Welcome to Court Watch #135. After publishing every Friday for the last 83 weeks, we were admittedly looking forward to a bit of a reprieve. We were going to sneak in a week off without alerting you all, and hoping you didn’t notice our break. Alas, after the Court Watch two man reporting team had its first and only impromptu company offsite at an Irish dive bar on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, we decided that Eminem and Jay-Z were talking about us in their songs. (“can’t leave [journalism] alone, the game needs me”). Despite our best efforts to unplug, the siren song of making news was ever-present on our vacation. So let’s talk about a domestic terrorism investigation that everyone else in the reporting world missed, and then we’ll move into the rest of the dockets.
Rhode Island Reich
Since January 2024, we’ve been quietly watching a docket in New England where an FBI agent focused on domestic terrorism filed an affidavit on a seemingly random gun case. The original charging documents were quite innocuous. We continued to attend the online hearings for the case to the point where (true story) a federal judge was very confused that we were the only non-lawyer on the Zoom call and asked if we were lost. Indeed, nothing in the proceedings rose to a level that would explain the involvement of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.
However, this week, on the eve of a hearing that has since been pushed, it started to come into focus. The Justice Department filed, as an exhibit fighting back against a dismissal motion, an unsealed search warrant publicly revealing a federal investigation into the defendant’s online ties to neo-Nazis. Court documents now show that Kyle Reynolds participated in neo-Nazi chatrooms on the messaging app Telegram, interacting with at least one other man who led a violent accelerationist group bent on destruction.
The investigation into Reynolds began just as FBI agents arrested another alleged neo-Nazi, Brandon Russell. The twenty-seven-year-old Russell was charged and later found guilty of conspiring with a Maryland white supremacist to destroy Baltimore’s power grid in an effort to sow chaos in the racially diverse city. When law enforcement arrested Russell in 2023, they also seized his phone, giving investigators access to a slew of neo-Nazi aligned chat rooms.
FBI agents soon identified a concerning exchange from February 2022 between Russell, who used the username “DIEWITHAGRIN,” and another user named “Kobra401k” in a popular neo-Nazi chatroom on Telegram. After a moderator posted a screenshot of an article in Rolling Stone about a prominent Nazi hunter in the chat room, Kobra401k asked, “phone number and address?” to which Russell replied with a link possibly to the Nazi hunter’s home. Prosecutors now say Reynolds was the man behind Kobra401k.
The pair interacted again in March 2022, when Reynolds allegedly texted in a different neo-Nazi chatroom, “Only when Our anger turns to hate will things finally change my brothers and sisters. Let it fuel your fire 🔥💪.” Russell, however, pushed back, writing, “So when is it gonna change… Its been years… Where the f### is the new tarrant3 or Breivik4[?]” He told Reynolds to “Go do something… Too many words.” and then sent a picture showing what appears to be a Uzi sub-machine gun and said tauntingly, “I have actions to back my beliefs… What about you?” Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik carried out the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings and the 2011 Norway attacks, respectively, the two most deadly neo-Nazi inspired attacks in the twenty-first century.
Reynolds reportedly responded to Russell’s jibes by sending a picture of a seemingly larger semi-automatic long gun. He then allegedly texted, “You are already outgunned. The fact you have to ask others on a telegram chat to ‘do something’ speaks volumes. You clearly aren’t doing s###.” The chatroom tit for tat gave investigators a possible path towards charges: Reynolds had previously been convicted in state court for assaulting a person over the age of sixty, making him unable to possess guns or ammunition as a felon. Law enforcement said Reynolds also commented in a separate chat that he wrote “Ezekiel 6:3:47,” a Bible verse frequently cited by antisemites, on “all of [his] mags.”
By January 2025, investigators had matched several alleged corroborating details about the “Kobra401k” user to Reynolds, including that the user was the same age as Reynolds and, more specifically, that he attended the same church in Rhode Island as retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. Then, local law enforcement was called to Reynolds’ home during a domestic dispute, where his girlfriend reportedly told officers that he kept a shotgun, an AK-47, clips of ammunition, a “flak jacket,” and “vials of steroids” in the couple’s bedroom. An FBI agent met with her a week later at a police station. According to court records, she confirmed to the agent that the long gun appearing in the Telegram chats looked the same as the AK-47 that Reynolds had in his home.
The FBI searched Reynolds’ home two weeks later on January 23, 2025, reportedly recovering hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and arrested him that same day. Court records did not indicate that a gun was recovered at the residence. The next day, a federal magistrate agreed to release Reynolds until his trial for two counts of felon in possession of a firearm and a single charge of felon in possession of ammunition.
Reynolds’ case falls into a pattern by prosecutors of pursuing charges against domestic extremists that are lesser, more easily provable, and lower-hanging fruit relative to prosecutions targeting foreign radicals. Indeed, yesterday, a former soldier in the U.S. Army was sentenced by a judge in Washington after pleading guilty to gun charges in a case that had similar allegations as Reynolds’. The ex-soldier was an active participant in both on and offline neo-Nazi groups and, like Reynolds, his messages on Telegram showing pictures of guns attracted the attention of federal law enforcement. A judge in Washington’s Western District sentenced him to two years in prison.
A recent study by the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) at the University of Nebraska Omaha into Atomwoffen Division, a neo-Nazi aligned group of accelerationists led by Russell, further captured the trend of prosecutors using lesser charges to target domestic extremists, finding prosecutors relied heavily on illegal guns, interstate communications of threats, and child exploitation prosecutions to dismantle the group. (editor’s note: one of the reporters works at NCITE and is a co-author on the study)
Reynolds’ lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S Attorney’s Office for Rhode Island declined to comment on an ongoing criminal prosecution.
The Docket Roundup
The ACLU’s New Hampshire chapter had to give up a dollar to the court.
Come for the collages, stay for the Instagram credits. Here’s your weekly sovereign citizen filing, with a large dose of Epstein conspiracies included.
The feds arrested a San Antonio man for allegedly posting threats online against President Trump under a username that just left one letter of his last name off.
Ryan Welsey Routh, who is facing charges for a second apparent assassination plot against President Trump, sent an unhinged letter to Judge Aileen Cannon this week, asking for her as the presiding judge to remove his attorneys from the case.
There’s a new lawsuit over who gets to use “Cruisin’ Connecticut” as a marketing tool. Allow us to offer up several alliterative alternatives, such as “Catchin’ Connecticut,” “Coastin’ Connecticut,” and “Crossin’ Connecticut.” One of those has to be a winner.
A strip club in Nevada was accused of not paying its entertainers.
There’s drama in the science fiction-con world.
A scholar is suing the website Academia, with claims that the company profits off of his and other academics’ likenesses without their permission.
The Trump campaign is being sued for reportedly texting a woman in Florida on a do-not-call list.
A professor teaching an online class was cyberstalked by a student.
An anonymous Jewish student and a professor filed a lawsuit against the University of Southern California over its policies toward pro-Palestinian protests.
The CEO of an Iranian engineering company was arrested for purportedly violating export controls by shipping electronic and telecommunications equipment to Iran.
Here’s an interesting human rights and environmental case against the Export-Import Bank of the U.S, targeting a $4.7 billion loan it approved for a project in Mozambique.
The DEA says it used a confidential source to trick drug traffickers into giving the agents millions of dollars worth of drug proceeds as part of a fake money laundering operation.
In honor of them playing the Windjammer in Isle of Palms, South Carolina, next week, “Surefire” by Wilderado is our song of the week.
A shareholder is suing Reddit, arguing the social media site inflated its number of active users to increase its stock price.
This pro se case over the First Amendment and “In God We Trust” appearing on cash bills takes several wild turns.
Lawyers for The Daily Beast pushed back against a defamation suit filed by former Trump campaign manager Chris Lacivita.
A twenty-one-year-old former Army soldier pleaded guilty to a hacking scheme that entailed stealing companies’ data and then using the data to extort the companies while he was on active duty.
ICE has some explaining to do.
A federal judge is as confused as we are.
Can we all agree this is a weird DOJ headline?
A federal judge in the Northern District of Texas rejected a plaintiff’s motion to recuse him in a case against X/Twitter.
Thanks for reading our admittedly short roundup. We hope you’ll excuse this week’s brevity.
A final note, it could be our ever-increasing age and the waves crashing off the sands on Station 21 of Sullivan’s Island, but we found ourselves particularly reflective this week. A quick scan of social media will tell you that everything is the worst, that systems are cracking and guardrails are collapsing. Of course, there is more than a little truth in all of that. But having spent the last two decades studying the worst society can offer, there is an unspoken requirement of the job to keep sacred a modicum of optimism lest you allow yourself to be consumed by the reality of it all. So, while on vacation in South Carolina this week, we looked for it. If you ever feel disheartened by the state of the world, may we humbly suggest driving to your local airport and watching the arrivals. There is unmitigated joy when friends and family see each other for the first time in years that will reaffirm your faith in humanity. Or have a beer with a young cub reporter named Peter who cold emailed you more than a year ago about wanting to write for Court Watch and then proceeded to overachieve in breaking news. There is good to be found if you look for it.
As we’ve noted in the past, we always come back to Desiderata: With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. It would behoove us all to strive for the better angels of our nature and fight the urge to concede to the despair of the day.
We’ll be back next week with a more fulsome roundup of the courts. In the meantime, throw this song on max volume and dance like no one is watching.