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.

The Long Run is a weekly newsletter covering Democratic governance, governors, and the fight for the future of the Democratic Party. Each edition dives into the stories impacting Democrats' path forward — from state policy decisions to 2026 campaigns to early 2028 moves. Get ahead of the conversation and join a growing number of political insiders by subscribing for free here. 

• 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. 

You may be drawn to delete this email because you’re sick of getting newsletter subscriber pitches, but we promise this will be the only subscriber pitch you’ll get from us this summer. And let’s be clear at the front end, it’s our most important subscriber pitch in our four-year history. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMAGE: President Trump's TruthSocial Post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Docket Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Salman Rushdie’s attacker was convicted. 

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

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

• It’s footnote 2 for us. 

• Wilmer Hale was sued over a purported data breach.

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

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

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

• Judge Bastian channels his inner Wolf of Wall Street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• An Oregon state prison guard allegedly cyberstalked his ex.

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

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

• Crypto scams strike again.

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

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

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

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

• Warner Brothers says hands off the Harry Potter merch.

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

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

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

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

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

ISIS: Alien Terrorist Removal Court Case Revealed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Road to an Empty Court

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seal of the ATRC

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

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

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

A Court Without Cases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Secret” Courts

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

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

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

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

IMAGE: First order issued by ATRC.

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

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

So, Why Not Before?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-30-

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

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

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

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

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

The Docket Roundup 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Someone in the courts owes us 40 cents. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Even ICE has to pay for PACER.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a developing story.

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

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

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

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

The Docket Roundup 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• There was an attempted arson at a Philadelphia mosque.

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

Records Training

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

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

Continuous Monitoring And Databases

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

Past monitoring engagements include:

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

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

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

• Tracking ongoing hacking criminal cases for a cybersecurity company

Custom Research

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

Get in Touch

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