#125: Anticlimactically Granted?

Welcome to Court Watch #125. The courts delivered a sorta Benson Boone week. Let us explain: Sure, it felt fun to read the dockets, but afterwards, you wondered what it says about you that you enjoyed it for even a fleeting moment. We’re sorry if you were at Court Watch for something else, but we have a threat to immigrations judges, NFL draft lawsuits, interpretive jiggerypokery, Tucker Carlson TV appearances stop a security clearance, and at least one would-be kidnapper may be “hungry like a wolf.” Plus, the Southern District of New York continues to troll us. But before all that, let’s talk about a large defense contractor flying under the radar in Norfolk, Virginia. 

Playing Both Sides

A former Technical Director for the Department of Defense’s Joint Staff J6 was sentenced yesterday to 2 years of probation and a $100,000 fine after admitting to steering government contracts to a defense contractor while working for that company and the U.S. government. 

Last November, as first reported by Court Watch, prosecutors revealed in court records how Michael Henry had promoted a defense company within the DOD, helping it ink a $350 million contract with the government and obtain certification by the National Security Agency. All the while, Henry earned almost a hundred thousand dollars as a consultant for the company. In their November filing, prosecutors identified the defense company as the seller of a tactical radio software called TRAX, which appears to match the description of a product sold by SNC, also known as the Sierra Nevada Corporation. The company confirmed it had a consulting agreement with Henry, telling the Reno Gazette Journal, “While this case does not include SNC, we are fully cooperating with and supportive of the U.S. government’s investigation. We cannot comment further on active legal matters."

Court Watch has made multiple requests for comment to Sierra Nevada Corporation, none of which were acknowledged. However, some of their employees signed up as free Court Watch subscribers shortly after our inquiries but before publication of our first story about the charges. 

Before yesterday’s sentencing hearing, federal prosecutors and Henry’s defense attorney painted starkly different pictures in their separate filings of SNC’s role in the scheme. Prosecutors wrote that Henry continued to consult for defense companies despite an industry leader and DOD personnel warning against it, urging the judge to impose a $250,000 fine. The defense, for their part, said that Henry had received permission to consult for defense contractors and that it was SNC that put him in the unethical position of interacting with defense products after being hired as an oil and gas industry consultant. “Michael’s ethical lapse did not harm either the government or the company he consulted for—which should never have allowed this arrangement to be put in place, and which, unlike Michael, will suffer no consequences for its own errors in judgment,” Henry’s defense attorney, Andrew Bosse, wrote. Bosse said the judge should order a fine within the presentence report guidelines of $200 to $9,500.

The government and Henry’s defense did agree that he should avoid prison time, noting Henry’s extensive military service, including six deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. According to records filed by the defense, Henry’s superiors described him as an “absolute superstar” who was in the “top 1% of Army signal officers.” He was credited for creating a lifesaving battlefield communication system for U.S. service members, participating in sixteen hostage rescue missions, and surviving twenty IED explosions that left him suffering from brain trauma and PTSD.

Henry’s attorney declined to comment outside of the filing submissions. The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which is prosecuting the case, did not respond to our inquiries. 

Now let’s see what the rest of the dockets looked like this week. 

The Docket Roundup

• A Saudi woman in Houston was ordered by a judge to be removed from the U.S. when her mother’s immigration case was denied in 2002. In 2024, she filed a motion to reopen her removal proceedings. Last month, it was denied. Authorities say she then emailed the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) that “Ima have em spread out bombs all across your EOIR office. Everyone of your immigration judges will Be dead.”

• Welcome to the cutthroat world of “smart ladders.”

• A judge was unhappy that law enforcement tricked a man about locating his missing cat in order to tow his vehicle.

• A federal judge says, “the Government’s interpretation is, to put it mildly, ‘interpretive jiggerypokery’ of the highest order.”

• An anonymous NFL fan in Georgia is suing the league for a hundred million dollars for <checks notes> not drafting Shadeur Sanders higher. Meanwhile, the Commanders waited for the sixth round to take a linebacker, but no one will pay us millions for that skullduggery. 

• Another disgruntled Disney employee pleaded guilty to hacking the company. There were no “wing dings” or menus involved this time. Instead, the now ex-employee downloaded confidential data and then impersonated the Russian hacktivist group “NullBulge” to try to extort Disney.

• SDNY owes us PACER fees. 

• We haven’t had a good crypto laundering case in a week or two, so here you go.  Anywhere that starts with an ad on Instagram for an investment club and then introduces you to a supposed expert known as “The Professor” probably isn’t going to end well.

• There’s some serious tea brewing at the Inter-American Development Bank.

• Google is quietly suing a company over trade secrets.

• One pro se suit claims that there was such a toxic smell on his grounded Delta flight out of Orlando that he and his three-year-old daughter got sick.

• Seven ex-Twitter employees are suing X for not providing severance payments.

• The Department of Justice announced that the DEA had its largest fentanyl bust in the agency’s history.

• A Los Angeles man with a history of making threats to the FBI and DOJ was charged in Tennessee. 

• This case combines our two favorite court filing topics – ISIS and cryptocurrency scams. 

• A former U.S. Postal Service employee in Tennessee was arrested for allegedly threatening his old supervisor and driving by his house.

• Our song pick of the week gets a little country. 

• Lawyers, requesting an 8-hour motion hearing is a choice. 

• The state of Maine and the feds have to sort out who gets a band. 

• The feds filed a search warrant for a 2020 murder at the high-security prison, Supermax. 

• Three men the NYPD lists as “active” in its gang database are suing the Department and the City of New York, arguing the database violates their constitutional rights. The Legal Aid Society, NAACP, and Bronx Defenders are representing the plaintiffs in the case.

• An assistant director at a college admissions office in Massachusetts was charged with purportedly soliciting an underage prospective student.

• The family of a man killed in a road rage incident in Arizona used artificial intelligence to present in state court a video attempting to create the man’s hypothetical victim impact statement. At sentencing, the judge said he was moved by the video and ordered the maximum sentence for the defendant of 10 and a half years. Our friends at 404 have the story.

• Duran Duran was arrested for kidnapping (okay, not that Duran Duran, but close enough).

• A Yemeni man was indicted for purportedly hacking into 1,500 computer systems in the U.S. The Justice Department said that he is not in custody and probably still lives in Yemen.

• We kind of love the commitment to typographical corrections. 

• Two Asian American student applicants are suing the University of California for alleged racial discrimination in its admissions offices.

• The ATF says it arrested a gun smuggler from South Florida, who moved more than 400 guns from the US to Ecuador, some of which were reportedly used to commit violent crimes in that country.

• More drones over military bases. This time in Guam.

• The alleged dark net drug sellers behind users “JanesAddiction,” “DopeValley,” and “DaShop,” among others, were indicted.

• Who woulda thought? Scammers are impersonating Blue Checks on Twitter.

• Capital One is holding the line while news organizations and law firms are settling.

• A couple of appearances on Tucker Carlson’s show without disclosing it appear to have resulted in the CIA denying a security clearance for a think tank guy. 

• The Trump Administration's new rule that requires reporting of any currency exchange near certain areas of the border that’s more than 200 dollars has resulted in more than 46,000 reports being filed.

• UnitedHealthCare is the subject of a stockholder lawsuit for allegedly not properly accounting for the public backlash of its denial of claims and anticipating public support for the murder of its CEO.

• “This is a classic case of David vs. Goliath…” says a lawsuit about who owns the rights to Pickles. Is it Disney or a random baseball team named Pickles? Our suggestion — split the baby, settle with the baseball team and then make a Disney movie about a small ragtag town team coached by gruff but ultimately lovable Billy Bob Thornton character that took on a multibillion company. We’d watch it. You would too. Any would be be better than Hard Ball. (editor’s note: In addition to its various stereotypical tropes, how do you make a children’s movie where one of the kids is violently murdered? Who was the market audience for that movie?)

• The Justice Department announced charges against a twenty-year-old man from New York for purportedly committing hate crimes after he allegedly assaulted pro-Israeli protestors on three separate occasions during protests over the war in Gaza.

• The feds ended their nine-year-old case against a former Chicago alderman. In response to prosecutors’ motion to dismiss, the judge wrote, “The motion is anticlimactically granted.”

And with that, we’ll anticlimactically end this week’s roundup. Thanks for reading.