#116: Tucker Carlson Network’s Law Enforcement Tip

Welcome to Court Watch #116. This week in the dockets: a boat captain murders dolphins, Tucker Carlson’s team alerts law enforcement to a threat to the federal courts, a judge channels her inner Polonius, three ISIS arrests in three states, and we love a good kicker as much as the next guy but ending a letter with  “P.S. enjoy the anthrax!!” seems less than ideal if you want to avoid a federal charge.

But before we get to all of that, our very own Peter Beck brings us a story from his childhood stomping grounds – home of the best BBQ joint in the South and the most entrenched local government corruption case in recent memory.

Boats, Bribes, and Businessmen. 

Three North Charleston City Council members, two lobbyists for a local boat manufacturer, and two nonprofit leaders were among the eight people charged last week in a major public corruption case in South Carolina. The three councilmen comprise nearly a third of North Charleston’s council in a city that has struggled at times compared to its historic and more affluent neighbor city, Charleston.

Federal prosecutors said Councilmen Jerome Heyward and Mike Brown accepted bribes to vote in favor of a rezoning proposal that permitted Sea Fox Boats to build an industrial factory near a residential neighborhood. The land in question was a park owned by the Charleston County Parks and Recreation Commission before Sea Fox Boats acquired a lease for the property with plans to invest $40 million into rebuilding the park and a 200,000 square foot factory.

Local residents were outraged, pressuring the City Council to reject the rezoning proposal. According to court records, a scheme soon began between Councilmen Heyward, Brown, and the two consultants in which the council members would be paid thousands of dollars in return for their support, all while the FBI was listening to their phone calls. 

A third councilman, Sandino Moses, who was also charged for not reporting the bribes, allegedly received $450 from the lobbyists but soon returned it after having second thoughts. 

Recordings quoted in court documents reveal the payoffs hit a snag when the consultants were slow to turn over the cash. The city council ultimately did not vote on the zoning proposal for reasons unclear from court records. Sea Fox later withdrew from the project.

The investigation also scrutinized a City of North Charleston program that awarded grant funding to nonprofits to address the community’s gun violence epidemic. Last year, the local paper, The Post & Courier, published a report detailing the lack of vetting by city officials and the seeming lack of work by nonprofits awarded grants. According to court records, Heyward accepted $40,000 from two nonprofit leaders, who were also charged, to steer $100,000 of grant money to their organizations. One of the nonprofit leaders charged also reportedly served as Heyward’s personal assistant. 

The FBI was tipped off when a local businessman reported Heyward after he allegedly pressured him to agree to a $10,000 up-front and $7,500 monthly consulting contract for his “significant influence and control over other elected officials on council.” The businessman agreed to let the FBI tap his phone, and the FBI began paying the consulting fee to Heyward. 

Four of the eight charged, including Heyward and Moses, have pleaded guilty. Heyward and Moses resigned from the North Charleston City Council shortly after the allegations became public. Governor Henry McMaster suspended Councilman Mike Brown from office until he is acquitted, convicted, or a successor is chosen. 

But enough about the Palmetto State trying to the the Windy City, let’s get to the rest of the country’s dockets.

The Docket Roundup

• An Oregon man was arrested for allegedly repeatedly attacking a Tesla dealership. It’s a fascinating read. 

• A South Carolina man was indicted for threatening to kill President Trump.

• Step aside, New York. Introducing a PACER minute. 

• The FBI arrested a twenty-two-year-old Somali man living in Minnesota for attempting to provide material support to ISIS after he allegedly spread propaganda on social media and tried to fly to Africa to join the terror group. According to court records, FBI agents observed the man driving in Minnesota while holding a small black ISIS flag outside the window of his Nissan Sentra. The man purportedly admitted to law enforcement that he began consuming pro-ISIS content when the Israel-Hamas war started. He passed on joining the Taliban, reportedly calling the group “too democratic” for its decision not to kill U.S. personnel during their withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

• Record companies are suing a bar in a strip mall in Missouri for playing Fast Car, Nelly, and LL Cool J.

• This week, Tucker Carlson’s media group reportedly tipped off the FBI after it received an email from a man who claimed to be plotting to bomb a federal building and courthouse in Tennessee. The man was arrested after the FBI found his purported Twitter account, which included additional threats and posts of pictures of homemade glass jar Molotov cocktails and the federal building’s exterior. The man’s Twitter account was still active at the time of writing. A request for comment to Tucker Carlson’s press shop was not returned.

• A thorough rundown of a COVID loan fraud scam in Georgia.

• When a DOJ headline completely buries the lede.

• The IRS is investigating the CEO of Kryptoblocks, “a cybersecurity services company” that “leverages blockchain and AI capabilities to ward off security risks,” for allegedly submitting false paperwork to receive $3 million in PPP loans, some of which he reportedly gave to himself and his family.

• The feds indicted in a five-year-old threat case from 2020 in which the defendant allegedly sent a letter addressed to President Trump that stated, “PS: enjoy the anthrax in the envelope!!”

• The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced that it had filed a statement of interest in a civil case in California over protestors allegedly blocking worshippers from entering a synagogue.

• Too much wine and some politically tense TV ads led to a poor outcome.

• The FBI says it caught a serial catalytic converter stealer in Maryland and Virginia with tower dumps.

• We’re going to try a new weekly feature where we recommend a song to cleanse the palate of sad court record news. Seamus’ pick is here. Peter’s is here. 

• The Secret Service clawed back a million dollars from a crypto romance scheme involving an “attractive Asian female in her 30s” who reportedly posed as the owner of a furniture wholesale store in Austin.

• The judge in a San Francisco-based suit against the Trump Administration went on record about his social relationship with the Civil Division Chief of the local U.S. Attorney’s Office.

• We had a write-up with 404 Media on judges growing frustrated with AI as the new normal.

• Apparently, people still buy DVDs. And some other people allegedly work the system for their own gain.

• The Justice Department filed a statement of interest in support of the habeas petition of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years in prison by a Colorado judge for breaching her county’s election security system to prove debunked claims of voter fraud.

• We missed this when it first came out, but our PACER spidey sense tells us there’s much more to this story than the complaint indicates. 

• A New York woman was arrested for allegedly stealing an estimated ten million dollars from the widow whose husband she was a personal assistant to so that she could pay off her credit card bills. The FBI claims she spent more than a million dollars on Louis Vuitton, nearly three hundred thousand at Gucci, and another three hundred thousand at Apple.

• We’re curious about the release on an unsecured bond of a New Jersey man who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges. 

• A man incarcerated in a federal prison located in New Jersey was indicted for allegedly emailing threats to sexually assault a non-disclosed victim. One email reportedly threatened, “Your body. My choice.”

• It’s thankless and expensive work, but we’re still tracking them all. 

• A two-year order to keep a document sealed finally expired this week. So now we get a window into a counterterrorism investigation in Virginia involving a man who purportedly supported white supremacy. 

• Turns out the Facebook group “Financial Independence Forum” was just a hunting ground for crypto scammers.

• The best minute order ever: “The Court GRANTS, very reluctantly, the parties' 68 Joint Motion for Page Limit Expansion, which Plaintiffs precipitated. Plaintiffs should not have filed this Motion at the last minute. They knew of the brief's excessive length before 3:16 PM on the day of filing. And as Polonius reminds us, "brevity is the soul of wit." William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, Line 90. It is also, almost always, the soul of an effective brief.”

• Prosecutors charged twelve alleged Chinese state-sponsored hackers.

• The DEA says it flipped the inside network of a cartel’s crypto laundering operation to track tens of millions of dollars.

• A Florida man who allegedly made a series of threatening racist comments directed at former Vice President Harris then decided to threaten the Secret Service agent investigating him. It ended the way you thought it would. 

• “Investors? Possibly you.” The founder of two real estate investment companies – Bear Lute and Prestige World Wide Real Estate – who we imagine probably loves the movie Step Brothers, was charged for allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors.

• A search warrant was unsealed in a threat case late last year that targeted a federal judge in the Northern Mariana Islands.

• You’ve gotten this far down in our newsletter, make the jump to a paid subscription so we can keep producing this every week.

• That’s a hell of a headline for a press release. 

• “Wait wait wait wait wait!!! That LinkedIn post is what this is referring to !!!!!?!?!?!? BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAH OH MY GOD!!!! You have to be joking right? This is going to be laughable in court.” January 6th, Whitey Bulger, the Ides of March, a second LinkedIn post, and more in this defamation and temporary restraining order case in Maine between a wastewater company and a disgruntled employee.

• A Florida boat charter captain allegedly poisoned dolphins with pesticides and killed at least one with a shotgun for trying to eat the red snapper his customers were fishing. We try not to take sides here at Court Watch, but for the record, we’re Team Dolphin. 

• A lawsuit argues that since President Trump said he declassified the Mar-a-Lago documents, they should be subject to release through a freedom of information act request.

• The DOJ announced the extradition and arrest of a man the Department claims has admitted to being a member of ISIS-K and aiding the terror group’s suicide bombings at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in 2016, at the Abbey Gate attack during U.S. forces’ evacuation withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and for a 2024 terror attack at a Moscow night club. The detention hearing is set for Monday. We’ll be there if any AUSA or defense attorney wants to grab a coffee and tell us your secrets. 

Thanks for reading. A final note: A lot of you didn’t read last week’s roundup. The open rate was the lowest since our move to beehiiv. The open rate bounced back dramatically for this story. I’m told the roundup likely ended up in the promotions section of your inbox because there was a sponsored ad at the top. Or maybe you all just hate stories about Harry Potter. How they treated the Seamus character in that book is reason enough to hate him. But who can really know? If you missed it, take a look here. Also, if you’d like tips on how to make sure the weekly roundup gets to you safely, follow these directions. 

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