#114: AI-Hating Vegan Death Cults

Editor’s note: On PACER, we have pulled 21,981 pages (and 2 audio files) of legal filings since January 1, 2025. We shudder to think how many additional tens of thousands of other pages on RECAP. We’ve also kept up in near real-time a litigation landing page for more than fifty lawsuits involving the new Administration. This is all to say, it’s been a busy season for both the U.S. Courts and Court Watch. With every download, comes a government-mandated fee for those records. We’re frankly drowning in court proceedings and court fees. Or as we call it, Heaven and Hell. If you’re been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription, we could really use the assistance now.

Welcome to Court Watch #114. In just a minute, we’ll get to Guantanamo Bay, AI-hating vegan death cults, Zebra pelt, Mar-a-Lago fence jumping, how the Eastern District of Virginia has mastered space and time, and bribes for violence prevention, among other things.

But first, let’s talk about politics and the art of the surprise. 

As old school journalists, we’re not allowed to have opinions. Or at the very least express them out loud. But depending on where you sit in the political landscape, everything this week was either unbelievably amazing or absolutely atrocious. Political beliefs have an impressive ability to shape how one sees the world, how we interact with our colleagues, or even which beer you drink. In many respects, politics is pervasive in all the worst ways. In the U.S. Courts, past political affiliations can serve as guideposts. For example, which judge was appointed by which president can sometimes provide a roadmap of how they will rule on a specific issue. But judges are people and people, like politics, can have the ability to surprise. 

With a new administration facing dozens of new lawsuits, and initiating two of their own against New York and Illinois, we thought it prudent to try to better understand the men and women in black robes who will decide the legal future of many aspects of President Trump’s mission to reshape the federal government. 

So we spent the week getting to know federal judges. We read dozens of public speeches by Supreme Court Justices over the last twenty-five years. Not content with simply taking in information, we sought to engage with the sometimes mysterious co-equal branch of government. 

We reached out to a federal judge about his lack of enforcement of unsealing deadlines. If his past legal rulings were a proper guide, he would have dismissed our inquiry outright. But he did not. Our first surprise of the week is that occasionally judges can be open-minded on public access.

Our second surprise of the week came when we tried to get a sense of another up-and-coming judge but were quickly kicked out of a federal hearing on Zoom upon her realizing we were not lawyers. This previously open setting suddenly became sealed. A reminder that sometimes the old ways are ingrained even with the advent of new technologies and new judges. 

Analytics tells us another federal judge spent the last week reading past issues of our Friday roundups. Our third surprise of the week: Judges, it turns out, are just like us– they occasionally need something mindless to pass the time.

Late yesterday, an Obama-appointed federal judge, Christopher Cooper ruled in favor of the Trump Administration and against a number of unions who were litigating against the firing of federal employees. Writing in his opinion, Cooper stated, that “Federal district judges are duty-bound to decide legal issues based on even-handed application of law and precedent—no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people.” Which leads us to our overarching surprise of the week: judges’ rulings still have the ability to surprise you. 

Our insomnia this week has taught us that former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was quite fond of saying in public remarks that “History makes clear that the Constitution can work only with the understanding, active support, and participation of millions of ordinary Americans.” 

And participate this week, we did.  

With that, let’s dive right into this week’s dockets which revealed plenty more surprises: 

The Docket Roundup

• A man on a flight from Miami to Newark was arrested before takeoff after reportedly harassing flight attendants, a group of Jewish passengers, and a disabled minor. The man purportedly tried to break into the cockpit after the Captain announced over the plane’s PA that they would return to the gate for law enforcement.

• The Secret Service arrested a man agents say jumped a security wall at Mar-a-Lago as part of an attempt to speak with President Trump.

• A train operator in DC was charged with submitting fraudulent disability claims. 

• EDVA is the ‘rocket docket’ so much so that they already have the transcript created for a hearing next Friday.  

• A criminal affidavit from ICE involving an immigration arrest makes sure to note that the arrest was made “with the assistance of FBI agents.”

• If you want to get a sense of how a series of shell companies got millions in COVID loans, here you go. 

• Pro Se litigants suing DOGE have entered the chat.

• “When I need to go to my eight-year-old daughter's report day at school, I can't take the two hours off to go see her because they don't have anybody to cover me.” Court employees push back on the courts. 

• Sovereign Citizens gonna Sovereign. 

• In this week’s word salad, Florida is suing Target over gay pride merchandise. 

• The judge who temporarily stopped the transfer of three migrants to Guantanamo Bay moved to wrap up the case after ICE deported them to Venezuela instead.

• A lawsuit was filed by a parent against a school district in Kansas for “the heavy hand of government bullying as a result of the [mother’s] whistleblowing efforts revealing the indoctrinating literature contained in the school’s curriculum and library.” We noted that the first page of the suit features a screenshot from the White House’s web page of one of President Trump’s executive orders.

• ‘Move fast and break things’ only works if you have the right email. 

• Everyone involved in this order should be embarrassed. 

• The FBI arrested a man who allegedly stalked a high school classmate for 14 years and made antisemitic threats, despite the victim receiving multiple orders of protection.

• Here’s the docket of an old civil case filed on behalf of the now-arrested leader of the Zizians, Jack “Ziz” Lasota. The suit alleged that a sheriff’s deputy in California sexually assaulted Lasota. A judge dismissed the suit after Lasota and the other plaintiffs failed to appear for court.

• According to a late Thursday night filing, all migrants who were transported to Guantanamo Bay have now been removed and most sent to Venezuela. 

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a complaint against Lush Cosmetics after it purportedly failed to act and remove an inappropriate store manager despite multiple employees’ reports of sexual harassment. 

• Meta appears to have identified a defendant in a lawsuit through his OnlyFans profile. He purportedly marketed a service to disable any Instagram account. 404 Media has the write-up about the alleged extortion scheme and how it relied on exploiting Meta’s moderation features.

• An Egyptian police officer is suing the Chicago Police Department for reportedly not allowing him to change his self-selected racial designation from caucasian.

• The FCC wants $25,000 from a now-defunct radio station in Florida that had the wrong antenna five years ago.

• A guy in Virginia purportedly got caught trying to sell a Zebra pelt online.

• The former deputy director of DC’s Office of Neighborhood Safety & Engagement was charged for allegedly taking bribes from a Maryland businessman as part of a non-violence initiative. Sigh.

• Here’s proof of how well ECF works.

• A man from Dallas was arrested for allegedly stalking and sending violent threats to his ex-wife.

• Trump Media & Technology Group is suing a Justice of Brazil’s Supreme Federal Tribunal, claiming that a gag order he issued “censor[s] legitimate political discourse in the United States.” The lawsuit cites a recent executive order by President Trump.

• A seventeen-year-old victim in an attempted extortion case bravely fought back.

• The parent of a youth basketball player doesn’t want to have to stay at the hotels the tournament organizer reportedly requires them to book.

• A Colorado-based company that reportedly represents notable people, such as Taraji P. Henson, Michael Ian Black, and Ana Marie Cox, for their speaking events owes a Pulse nightclub shooting survivor six figures and filed for bankruptcy.

• We ran a story with 404 Media on a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon being sued after hackers reportedly breached confidential patient information, including sensitive pictures of clients throughout the treatment process.

Thanks for reading. All told, we reviewed more than 225 dockets, four-thousand pages of legal filings, and distilled it down to 29 bullets for a newsletter. As such, it may be time to channel our inner Robert Hardesty tomorrow. As the New York Times wrote in an obituary twelve years ago about the former speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson, “...[Hardesty] acknowledged, the pressure of writing according to the dictum of simplicity was brutal. Once, on a rare weekend off, he was asked how he would spend it. “I’m going to go home, drink whiskey, and do nothing for 48 hours but think in long, convoluted sentences.”