’t just low—at less than 4 percent, it’s rare.

Despite the low rate of convicted terrorist recidivism, recent events suggest that this trend may be on the path to quietly inching higher in the coming years as more and more convicts are being released.

To name a few examples: In July, a 21-year-old German man killed a woman and injured another 29 people after he was released from a brief stint in detention for attempting to join the Islamic State. In France, a man who had been recently released early on a 17-year prison sentence for a terror-inspired stabbing of two Belgian police officers was killed in February during an attempted knife attack on gendarmeries at the Arc de Triomphe. And in March, 36-year-old Mohamed Jalloh killed an instructor with the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at Old Dominion University, a decade after he was convicted of attempting to provide material support to ISIS.

These cases suggest the problem isn’t simply recidivism rates, but rather a haphazard and nearly nonexistent reintegration system that conflates disengagement from violence with actual deradicalization. With dozens of convicted terrorists soon to be released in the coming years, the United States lacks any uniform standard for how, or whether, they’re tracked. 

(Editor’s Note: As is typical with our Sunday series, this story is behind a paywall. However for a limited time, if you’re currently a free subscriber and fill out a quick six question reader survey, we’re offering a complimentary month of paid subscription which unlocks stories like this. Be sure to be logged into your Court Watch subscription before filing out the survey. There are no gimmicks attached to it. No autorenewing or credit card required. It’s simply a thank you for helping us better understand our readers)

‘This Case Kept Me Up At Night’

On Friday, September 11th, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court unsealed a deportation order for an Afghan woman who was accused of supporting the Islamic State in the first-ever use of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. The deportation was the first time the Justice Department invoked the court, which Congress created in 1996 under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, to allow the use of classified information in immigration cases sensitive to national security.

The court’s inaugural case, which Court Watch first reported, after a 30-year lull, represents an initial victory for the Justice Department in testing the Alien Terrorist Removal Court as another route to pursue President Trump’s immigration agenda. Unlike in traditional immigration courts, a U.S. district judge ordered the respondent, Nazira Haji Zada, removed from the U.S., finding that the government had met its evidentiary burden that she was likely a noncitizen who posed a national security threat to the U.S.

Prosecutors argued that Haji Zada, a 47-year-old Texas woman, had knowingly supported her family’s radicalization and a plot hatched by her son and son-in-law to attack a federal polling location in November 2024 on behalf of the Islamic State. Prosecutors also alleged Haji Zada’s role in the plot was to help relocate the rest of the family to Islamic State-controlled territory in Afghanistan. Haji Zada’s son was sentenced in November 2025 to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to planning the attempted mass shooting. 

The court’s structure would have allowed prosecutors to present classified evidence in a removal hearing to Judge Ericksen against Haji Zada while withholding it from Haji Zada and potentially her attorneys. Plans for that removal hearing, however, were upended when Haji Zada apparently agreed to concede to the government’s accusations that she was a noncitizen terrorist.

On July 30th, Chief Judge Joan Ericksen presided over the court’s first and so far only public hearing. At the hearing, attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office for the District of Columbia representing Haji Zada said they would lodge multiple objections to the court’s constitutionality, which legal scholars have questioned. 

Judge Ericksen’s deportation order was filed on August 20th, but was not unsealed until today. According to the order, Haji Zada was deported back to her home country of Afghanistan. 

Welcome to Court Watch #190. There was a lot going on in the U.S. court system this week. In the words of one First Circuit judge, “We’ll fill in the deets shortly, but the SparkNotes is this…”

We got cartels, threats, YouTube influencers, weaponized drones, Marine anarchists, NBA gambling, illegal vapes, and an AI that talks to you in the voice of the person you’re stalking. Among other things from the dockets.

To steal the language of one federal prosecutor this week, it’s “a veritable cornucopia of related criminal conduct.” 

The Docket Roundup

• In a first window into our coming dystopian hellhole, an AI agent pitched us to write for Court Watch. We’ve asked ‘him’ where he went to law school. No response yet. Freelancers can be so flighty. 

• We know there’s a lot going on, but seriously, is no one going to notice that prosecutors in Texas have secured an indictment against an allegedly high-ranking Tren de Aragua leader, Luis Saúl Pérez Nieto, with running multi-country money laundering and drug smuggling operations? 

• A Nebraska man allegedly tried to get a small bomb through TSA at the Omaha airport. The man reportedly told law enforcement he’s not sure how it ended up in his bag.

• We have all the Kyrsten Sinema tea.

• Prosecutors asked for the maximum sentence of 20 years for a man who an Eastern Virginia jury split on different counts about his level of complicity in the Abbey Gate bombing in 2021.

• On this 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we reup our quick reflection from O’Hara’s pub. 

• Curious about how busy the appellate lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Division are? Well, the attorneys arguing in a case involving the U.S. Institute of Peace gave a rundown.

• Conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley sued the state of California over a law that’s been nicknamed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.”

• A professional gambler who was allegedly involved in an NBA rigging scheme is set to plead guilty.

• The government and federal defenders are getting nitpicky about an Iran-backed militia commander’s jailhouse diet.

• If you’re curious how to ask for a pardon, Pete Rose, Sirhan Sirhan, and a few of the Watergate defendants can show you the ropes thanks to American Oversight.

• Chainsaws, alcohol, and arson at a family member’s cabin reportedly all happened in this wild ride before a man bicycled his way into the back of a truck.

• “The Court can't determine whether the government's representations are unreliable because of deliberate misrepresentation or mere ineptitude. But either way, the Court won’t be fooled again. Based on the record before the Court, there is no basis to find a significant likelihood that the petitioner will actually be removed in the reasonably foreseeable future,” writes Senior U.S. District Judge John Gerrard in an immigration case out of Nebraska.

• Do not bet your wallet on online business advertisements or to prove your love to women you’ve only known through WhatsApp.

• A New York man was indicted for allegedly threatening the spouse of an ICE agent. The man reportedly wrote over a social media platform, “Are these your kids you had with your Nazi murder r*pist husband. They will get it too. Never think that his whiteness will protect them.”

• Meanwhile, a fellow New Yorker, a 75 year old man with an iphone 12 mini was charged with hoping someone would kill the president. It’ll be interesting to see if this case survives impact with a jury. 

• Most of  the docket was sealed but the judge’s new detention order gave away the details. A few years back, Texas police officers shot and killed a man who allegedly charged at them with a chainsaw. This month, the man’s brother was charged with threatening to kill the police officer he (incorrectly) believed pulled the trigger. 

• Our entire brand is taking stuffy legal documents and making them accessible to the masses, but it’s a bit jarring to see the First Circuit employ our writing style. “We’ll fill in the deets shortly, but the SparkNotes is this,” writes one appellate judge. Complete with ending the forty-page opinion with “that’s all folks.” Not sure how we feel about this but we take full responsibility for the consequences and influences we’ve had on the courts. 

• You know when you love a song, and then you play it for your best friend who doesn’t get the vibe, but you keep telling them to just wait until the hook towards the end. And then it comes, and they still don’t like it. So you unfortunately have to cut off all contact with that person forever because they just don’t appreciate chaotic energy music. This is that song for us this week. (Wait till the ‘if I was in your shoes, I would be jumping’). Go ahead and unsubscribe if you’re not finding yourself dancing in your kitchen. 

• An Indian national living in Minnesota was charged for allegedly voting illegally in the 2024 election.

• College students in North Carolina’s Triangle area might have to find a new place to buy their vapes.

• Speaking of the Triangle, a man from Raleigh allegedly sent more than 300 messages to a celebrity singer and songwriter with the initials “EC.” This line in the complaint caught our eye:  “During the interview, DOUGLAS allowed investigators to enter his residence. Upon entering DOUGLAS' residence, DOUGLAS informed investigators that he created an AI chat bot that listened to everything spoken within the residence, translated the spoken words to Russian, and played it through the speakers in the voice of EC."

• A former Louisiana police officer and marine pleaded guilty to being involved in the Order of the Black Lotus, an anarchist group.

• Who the hell is using Bing Visual (besides alleged child predators)?

• A purported drug dealer in Cleveland ran from an FBI search warrant by hopping from his balcony.

• Your pro se of the week was written in marker and claims President Trump engaged in a roughly $200 trillion hack.

• The Associated Press wants the CIA to turn over records from its investigation into a former case officer who was convicted of assaulting dozens of women.

• There’s an interesting case in the Northern District of Georgia in which a plaintiff is seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction over pretextual traffic stops for immigration arrests.

• 7-Eleven means business when it comes to its franchisees.

• A judge signed off on the Justice Department and the state of Kansas reaching a consent judgment in a case over tuition benefits for undocumented residents, despite the governor and an outside nonprofit trying to intervene.

• What’s worse than dealing with accountants? Well, how about (allegedly) fake accountants who raise millions in VC money?

• A Louisiana man was indicted for allegedly posting threats to commit a school shooting and racist tweets.

• WWE legend Ric Flair sued a digital talent agency, claiming the company duped him into signing away his image and likeness for promises of six-figure monthly earnings. Our friend Justin Rohrlich at the Independent has the write-up. (editor’s note: Peter would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Flair formally for being kind enough to take a selfie with him and his friend in a Delta lounge before they flew to the Virgin Islands for a graduation trip. And to apologize for saying “Whew!” one too many times.)

• A Florida man caught a threat charge for allegedly emailing a congressman, “You 10000% deserve to be beheaded and your body paraded through the streets.”

• The SEC says it busted a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme targeting Christians in America with Ghanaian heritage.

• In this week’s worst of humanity, an 764 member from Tennessee, Cayden Newberry, who used platforms such as Roblox, Discord, and Telegram to prey on children, is set to plead guilty.

• We haven’t been tracking it too closely, but this investigation out of Maine might be one of the first cases at the federal level of drones being used to carry explosive devices.

Thanks for reading. Here’s an Easter Egg for those committed readers who stayed until the end. At Court Watch, we’re trying to get a better sense of who our readers are and their interests. So we put together a very quick 5 question survey. If you’re a free subscriber and fill it out, you get a free 30-day upgrade to a paid subscription (editor’s note: no credit card required, doesn’t auto-subscribe at the end, none of that nonsense, just a thank you for spending one minute filling out the survey). That will be important because Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole is behind a paywall and it's a doozy. 

Welcome to Court Watch #189. We have a roundup filled with meth at the CIA headquarters, FIFA tea, and a $450 million investment scam. But first, let’s talk about Caamp, the American folk band that is the background music for a lot of our writing. 

When one of our favorite Caamp songs, All The Debt I Owe, came on the playlist this week, we felt a pull to see if we could find a song that matched the vibe. Admittedly, our muses for court watching come from a lot of different and strange places. Much like the band and the song, the would-be court docket had to include a larger than life (in some circles) figure, be relatively unknown outside of the most terminally online fans, have some sort of unpayable debt/the promise of new beginnings, and a rhythmic soothing that reminds you of sleep. 

Which naturally brought us to the Great Lakes. In the beginning of this year, the Minnesota sleep comfort company, MyPillow, sued ACI International, a company that makes slippers, for putting a levy on MyPillow’s Amazon account. The suit states ACI International implemented the levy after MyPillow fell behind on its payments to the manufacturer, which MyPillow attributed to economic losses after being a target of the FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. In the filings, MyPillow argued that ACI’s levy could result in the company’s demise. All told, MyPillow was purportedly on the hook for millions of dollars but had a cash flow issue. But there was a possibility of a, for lack of a better word, government bailout. According to emails filed as exhibits in the case, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell offered a cut of a possible weaponization settlement to pay off the debt.

MyPillow claimed ACI International continued the tax levy despite the two companies reaching an agreement that MyPillow would use a portion of a possible settlement with the government over purported wrongdoing in the Arctic Frost investigation to pay ACI International. In response to the lawsuit, ACI International filed separate motions this week to transfer the case to California and dismiss it, along with a host of exhibits. 

One exhibit is the “security agreement” for the hypothetical Arctic Frost settlement. The agreement states MyPillow owes ACI International $15.4 million and promises that MyPillow will pay the full debt if it receives a settlement of more than $50 million. If the settlement is less than $50 million, the security agreement proposes for My Pillow to pay 80 percent of its outstanding debt. 

The newest court filings from ACI International includes a declaration from its lawyer that, “I am not aware of any evidence that MyPillow has submitted a claim relating to “Arctic Frost” to any governmental agency, or that any recovery on any such claim has been made or is owed to MyPillow.”

MyPillow and Lindell did not respond to a January 2026 request for comment on the lawsuit. His lawyers did not respond to an additional inquiry this week. We didn’t reach out to Caamp, though they did previously release a song called No Sleep. 

Now on to other dockets you may have slept on this week. 

The Docket Roundup

• A federal judge is refusing, on procedural grounds, to dismiss charges against alleged co-conspirators in Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s case. 

• It wouldn’t be the first week of the college football season without Lane Kiffin drama. 

• The Trump administration has started deporting Iranian immigrants to the Central African Republic, including several who had pending asylum appeals.

• A doctor and several former federal employees sued the CDC for not giving more guidance about Havana syndrome. 

• OpenAI is being sued by a 13-year-old who witnessed a school shooting in Canada. The lawsuit argues that ChatGPT encouraged the shooter.

• Prosecutors are appealing a district court judge’s ruling that tower dumps are unconstitutional to the Fifth Circuit. It’s a case we’ve been watching closely with huge ramifications for how law enforcement conducts investigations involving multiple crime scenes.

• A judge ordered the State Department to turn over answers to why it shut down USAID.

• A former postal employee who bought a flamethrower off TikTok was deemed competent to stand trial by a judge and released from a mental facility. 

• A newly unsealed warrant gives a window into how the IRGC sought cryptocurrency donations online.

• If we came up with a list of things you would not want in your car while trying to drive into the CIA headquarters, meth and a fixed-blade knife would make that list.

• Prosecutors wanted a 33-month prison sentence for a Chinese spy who is the son of a Republican operative. They got 24 months.

• Leon Black is resisting subpoenas from the House Oversight Committee in an Epstein-related probe.

• The Justice Department’s National Security Division announced that it seized more than half a million dollars intended to go to Hamas.

• A 17-year-old from Maine was the first juvenile in the country to be federally charged for being a member of 764. The buried lede in the FBI press release, however, is that the number of active investigations has increased to more than 500 today from 250 in December 2025. 

• Prosecutors and federal defenders are still sorting out the release conditions for the defendant in the Roblox ISIS alleged threat case, apparently after an eight-month miscommunication.

• Finally, the hypothetical 3L law exam question of how a crim pro law professor would handle a questionable search came true.

• The Justice Department declined to investigate an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys for hiring prostitutes. The Justice Department attorney resigned before the investigation could commence, thus killing it before it could proceed. 

• “A shitshow,” says a customs official on a bodycam discussing a large-scale immigration raid in New York.

• A man who appears to be suffering from a mental illness was arrested for allegedly threatening a Nashville police officer over Instagram DMs. The son of an undocumented woman, who reportedly told investigators he’s been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, was charged in North Carolina for allegedly threatening ICE agents. A Tennessee woman was charged with threatening to kill FBI agents. A California podcaster was charged with threatening to kill the President. And rounding out this week in (allegedly) poor reactions to law enforcement, a judge ordered a Wyoming man to stay locked up before being tried for reportedly threatening a local police officer, judge, and county prosecutor who handled his DUI case.

• The Ninth Circuit sided with the state of Nevada and tribal authorities over Kalshi, about whether prediction markets operate as gambling sites.

• It took at least eight law enforcement officers to detain one handcuffed purported credit card scammer at the Fort Lauderdale airport. 

• The Justice Department wants a judge to unseal search warrant applications for Victoria Toensing, a Republican operative who is married to Joe diGenova, a counselor to Attorney General Todd Blanche.

• A teen was charged in North Carolina state court with three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder for her alleged ties to the San Diego mosque shooting, an interesting development in efforts to push back against increasingly online violent extremism.

• A dog-themed crypto coin allegedly turned out to be dog shit.

• The Justice Department paid $3,500 to the third branch for civil contempt in an immigration case.

• Allegedly selling machine gun conversion devices through TikTok is a new one.

• Your pro se of the week is an elections case out of Illinois that raises concerns about how anonymous voting-by-mail sequences could be reverse-engineered to identify voters.

• In honor of our plans to see Ben Rector (with the National Symphony Orchestra (!))  at Constitution Hall next Tuesday, here’s our song of the week. 

• The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is involved in an ammunition case after a traffic stop in Ohio led to an interesting discovery.

• Iran, North Korea, and the Sinaloa Cartel—this crypto seizure has it all.

• The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, claiming the company manipulates and falsely advertises its prices.

• A judge allowed the government to force-feed the man accused of shooting two members of the National Guard in D.C. last year, who's been on a hunger strike.

• The Atlantic filed another brief to support its motion to dismiss FBI Director Kash Patel’s civil suit against the publication.

• A new group of pardoned J6ers, who are calling themselves in court filings the “J6ers Were Tortured In The DC Gulag,” asked a judge to order Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon to investigate their civil rights claims. (Hat tip to Lawfare’s Sarah Willrich.)

• We love us some good old-fashioned FIFA tea.

• The state of Maryland asked a judge to unseal a transcript from a sex offender case that’s been sealed for almost 20 years.

• A road over an isthmus in Alaska can go ahead after an environmental group sought to block its construction.

• The D.C. Circuit vacated a district court’s decision to dismiss Bowe Bergdahl’s court-martial conviction for leaving his U.S. Army installation in Afghanistan in 2009.

• Speaking of the D.C. Circuit, what’s up with this opinion regarding an anonymous SEC lawsuit? 

• A former FBI electronics technician was sentenced to three years’ probation and an $8,000 fine for a scheme that funneled bids for FBI electronic equipment contracts to his sister’s company.

• The U.S. Office of Personnel Management agreed to turn over records to the New York Times.

• A federal judge had some strong words for the Trump administration’s executive order in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling affirming birthright citizenship.

• The feds obtained an indictment in Texas for a man who allegedly cyberstalked by sending a torrent of Instagram direct messages.

• There’s an alleged $450 million pre-IPO investment scam out of California and New York. 

• The BBC wants Cassidy Hutchinson to still testify in President Trump’s defamation case.

• A Virginian woman allegedly lured a man to her home over Snapchat at 2 in the morning, where her partner mugged him with an AR-15.

Thanks for reading. For Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we’re diving into an old national security case and asking the question about whether second chances are ever a possibility.

If you’ve been forwarded this piece, you can subscribe here to get future stories directly in your inbox. To support this type of independent journalism financially, please consider an paid subscription or a one-time donation.

Editor’s Note:  The butterfly effect, a concept created in the 1960s by a meteorologist to explain small changes in weather patterns that can, through a series of dominoes that follow, result in large deadly climate events, has seeped into the larger zeitgeist through Hollywood movies. But the theory’s application isn’t limited to the weather. In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporters Peter Beck and Ema Rose Schumer examine how one college essay resulted in angry debates on campus, a failed federal prosecution, an ongoing lawsuit about how far academic freedom can bend, and put two federal judges on opposite sides of what it means to be a ‘threat’ - Seamus

A college essay spurred a U.S. Marshal investigation, a failed federal indictment about a death threat to a judge, and an ongoing lawsuit that tests the limits of academic freedom. It all started, as these things tend to do, with a debate on the legal theory originalism. 

In the fall of 2024, a second-year law student, Preston Damsky, submitted a paper, according to court records filed by the University of Florida, advocating for the United States to be a white ethnostate. In addition, he reportedly argued in favor of stripping birthright citizenship, overturning the rest of the Reconstruction-era amendments as unconstitutional, allowing the military to “shoot to kill” “criminal infiltrators” at the Southern Border, among others. 

For this essay, the adjunct professor, who also serves as a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, awarded him the book award for best student in the seminar.  

The award, given by Judge John L. Badalamenti, stoked backlash on the campus of the University of Florida Levin College of Law and on social media, ultimately giving rise to two federal cases testing the First Amendment’s balance between promoting speech on issues of public concern and curbing rage likely to erupt into violence.

Even before news of the award circulated, many students were already familiar with Damsky for his extreme beliefs. Yet the capstone essay and the judge’s decision to award Damsky led to an uproar that expanded beyond the University of Florida, trickling onto social media platforms and into the wider legal community.

But things really started to come to a head nearly a year later when The New York Times published an article detailing Damsky’s essay and the ensuing backlash on campus. That same day, a prominent human-rights lawyer distilled the article in a post on his public Instagram account, calling out Judge Badalamenti by name. In the comments of the post, the Instagram account @Falasteen8090, later identified as 35-year-old Neda Joudeh, wrote, “I wish someone would in alive him” (SIC).

Judge Badalamenti came across the comment on Instagram and reported it to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Welcome to Court Watch #188. And welcome to the hundreds of new subscribers who joined us this week when our friends at 404 Media republished our recent story about a team of volunteers doing yeoman’s work for the public’s right to access public records Our new readers’ first experience with our publication was receiving a 3,000 word tome about nihilism and murdered children in your inbox. We admit that’s a jarring introduction to Court Watch. Though we can’t promise our future coverage will always be rainbows and sunshine, we’ll endeavor to lighten the mood ever-so-slightly in today’s roundup of the most fascinating court filings from the last seven days.

In the federal courts this week, we’re sure there must be an innocent reason for why a Chinese national was really interested in American military planes, there’s a settlement brewing for the FBI Director’s girlfriend, and a cat with a couch can continue to troll our elected officials, just not with an injunction. 

Plus, an appeals court finds that if you use AI, you’re still a creep but not necessarily an illegal creep. 

The Docket Roundup

• A month after the World Cup, the real futból match is going down in New York, featuring the new owner of the Los Angeles Lakers: Joshua Kushner.

• We have questions about this Chinese student attending university in Canada and his questions about Trump Tower.

• One Colorado man decided to go big or go home with his impersonations to get out of a criminal charge, allegedly signing letters to the court as Chief Justice John Roberts.

• A judge dismissed an effort by DOGEd federal temporary employees to have the special counsel’s office investigate their cases.

• It’s interesting how much things can change in 32 days. In July, a criminal complaint filed by the FBI accused Mohammad Hasna of posting support of Hamas online and helping provide food supplies and cash to Hamas for the last few years. All while working for U.K. based charity, Al-Khair Foundation. Interesting but also a relatively standard terror financing case. This week, an indictment was handed down that greatly expands the accusations. In it, prosecutors allege Hasna has been a military member of Hamas since 2003, holding positions in al-Qassam Gaza Brigade such as a platoon commander and brigade trainer. The feds say over twenty years Hasna rose to the rank of deputy company leader for the designated terrorist organization. Here’s the most interesting part, if you compare the employment record outlined in the complaint to the activities alleged in the indictment, you quickly realize that during part of the time Hasna is accused of being intimately involved in Hamas’ military wing, he was also the Gaza coordination office director at the Humanitarian Affairs Department of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC). We reached out to the OIC, the ‘second-largest intergovernmental organization, after the UN,’ on Thursday evening for a comment. We have not heard back yet.

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that child abuse materials generated using AI within the home are constitutionally protected under binding First Amendment precedent. If you’re surprised, we wrote about it for the Rabbit Hole in March.

• FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, might settle with a defendant in a defamation case.

• Anthropic mostly won its initial case against the Defense Department. 

• Fired Stars and Stripes reporters are suing to get their jobs back.

• Flying under the radar: An alleged member of the online terror network the Com was arrested after reportedly swatting a victim’s house more than 20 times since 2023, paying someone to throw a brick through her window, and hiring two others to fire bomb her brother’s car. 

• The Justice Department dodged catastrophe in the Abbey Gate case out of the Eastern District of Virginia.

• A similar looking fake Coinbase website helped scammers steal millions.

• Not to be outdone by our Alien Terrorist Removal court scoop, our colleague Ben Penn found his own secret old court.

• The feds say “courthouse arrests are thus essential for operational effectiveness, officer safety, and protecting the community” in a new case against an Ohio municipal court.

• For our song of the week, we picked a tune with only a few hundred views. And because you deserve it, here’s another song of the week if the first one wasn’t your vibe. Stick around till at least the one-minute mark. 

• A Maine judge didn’t go along with the ACLU’s attempt to obtain a preliminary injunction for a woman who runs a cat influencer/JD Vance trolling page and reportedly keeps getting kicked out of Vice President events. We highlighted the case in a Rabbit Hole last month.

• Ghislaine Maxwell’s habeas petition was denied, likely exhausting her judicial avenues to appeal.

• A Tennessee man was charged with threatening dismemberment and sexual assault against a victim.

• A Washington man, whom prosecutors said his desire for child abuse “will not simply disappear; it will have to be managed,” was sentenced to 150 months in federal prison.

• We have questions about this combined drug trafficking and material support to foreign terrorism case.

• The Justice Department is going after an Albany deli for allegedly stealing folks’ SNAP benefits. The Google reviews called it. (editor’s note: at an initial hearing, the feds hinted at a national security angle in this case)

• A 29-year-old former IT specialist at the Defense Intelligence Agency pleaded guilty to trying to share classified information with a foreign government.

• Your all-too-frequent reminder not to ever allegedly call witnesses and threaten them if you’re under investigation.

• Also, while we’re at it, please don’t expose yourself on a naval installation. Don’t expose yourself anywhere, but definitely not next to a destroyer.

• The feds pulled down two hacking platforms, announcing that they had been used in Chinese state-sponsored hacks of U.S. critical infrastructure. Now, all we have to do is figure out how to get it out of our critical infrastructure.

• (whispers) It’s curious that EDNY prosecutors brought an indictment in a hacking case that’s gone completely quiet for the past four years.

• The attorneys of an alleged commander of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia, who is facing terrorism charges in the Southern District of New York, filed a motion arguing that he is a prisoner of war covered under the Geneva Convention. 

• There’s an interesting elections case over recounts in Portland, Oregon.

• A Maryland judge ordered the Trump administration to arrange for the return of a man whom it had removed from the country three times despite an immigration judge finding that he was likely to be tortured if returned to Mexico.

• A pro se plaintiff says the FBI hasn’t paid them for being an informant.

• The FBI says a Florida man kept calling the NAACP with racist threats, resulting in the civil rights organization evacuating their offices.

• The Justice Department couldn’t convince a Trump-appointed judge to dismiss Steve Bannon’s convictions for congressional contempt.

• Federal defenders and prosecutors are quibbling over the defendant’s release conditions in the ISIS Roblox threat case.

• The Justice Department is resisting turning over records about the weaponization fund that they say “has never existed and will not exist.”

• This threat case, which ended in a deferred prosecution agreement, got a little territorial over Boston neighborhoods (no, it didn’t have to do with Southie).

• We got a PowerPoint preview of an FBI cell phone expert’s testimony in the trial of a purported October 7th terrorist out of Louisiana. 

• On a related note, there’s an interesting order from a Florida judge about doxxing and social media comments after the October 7th attacks.

• Lots of talk about Canada this week, but not a whole lot about its antitrust authorities trying to subpoena American tech executives.

Thanks for reading. For Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we’ll be diving into one federal judge’s decision to not take (legally) seriously a threat to his colleague.

Image: Annunciation Church School Picnic, 1924. Source

A little more than a century before a hail of gunfire rained down on the congregation, parishioners of the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis held their parish’s first mass. It fell on the feast day of St. Remigius, whose miracles included such wonders as saving the infant son of a Frankish king. 

Remigius’s commitment to God was unquestioned. The assailant on Aug. 27, 2025, did not share that religious certainty but instead worshiped twisted deities, murdering children as a way of depraved tribute to the Columbine mass shooters and others like them. Many of the children targeted acted, much like their canonized fifth-century saint, to protect the youngest among them. 

In all, 26 children and three of their elders were wounded while trying to escape or, in some cases, shield each other. Two of the youngest pupils, Fletcher Merkel, an 8-year-old, and Harper Moyski, a 10-year-old, did not escape the violent fury of a person who saw nothing of value in this world or the next. 

The children were there to pray. The shooter, Robin Westman, was not. 

The students and teachers inside the chapel read from the holy book, filled with stories and parables passed down for generations about the disciples and their savior. Tucked in the back of every Catholic church pew is the missalette, a book that provides recommended songs, scripture, and the order of the Mass. Those texts are the same in every church St. Peter helped build around the world, binding 1.4 billion to a unified set of beliefs. At a school liturgy, it’s typical to see younger congregants use the missalette to follow along with a Mass that can sometimes feel at both times comforting in its repetition and confusing in its symbolism. 

Much of the media reporting accepts the shooting as simply another predestined outcome of an online culture that increasingly fixates on death and happily welcomes nihilism in its most violent form. Undoubtedly, that was part of it. Westman’s manifesto, however, also indicates the amorphous concept of nihilistic violent extremism may have been too generous. It was more about notoriety with a nod to nihilism. It wasn’t for any single ideology, religion, philosophy, or some other tangible or coherent belief: The goal was to create as much suffering as possible in the shortest amount of time. Violent trolling, by its very nature, diametrically opposes sacred traditions such as those routinely performed at Annunciation. 

In court records, the FBI defines nihilistic extremism as an ideology, arguing the purpose underlying its adherents’ violent acts is to sow enough chaos for society’s collapse. But Westman was no anarchist, and giving the attack a simplistic ideological gloss to fit neatly in our preexisting political frameworks credits Westman and other young, detached mass shooters too much. 

The gospel reading from that day was from Matthew, chapter 23 verses 27 through 32 (“So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”), where the apostle rails against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees who appear to value sanctimony in public but live their own lives divorced from the teachings of their faith. It’s a heady and dense reading for any believer, let alone those recently christened into the church. The shooting began before the part of the liturgy when the disciples’ words could be spoken out loud. But in the days that follow, Matthew’s warnings about public proclamations of support but private indifference to suffering would take on even greater meaning. 

The 23-year-old Westman followed a different set of disciples. Most mass shooting manifestos borrow from the previous ones, in an endless chain of copycat violence dating back to Columbine. Today, an entire online ecosystem glorifies the killers as “saints,” tallying their victims up in TikTok edits like scores in a video game. The group’s members—predominantly teens and adolescents—call themselves the true crime community. They adopt the aesthetics—the dress, ideology, type of weapon, memes, pictures, and symbols—of killers, and they push each other to kill. 

No U.S. government countermessaging campaign or well-funded outside civil society groups exist to push back against this vitriol. There are no dissenting voices to steer children toward a healthier vision of a more positive world. As such, the online echo chamber continues to transform kids and teens into violent shells of their former innocent selves. 

Four Dominican nuns founded Annunciation Catholic School in 1923. For the school’s first year, 72 pupils enrolled; by 2025, the school had grown to 340 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The young pupils wore navy and green uniforms—the school’s colors, almost like Notre Dame, without the gold.

“Fuck those kids,” Westman, a former student, said over a recording. The online video is a journey. Westman starts singing “skibidi” before showing off the preparations for the attack, methodically holding up to the camera every gun and cartridge, which had a variety of racist slurs and antisemitic tropes, phrases like “Kill Donald Trump,” and the names of past mass shooters etched in chalk. In the chamber of a Glock, Westman inscribed, “There is no message.” Westman wanted a reaction from everyone, about everything, anything, or perhaps nothing at all. Not only to be whispered about in polite society, but to live on loudly in infamy in the manifestos of the mass killers that come after.

At some point, the camera points downward at Westman’s feet for a minute. A then-anonymous school shooter, in white socks and brown cargo pants, clutches a vape. A possible callout to other school shooters from the months before—Samantha Rupnow and Solomon Henderson—who bizarrely dedicated one of their final moments to taking pictures of their footwear. Shortly after, there is a poor rendition of Annie’s “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” Westman laughs in an unsettling way—in part, because viewers can tell Westman wanted them to be unsettled. 

The students’ uniforms blended into the landscape of a Minnesota August, with its elm-lined streets and deep green grass blanketing the school’s baseball diamond, just to the left beside its chapel. In June, the Minnesota Twins announced they would renovate the field to “create space for healing, play & hope.”

At Columbine High School in 1999, the shooters wore trench coats on top of their black T-shirts, which read “Wrath” and “Natural Selection.” At Abundant Life Christian School in December 2024, Rupnow, a 15-year-old, wore a black shirt emblazoned with a bull’s-eye and black-laced boots; Rupnow took a picture of the boots in the minutes before the attack, the camera pointed down in a bathroom stall, as the shooter held up three fingers. 

In the United Kingdom, an admittedly imperfect but occasionally successful program called Channel seeks to guide troubled individuals off the path to radicalization. More than half of the program’s referrals last year were for children. Strategies to identify and intervene early on with people exposed to these levels of hate are not a silver bullet for violence prevention, merely one of many that must be implemented. But at least it’s one part of the puzzle to stopping the next mass attack. There is no equivalent initiative in the United States. Efforts to build one were forever stalled in the previous administrations and fully abandoned in this one.  

A month later, another shooter—this time, Henderson, a 17-year-old—retreated to the bathroom to take pictures holding up the same three-finger symbol at Antioch High School. And in September 2025, several days before Desmond Holly, a 16-year-old, opened fire inside Evergreen High School, he posted a TikTok wearing a black T-shirt with red letters. “Wrath” had been painted on it. 

The Annunciation school mass began at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 27, 2025. It is hard to explain the importance of the first school-wide mass to a layperson. For many young believers, it is a moment of innocent joy. A time to bring together children of all ages from kindergarten to eighth grade under a unifying set of Catholic beliefs. Beliefs that are far too often subject to ridicule and misunderstanding. Many young people sit under the steeple and question those beliefs but attend the ritual nonetheless because the act of attempting to believe is one of the last few noble endeavors left in the world. There is something powerful about looking over the sea of church pews filled with people struggling with their faith and their own tribulations and knowing you are not alone in an ever-changing world. The first call to 911 came in at 8:27 a.m. 

The bottom left corner of the massive stained-glass window in the back of the church shows a man with his hands over his face. It’s Adam in the Garden of Eden, ashamed for disappointing God. In the closing credits, Westman’s manifesto video asked subscribers to like and share its content. When bullets burst through a stained-glass pane, it would have been reasonable to assume it was a first week of school prank, probably firecrackers by mischievous eighth graders. Then more followed. The principal yells for the hundreds of kids and teachers to take cover.

“Bigger kids were able to quickly help little ones in the church because many of them had been paired together in a buddy system,” one parent of five children who attend the Catholic school told NPR. The early teenagers pushed younger students down out of the line of fire. One middle schooler was shot in the back, shielding a younger student.

Most parochial schools have a buddy system; younger students partner with older ones for the occasional recess hang-out or sitting together during school functions. Sometimes they’ll pray the rosary together. It starts with a sign of the cross, then the Apostles’ Creed, a prayer that concludes with an unflinching belief in everlasting life. The buddy system helps put the younger kids at ease knowing someone bigger than them is looking out for them, and it teaches the older kids the responsibility of protecting and mentoring the younger ones. It builds a sense of community. To an outside observer, pairing younger kids up with older ones may seem like a harmless yet antiquated tradition, but it saved lives on that August day.

No one was with Westman on West Diamond Lake Road when the shots began. The assailants at Abundant Life Christian, Antioch, and Evergreen high schools, among others, appeared to be lone wolves, too. If you have trouble recalling all those specific mass shootings, it's because we, as a society, have become accustomed to such depravity. But their future accomplices remember, raised on memes venerating violence and videos desensitizing gore, all online. 

When Westman fired a rifle into the suburban Minneapolis chapel in August 2025, the FBI had dozens of investigations into nihilistic violent extremism, mostly targeting online terror networks such as the true crime community and 764, an insidious group that coerces other young people into committing unspeakable acts of self-harm and abuse. To this subset of nihilists, killing children is not immoral or anything really; it just is. 

Today, the FBI has more than 250 active investigations into an increasingly prevalent online culture of death. Looking at social media, this trend shows no signs of slowing down. Its participants are younger and even more desensitized. Most mainstream platforms have largely ceded their corporate and moral responsibility for policing content on their public squares, in favor of bottom lines and a veneer of protecting free expression that rings hollow upon closer inspection. The more fringe sites, where people on the radicalization path, such as Westman, flock to access more violent content, intervene even less. 

Westman was never arrested. A self-inflicted gunshot to the head prevented that. Henderson, Rupnow, and Holly shared the same fate. According to the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha, there have been more than 30 nihilistic violent extremism-related prosecutions in recent years. Faced with a reality that many of the words and actions taken by these shooters before their attacks never cross a legal threshold of criminal charges, a patchwork of states have begun to lean more fully into the concept of behavioral threat assessment management. Such teams seek to create central reporting mechanisms to identify individuals and behaviors of concern with the goal of crafting intervention strategies that decrease risks of violence. Interviews with members of those teams reveal a recurring theme. Despite their promising early results, they are overworked and woefully underresourced.

“Jesus wept.” It’s the shortest verse in the New Testament, but arguably its most powerful. The Bible has moments when Jesus, whom believers trust exists as the son of God and the son of man simultaneously, allows his human side to take precedence. His anger at the merchants in the temple, his incredulity toward his parents’ concern about his whereabouts after the Festival of Passover, and, in Bethany, a small town in the West Bank, where he mourned the passing of his dear friend Lazarus. 

For some theologians, it’s difficult to comprehend their savior’s grief with the knowledge that he can and will resurrect Lazarus. But the Catholic faith allows for grief, albeit for short, fleeting moments. Eventually, we’re told, it is supposed to be replaced with a calming belief that it is but a temporary loss before you see your loved one again in eternity. It’s hard to feel that comfort when the coffins are child-sized.

Today, true crime community members—kids and teens, really—post dozens of 30-second clips on TikTok every day, drawing hundreds of likes and comments within several hours. In one video, a child, who can’t be over the age of 13, dances wearing fatigues, a bulletproof vest, a tactical helmet, and a skull mask, with a holster holding a pistol around his waist. A teen girl, who looks like any other, except for the skull mask covering her lower face, does the same dance trend. The dance videos are captioned “#sinister,” “#larp,” “#tccdance,” and “#truecringecommunity.”

The teen girl’s other, nondancing posts are montages of Randy Stair, who killed three of his co-workers at a supermarket in Pennsylvania before killing himself in 2017. Another user posts an artificial intelligence-generated video of the Parkland high school shooter dancing in front of images of the school as a ticker in the left-hand corner rises from one to 17—the death toll. The bio for one account reads “forget me, I’ll be gone.” 

TikTok removes some of the posts and accounts after a day or two, but not all. A montage that flashes pictures of Westman and the guns used in the attack, with their chalked words, as a song with the lyrics “I hate to see you cry. My love is dying inside” plays, has been on the platform for months.

How can a society prevent more tiny coffins? It requires, as an initial first step, a sober assessment of who we are and what we do to support the minds of our future generations. You can’t look away from the preteens dancing in tactical vests on TikTok or the school shooter simulators on Roblox. Even if they possessed the political will, social media companies can’t address 764 and the true crime community with a one-size-fits-all moderation strategy; they’re networks of participants who are adept at flouting algorithmic detection and creating end runs around remedial measures. It requires a sustained focus, something we’ve lost in a world of algorithms that train us to value attention only for 30-second intervals.

And law enforcement agencies from the federal level all the way down to local school resource officers can’t assume these young people are simply troubled outliers and that their acts of violence are the unfortunate, unavoidable cost of troubled minds. These are impressionable, vulnerable, and often isolated teens and adolescents who have been radicalized by peers, who have fooled each other and themselves into feeling a sense of belonging in a violent, cruel community. Many entered their adolescence trapped inside and online as a global pandemic raged outside their windows. Opportunities for typical social interactions were limited, to say the least. For far too many, the worst versions of ourselves that we as a society produced—collectively in our stoic indifference—offered some of the few opportunities to feel connected. 

Westman wasn’t born idolizing mass shooters. Something terrible is happening to our kids, and we seem unwilling to act beyond a passing surface-level self-reflection. One has to sit for a moment with that awful truth. We have to reckon with that if we want to stop others from following their idols to the grave. There is good to be found and fostered in today’s youth, as demonstrated in stark contrast by the moments of sacrifice shielding other children during the attack in that church. But that contrast immediately conjures up a question. How do we raise more kids who don’t trade their navy and green elementary school uniforms for fake army fatigues? 

On Aug. 25, Minneapolis law enforcement released 2,648 pages of evidence from that day and the investigation that followed. The report includes crime scene photos such as a picture of a bullet hole in a statue of Mary and Joseph, wrapped in police caution tape. It also contains hundreds of close-ups of Westman’s gun and their chalk markings next to an evidence number. But the release of thousands of pages of public records is no true after-action report. Instead, it reads like a document dump from any run-of-the-mill criminal case, with little effort to make sense of the reasons behind Westman’s actions or to take tangible steps that could prevent the next “saint.” 

There are 42 words in the Hail Mary, a favored prayer for young congregants for its simplicity and soothing cadence. A seasoned believer can pray to the matriarch of the church in under 12 seconds. The shooting lasted two minutes, with 119 bullets fired. The chapel’s pews are standard fare for any Catholic church, solid wood with a slight slant on the back. A golden crucifix hangs in front of wood paneling at the front. Children duck and run toward the exit, past the large baptismal font that washed away a century of parishioners’ original sins. 

Shortly following the attack, hundreds of students, teachers, and community members quietly gathered outside the Hennepin County Medical Center, one of the places where dozens of the injured and the deceased were brought after the sounds of the shooting stopped. An impromptu candlelight vigil included a moment of silence. In the 11-minute video post prior to the suicide and shortly before the attack, Westman noted that “got my new headphones so I don’t hear them scream.” At 8:26 a.m. today, churches around the Twin Cities will loudly ring their bells to remember the victims. The sound will be deafening and haunting, as solemn remembrances must be, regardless of anyone’s attempts to drown it out. 

Carved in the stone of the Annunciation Catholic Church are the words “This is the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.” One year ago today, two children entered through the house and were brought to the gates of heaven too soon by a murderer who believed in nothing. 

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We all have a story of helping an older friend or relative figure out whether a message they received is real. The texts and spam calls seem to come almost every week, with varying degrees of believability. But there’s a reason why they keep coming: The scams don’t often work, but it’s a volume game, they can be highly profitable for fraudsters when they do. In this week’s The Rabbit Hole, reporter Gabrielle Russon tells the tale of how a group of scammers allegedly made off with millions, and how a few of them ended up in a Florida courtroom. - Peter

An 82-year-old woman was playing online solitaire when the game was interrupted by a loud siren wailing. A warning popped up on the computer screen with a frightening message: She had been hacked.

What should she do?

The senior citizen, identified only as “M.B.” in court records, was stuck. She could not close out the pop-up advertisement stuck on her screen. The ad warned that all her data would be lost if she shut off her computer.

The ad displayed a help number.

“Microsoft,” said the voice when M.B. called the phone number.

M.B. was transferred to a technician who promised to fix her computer. The tech confirmed her computer had been hacked and said $66,000 in online porn charges were pending from her account.

The “technician” transferred her to a “bank employee” in the fraud department to assist her in transferring her money to a Florida construction company to protect the rest of her assets.

“M.B. became hesitant because it sounded like she was being scammed,” court records said.

But the bank employee who generously spent all day on the phone with her assured her by saying, “We’re in this together” and “You’re helping catch the bad guys,” court records said.

Instead, federal authorities said she got caught in an elaborate scam that tricked senior citizens across the country into losing thousands of dollars. More than 29 victims lost at least $2.2 million that was quickly wired overseas to Hong Kong and Bahrain, according to a federal complaint filed last month in the Middle District of Florida. 

Text message picture of cash taken from a elder fraud victim sent between two alleged scammers. Source: U.S. v. Patel, Western District of New York, 26-mj-615

The defendants facing conspiracy to commit mail fraud charges were Ling Wang, Shouxin Lou, Xiaowei Lin, Huashan Lu, Yuxiang Zhao and Yongbo Li, according to the federal complaint.

The complaint does not state whether the defendants are U.S. citizens, but court documents show a Mandarin translator was needed for court proceedings. 

M.B. was one of the lucky ones. Her bank reversed her $83,150 wire transfer, so she got her money back after her nightmarish Solitaire game.

For one victim in her 70s, an Amazon package arrived at her home carrying earbuds she had never ordered. After that, the senior was informed her Amazon account was frozen. She spoke on the phone with someone who said her accounts had been compromised and were linked to money laundering, the federal complaint said. 

Another victim, an 87-year-old man, ended up giving out his Social Security number and driver’s license under the guise that he was getting a refund for his computer McAfee Security subscription.

One 74-year-old who appeared to have dementia was confused and did not think she was a victim at all. 

Other seniors, including an 80-year-old U.S. Army veteran, got confused by fake Amazon or Apple pop-up messages on their computers or Apple TV, so they called the phone number. The fraudsters posed as government officials, pretending the victims had their identities stolen and were now caught up in wild criminal scandals.

One senior from McHenry, Illinois, withdrew $49,500—her life savings—and mailed a cashier’s check to Florida because she thought she was a victim of porn fraud, the federal complaint said.

Elder Fraud Crime Reported, Source: FBI Internet Crime Report https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf

The Postal Inspection Service intervened and caught the parcel in time—a bright spot in the case.

Others lost their retirement savings and “are past the point of being able to recover financially from these losses,” the complaint said.

“The whole targeting of seniors in the U.S. has become very, very common,” said Marie Springer, an adjunct associate professor who teaches about fraud at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Springer first began tracking Ponzi schemes when she was finishing her Master’s degree and Bernie Madoff was in the news. Since then, her research has expanded, and she pays attention to other fraud, including schemes targeting seniors.

It’s grown so much, “it makes my brain want to explode,” she quipped.

 A 2025 FBI Internet crimes report said the number of online elder fraud abuse complaints rose to nearly 202,000 last year, a 37% increase from 2024. Those 60 and up lost $7.7 billion, another staggering increase of 59% compared to 2024.

The internet makes it easy for international fraudsters to buy lists targeting seniors’ names, Springer said. 

The federal complaint detailed how the organized group operated: one person based abroad would apparently talk to the victim over the phone while five defendants were on the ground in downtown Orlando to receive the victims’ money and deal with the banks.

Several of the defendants were registered owners of official-sounding businesses, such as Palmedge Construction, LLC. In reality, federal authorities said the businesses were dummy corporations and did not actually do construction work. The so-called businesses used P.O. boxes set up at UPS Stores and other locations to receive packages from victims as far away as Arizona and New York. The businesses also set up bank accounts to get money transfers from their victims and then quickly transferred those funds overseas, the federal complaint said. 

The federal investigation used surveillance to watch the defendants.

Decoy Gold Bars used to catch a scammer. Source: U.S. v. Lin, Detention Memo, 3:24-mj-00215, Oregon

The court records also give insight into how difficult it can be for law enforcement to investigate alleged fraud like this.

“The scheme is constantly changing hands and faces and that the identified suspects have lived in various parts of the United States of America, including Florida, California, New York, and Texas. They are likely to move to different locations because avenues for opening PO boxes or bank accounts are closed after companies or local branches become aware of activity on those accounts,” the complaint said. “As a result of moving and constantly introducing different individuals into the scheme or rotating who/what company is involved, it adds a layer of anonymity that may make law enforcement investigations less likely to be carried out, as it may involve multiple jurisdictions and be difficult to track down.”

The Department of Justice and the attorneys representing the defendants declined to comment for this story.

Our Sunday The Rabbit Hole is supposed to be behind a paywall. It’s not this week. We hate paywalls but it’s the only way to keep our reporting going. Unless…enough readers make the jump to become supporting members. You can do so here by supporting our independent journalism and making it available to the public or by making a one-time donation to Court Watch.

Welcome to Court Watch #187. It’s not every week that devil worshipping, congressional extramarital affairs, sketches of military bases, and a trip to Home Depot for nails all converge in the federal courts. But this is that week. 

Plus, the Justice Department has a new watering hole. 

The Docket Roundup

• Flying under the radar: A former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee, Alexander Strohmeyer, was indicted for threats after he purportedly threatened to use AI to create child exploitation materials of a senior officials in the U.S. Attorney office and wanted to use ChatGPT to track down their kids.

• A federal judge ordered independent reviewers to monitor conditions at a Texas and California detention center that houses children, finding that current conditions do not meet the basic standard of care.

• Everyone is talking about tattoos, but we’re more interested in tea. Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s former chief of staff sued a conservative outlet in South Carolina over claims it falsely stated she had an affair with Mace.

• A plea deal was made in a U.S. Post Office bribery case involving lots of counterfeit stamps.

• The New York Times wants a judge to unseal grand jury records after one of its freelance reporters was subpoenaed over a story about an aborted Navy SEAL mission in North Korea.

• An airline ticket credit and an annoyance over customer service experience resulted in a federal charge.

• The woman who allegedly plotted an ISIS-inspired attack on the New York State capitol had apparently educated herself already about the material support statute and the size of nails.

• A man who called himself the “God of Israel” got in trouble for allegedly calling in threats to a Georgia district attorney’s office.

• We helped out a bunch of smart academics to figure out why fake warrants keep getting introduced into the federal court system. 

• FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend and country music superstar, Alexis Wilkins, lost her defamation case against a conservative influencer over jurisdictional reasons.

• Court records we helped obtain for Bloomberg Law News finds that the U.S.’ war overseas is having an adverse effect on the Administration's war on immigration in the United States as judges put a pause on some deportations of Iranians.

• Very fancy libel lawyers are trying to unmask an anonymous twitter account and substacker who wrote mean things about a man involved in the Professional Tennis Players Association

• The Alien Terrorist Removal Court is still the hottest docket in D.C. right now. The chief judge has ordered a release hearing for next Thursday but then both sides asked for a continuance (editor's note: maybe a self-deportation deal is in the works?). Meanwhile, the alleged alien terrorist’s attorneys and the Justice Department are duking it out over whether the attorneys get access to any classified materials. The Justice Department has already indicated it plans to appeal the ruling if the chief judge says so. We’re deep in the tea leaves, and we’ll have more to say after the release hearing.

• The Flock anxiety has reached the federal docket, albeit in a very unhealthy manner.

• A grand jury in New Jersey indicted a 20-year-old alleged neo-Nazi for a purported plot to blow up electrical power stations in 2024.

• Speeding seven miles per hour over the speed limit led to a $52,000 drug bust in West Texas.

• Speaking of busts, the feds are the new proud owners of a Cantina Bar in Oklahoma City. Court Watch is entertaining investor pitches to join us at the ground floor of purchasing the Sooner watering hole off forfeiture.gov and hosting opening argument mic nights for 2Ls. It’s important to aggressively niche our news coverage even smaller. 

• An anti-ICE student group sued Florida International University for reportedly punishing several students after a protest.

• The Babylon Bee wants a word with New Mexico over its artificial intelligence-generated content regulations.

• Max Blumenthal sued the Department of Homeland Security over reportedly having to go through a secondary screening at Dulles International Airport, during which two of his cell phones were seized.

• The fourth time is the charm. A magistrate judge in Florida recommended that the government’s motion to dismiss a case brought by a group of Epstein victims be denied.

• There was another case under the Take It Down Act, one of the newest federal crimes on the books. We wrote about the first few cases for The Rabbit Hole last month.

• A man living in Hawaii who apparently thinks he’s married to Tulsi Gabbard was arrested for reportedly threatening her husband on X.

• The “J6 Historical Society,” formed by a group of pardoned J6ers, sued U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for records from investigations into that fateful day. Additionally, other J6ers want to take the government to court for tort payouts. And other J6ers filed a different lawsuit. The latter two were filed by a law firm with a website called ‘legalbrains.com’ 

• Our song of the week has just the right amount of quiet soul. 

• One 764 member’s attorney was not happy that the government tried to slide new facts about running a devil worshipping group in prison into its sentencing memo supplemental. He was sentenced to 77 years. 

• Ominous letters to elected officials in Ohio led the feds to grab user information from an online database of home addresses.

• The Intercept is taking on President Trump’s Truth Social $100,000-a-month early access feature. A subscription to Court Watch is 9 dollars-a-month and our feed breaks more news. We’re clearly not keeping up with inflation. 

This is a good old fashion ad-swap with a colleague that’s also part of beehiiv’s Media Collective.

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• Maryland will not give up the new FBI headquarters without a fight.

• An Illinois judge declined to grant the attorneys’ fees of a woman who was held in mandatory detention, despite most of the federal circuits overturning the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory detention in immigration cases.

• Capitol One and the Trump family want a judge to sort out discovery in their case.

• It was fun while it lasted: the Perdue “six-seven” chicken nugget case was settled.

• A judge allowed a civil assault case filed by a pro-Israel protester to proceed against a pro-Palestine protester after the two reportedly fought over a flag.

• The Fourth Circuit said ICE can’t use aggressive enforcement actions near churches, though only the churches involved in the case.

• Fix the Court assembled a list of all the gifts given to Supreme Court justices. Our favorite gift from 2025 was concert tickets gifted to Sonia Sotomayor, “likely for a Bad Bunny show.”

• Dinesh D’Souza settled a lawsuit over 2000 mules.

• The state of Texas doesn’t want Baltimore, Columbus, New Haven, and a legal aid clinic to crash its party with the Justice Department over immigration court procedures.

• A pro se litigant tried to sue a Nevada state judge for allegedly using AI to decide five family court motions. A federal judge, however, said she still enjoys absolute immunity for judicial-related claims.

• An incarcerated man has filed civil complaints against President Trump, among others, not once, not twice, but six times in the past month. The complaints are meandering but colorful, and a judge has already struck one for bad language.

• There was a new pig butchering seizure out of North Carolina. Lawfare had an interesting write-up last week about how the seizures don’t do much to prevent future scams.

• A New York City man was charged with a federal hate crime after he allegedly disrupted a synagogue service and attacked several worshippers.

• The SEC says there was a major car dealership investment scheme in Texas.

• Seventeen Iranians were indicted for reportedly hacking on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. None of the men appear to be in custody.

• In an outlier for these types of cases, a Minnesota judge said he would still rule on a Department of Homeland Security policy revoking student visas, even after the department reinstated the visas of the plaintiffs in question.

• We have questions about this “photographing and sketching defense installations” charge out of Alabama.

• An ex-cop on Folly Beach, South Carolina, sued the town’s former mayor and the old sheriff of Charleston county after he was fired for reportedly warning the FBI about a senior skip day threat at the beach. Also, if you ever have a chance to visit, Peter recommends Monday open mic night at Chico Feo, the boiled peanuts at Bert’s, and the burgers at Lowlife. 

Thanks for reading. For this Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we look at how much it costs to ‘fix’ a computer. 

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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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.