#122: Why ‘Meaningless’ Matters to the FBI.

Welcome to Court Watch #122. We’ll get to TikTok dances, AI-created lawsuits, Wiener Doge, scrublords, and other mildly random but nonetheless fascinating filings, but let’s first talk about signals in the noise of court records. 

Long-time readers of Court Watch may notice that we really like to search for nuggets in court documents. We love little crumbs in a docket that may indicate a policy shift, a legal strategy, or emerging trends.

So when we noticed a Justice Department prosecutor included a new term of art – Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs) – as part of her March sentencing memo for a child exploitation case in Florida, it caught our eye. The case is one of several recent investigations in which the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have described criminal suspects as NVEs, signaling a possible shift in the way federal law enforcement approaches and categorizes domestic terrorism.

Five days after the Florida filing, an FBI agent in Wisconsin used the new classification in a now-unsealed warrant to search seventeen-year-old Nikita Casap’s devices. Casap was arrested in late March after allegedly murdering both his parents and going on the run as part of a plot to assassinate President Trump and overthrow the U.S. government. According to the filing, Casap had interacted with known networks of violent extremists, including the Neo-Nazi aligned Order of the Nine Angles, Atomwaffen, and the Terrogram Collective, which encourage their members to take violence into their own hands in order to sow chaos in society.

The FBI describes NVEs as “individuals who engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability.” According to the FBI, NVEs can act as individuals or as part of a broader network and frequently use social media to target vulnerable populations. NVEs harm their victims through some of the most heinous conduct imaginable by desensitizing them to violence, blackmailing them into sexual exploitation, and threatening to kill victims and their family members.

The term came up on dockets again this week when a man who lives with his parents on the Washington Navy Yard Base was arrested by the FBI for allegedly recording a disturbing video of an underage girl on a Google Meet call. Two more prosecutions in California and Florida also used the NVE term for defendants accused of possessing hundreds of images of child sexual abuse material. Indeed, the March 12, 2025, sentencing memo from Florida is the first instance we could identify of the use of the term NVE in court filings. The two defendants in California and Florida allegedly were members of 764, another online ring that the FBI classifies as a network of NVEs and whose members have an extensive history of targeting vulnerable individuals on the internet.

A preliminary review of federal cases by NCITE at the University of Nebraska Omaha found more than two dozen arrests in the last few years that would squarely fall into the new Bureau classification of Nihilistic Violent Extremism. 

(Editor’s note: For the record, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein was the first to note the new NVE term earlier this week, highlighting the court filings in Casap and Casimiro. We had been monitoring the Bureau’s apparent embrace of the term since the March filing of the Florida case, but it hit a critical mass to write about it after the unsealing of the Casap search warrant. Regardless, Ken got it out first. Props to him.)

But enough about the violent iterations into the belief system that nothing matters. It’s too depressing to spend an entire newsletter talking about nihilism. Besides, searching for interesting court records may be the most public manifestation of existentialism. So here’s what we found in this week’s dockets. 

The Docket Roundup

• Admittedly, we have been doing this for two decades and we were today years old when we realized there is a U.S. Court of International Trade. (Also, there’s a new lawsuit in that court by a wine exporter going after the tariffs.)

• The family of an autistic minor is suing the New York City Ferry for allegedly not providing adequate disability accommodations. 

• Nine ex-Google employees who staged sit-ins at the company to protest the war in Gaza claimed that they were improperly fired.

• A TikToker who says she created the “Charlie XCX apple dance” is suing Roblox over a similar dance emote that online users could do in-game.

• What happens when “Pro Tip 1” to use AI-generated filings doesn’t work out?

• Here’s a lawsuit that says Instagram influencer models don’t do enough to disclose their paid marketing advertisements.

• There’s a new lawsuit against X/Twitter for “shadowbanning.” Interestingly, the plaintiff’s lawyers argue that X/Twitter should be held to a higher First Amendment standard because of Elon Musk’s role as a special government employee. We’d note that the judge had originally ordered that the case be moved to another district in Northern Texas per Twitter’s Terms of Service (ToS), but the plaintiff successfully argued that the ToS was broad enough that it could stay in that court and he raised concerns about conflicts of federal judges and their purported ownership of Tesla stocks to rule fairly.

• With our academic colleagues, we tracked all the criminal cases against purported ISIS supporters in the United States. Take a gander. 

• The organizers behind the Naples Pride celebration are suing the city for allegedly imposing restrictions on their planned drag performance.

• An Arkansas man was indicted for purportedly making some really disturbing threats.

• Turns out you can get charged for allegedly over hyping AI.

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• A man from Georgia and a Chinese national were sentenced to 78 and 90 months in prison, respectively, for laundering money for the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels.

• The FBI arrested another alleged Tesla dealership arsonist in New Mexico.

• The Justice Department’s quest to figure out what its own attorneys asked its now-FBI director three years ago in a grand jury, so it can redact it from Politico, goes on.

• A transgender woman who is incarcerated at a men’s federal prison in Oklahoma filed a pro se civil rights suit against the Bureau of Prisons for purportedly allowing her to be sexually assaulted repeatedly by fellow inmates. 

• The Justice Department announced the extradition to India of one of the alleged plotters of the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks.

• 3 months in, still updating this, we’ll sleep when we’re dead. 

• There were fewer crypto cases this week, but we still had to squeeze in one about a meme coin named “Wiener Doge.” We sincerely hope there’ll be a spinoff government agency named after it within the month.

• Next Impulse Sports is suing Total Impulse Sport, another sports media company, for purportedly stealing their articles. 

• X/Twitter appealed to the Ninth Circuit in the Media Matters San Francisco case.

• A bunch of folks seemed to like our piece last week about a sovereign citizen on death row in South Carolina (highest email open rate ever). So here’s a filing that checks a whole bunch of sovcit boxes and accuses Buffalo police officers of violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act. (Side note by Peter: I wrote two separate lengthy papers on sovcits and FARA in college and couldn’t imagine the two ever overlapping, only to be outdone yet again by their… creativity).

• Prosecutors say a hacker known as “scrublord” allegedly hacked more than 600,000 people’s information at a prominent bank and attempted to sell each online for 1 to 5 dollars. 

• Welcome, UC San Diego Finance Department, to the horrors of PACER.

• The FBI says a man from Atlanta sent threatening messages to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and her husband. We noted that Gabbard’s husband took screenshots of the messages and saved the contact as “Keep watch. Dont Answer.”

• Another week, another precautionary tale about losing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a crypto scam.

• There’s a class action against C-SPAN that accuses the network of improperly sharing its viewers’ information with Meta.

• A former hospital employee who has Tourette syndrome and was reportedly fired after making “faces” at the hospital’s head of HR is suing. Our friends at The Independent have the write-up.

• The FBI teamed up with Romanian authorities to bust a $1.6 million Amazon email phishing scam.

• A disgruntled employee at the Navy’s Undersea Warfare Center in Rhode Island was arrested for allegedly threatening eight former colleagues over the phone.

• Here’s the search warrant in the case of the seventeen-year-old alleged Neo-Nazi who purportedly killed his parents and plotted to assassinate President Trump. The warrant provides new details into the seventeen-year-old’s reported online contact with other individuals in accelerationist Neo-Nazi chat rooms.

• DOJ is pushing back on a request to unseal a search warrant targeting a university professor for unknown (to the public) reasons, stating that a university researcher at Stanford has no legal right to access the documents. We’d note that the Assistant U.S. Attorney who appeared on the unsealing docket has a history of prosecuting national security cases for that district.

• Guess this is one way to achieve a Reduction in Force at the FAA?

Thanks for reading. We didn’t want to jam up your inbox, but check back on our site later this morning at 10am. We’ll have a new story with the good folks at 404 Media.