United States v. “Flip”, Eastern District of Virginia
Welcome to Court Watch #136.
Between the fake whiskey distillers, a judge’s fake opinion, and a fake judge on a U.S. courts website, it’s been one of those weeks. But we want to be real with you: this issue is all about you.
If you are looking for legal nuggets into the Jeffrey Epstein saga, we have it. Perhaps you're righting a 30 year wrong person case? We got that too. Can’t figure out how to upload your files? The Courts have an old-school solution for you. Is graphic design your passion? There are 250 million reasons to read this newsletter. Maybe you want to learn more about that New York City bombing? We also have you covered. Well, actually, we technically had you covered six weeks ago.
Plus, stay for the kicker where a court docket with major national implications got a little Court Watch sunlight before quietly moving to the shadows.
The Docket Roundup
No one seemed to notice, but yesterday brought us the first federal criminal case relying on the Trump administration’s designation of a Haitian gang as a foreign terrorist organization.
We may have our first hallucinated AI judicial opinion. After being called out on the fake references by one of the case’s lawyers, the judge ruled Wednesday that his order was “entered in error” and that a new opinion will be issued soon. Bloomberg Law had the scoop.
To be honest, it doesn’t seem worth it to us to have to learn Photoshop just to steal 250 million dollars.
Proxy voters Glass, Lewis, and Co. are upset Texas won’t let them tell investors about DEI.
A rapper named “Leek Obama” from Columbia, South Carolina, was sentenced to nine years in prison for leading a credit card fraud ring called Swiperz Only. Prosecutors say the group had their very own Swiperz Only logo, which they engraved on jewelry and embroidered on their own clothing merch.
It’s not every day that the Supreme Court’s lawyer has to defend them in federal district court. We think the district just should rule but only give a one paragraph explanation so the Supremes can get a taste of their own medicine.
The PACER database is so bad that the system can’t host large (to be honest, even not that large) data files. So if you want to read the evidence submitted by the Daily Beast in a defamation lawsuit, you’ll have to ask someone to get it from the “expandable folder on shelf in Clerk's Office.”
Judge Sullivan's use of excessive exclamation points in his minute orders is always entertaining to read. For the record, within about 12 minutes of Sullivan’s excitable order denying a stay, an appeals court issued it anyway.
SDNY fixed a 34-year mistake this week (hattip Reuters).
We’ve very much here for a good old fashioned intergovernmental courthouse squabble.
Our birddogging the Southern District of Florida resulted in a Jeffrey Epstein scoop. We’re sure there’s someone better than us at finding court records, but we haven’t met them yet. We won’t give away all our secrets, but we’ll say it took us five seconds to realize something was off on that docket and worth a click.
Feds are trying to track down 16 million dollars in cryptocurrency that one duped Missourian sent to a would-be lover.
A drive to CIA headquarters takes a series of escalating twists and turns.
A relative of an arrested member of the online extremist cult, 764, is accused of trying to convince a minor victim to destroy evidence against his family member.
The New York State Department of Transportation says it got scammed.
The Cuban Electric Company would like the money Treasury seized and has been holding for the last…<checks notes>...60 years.
We made the Top 50 Creator-Journalist list by Project C.
Tesla is being sued for producing a lemon. Grok tells us it’s really lemonade.
Thomas Donlon, who briefly served as the NYPD police commissioner under Eric Adams, is now suing him and New York City, claiming that Adams runs the police department as a “criminal enterprise.”
A sad case of a Michigan man who desperately wanted to be arrested.
A money manager firm wants Jerome Powell to be more transparent? The business beat reporters grabbed the gist of the filing, but for our money, the real interesting and yet to be covered angle is not the lawsuit but instead the law firm that took the case.
The feds rescued forty-seven pit bulls from a dogfighting ring in Missouri.
One Tennessee woman (allegedly) had a bad 4th of July: “happy firework day you devil worshipping COLT LEADER!!” (SIC)
Apple takes leaks about its next iOS system seriously, going so far as to sue a YouTuber.
The Trump Administration lost in the Western District of Texas was not a sentence we ever thought we’d write.
Congrats readers, you got to read about this in early June instead of late July because we do journalism around here. Upgrade to a paid subscription so we can keep helping you read the news six weeks before everyone else. Hell, we even scooped CBS Evening News by a month and a half. But as always, Google News did not pick up our original story.
Our song of the week is something you probably never heard of, and we’d recommend playing the full album. If that’s not your vibe, give this song a run. It takes about three plays till it sticks in your ribs.
A man who was featured last year in a Reuters story entitled “Trump fan targets MAGA foes with menace – and gets away with it” was charged this week with threatening two Democratic politicians. It looks like he finally flew too close to the sun last month when he allegedly threatened an FBI agent investigating him.
An Arizona man is accused of making false statements regarding an investigation involving stealing semiconductor plans and sending them to China.
X/Twitter would like “@Trumpgenius2” to not enter the chat.
Homeland Security Investigations is onto an almost 80-million-dollar money laundering operation.
What better place to store your (alleged) drug money than a bag with a giant dollar sign on it? (editor’s note: Please tell us it was the cops’ evidence bags.)
Three Native American tribes are suing betting sites Kalshi and Robinhood to stop them from allowing users to gamble on tribal lands.
We’ve been updating this every day for the last 6 months, and the initial interest/clicks from the public have now become a trickle. If you want us to keep going with it, drop us an email. If not, we’ll put it out to pasture.
Brad Spafford, whose case we previously covered as the largest seizure of homemade explosives in the FBI’s history, filed paperwork to plead guilty to several gun charges. The plea documents revealed new information highlighting the amount of explosives recovered, including 155 pipebombs, which prosecutors say Spafford stored in his garage near children’s toys, household items, and…a hot pocket.
At the bottom of this piece, Talking Points Memo said nice things about Peter’s reporting.
The Justice Department says it seized two million dollars from a Gaza-based money transfer business that prosecutors believe was intended for Hamas.
A Maryland man is returning to Maryland.
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Lawyers have never been known for their strength in math. Ric Grenell’s lawyers are apparently no exception.
“No matter how Defendants try to spin it, this court cannot grant them relief without contravening that critical interest. Because the court refuses to allow Defendants to continue breaking the law while this litigation proceeds, it is hereby ORDERED that Defendants’ Motion to Stay,” says Judge Alikhan in a particularly feisty FTC order that also takes a swing at the Supreme Court.
A couple former DOJ J6 prosecutors are suing over being fired by the Justice Department.
An arson suspect in Florida reportedly bought burn gel after setting fire to a pharmacy. Law enforcement was apparently able to collect the suspect’s charred hair after it fell off while he was purchasing the burn gel, and an employee, sensing something was amiss, collected it. Alternatively, that’s at least what he told the cops why he kept a bag of someone else’s hair. No judgments.
The New York Times is suing to figure out what happened at the attempted assassination of President Trump.
A New York judge is open to hearing from Jeffrey Epstein’s victims if they want the grand jury transcripts unsealed.
In bad news that probably won’t (but absolutely should) make it onto evening news programs: U.S. Courts announced that it ran out of money to pay defense attorneys appointed to represent indigent clients, meaning that none of these attorneys will be paid until at least October. It almost goes without saying that a lot of court-appointed attorneys do noble work, often working far beyond the hours they’re compensated for and well below market rate. There’s also a national shortage in federal public defender offices, which have been under a hiring freeze for seventeen of the last twenty-four months.
Yes, we did try to look for opinions written by “Judge John Example” in the Southern District of Mississippi this week. Unfortunately, there were no results. And there were no results for any opinions filed by any judge in that district in 2025.
There was a bizarre story in the news this week about a man who fatally wore a large chain near an MRI machine, so here’s a case about law enforcement identifying chains to bust a suspected drug ring.
A lawyer for a man suing X over “shadowbanning” is arguing that President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago staff was purposely trying to evade also being served in the lawsuit.
Judge Boasberg ruled to allow Politico to have limited access to more of FBI Director Kash Patel’s grand jury testimony in former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.
The Justice Department’s position to unseal the Jeffrey Epstein grand jury testimony made waves in Indiana, where a researcher is still fighting to unseal search warrants for the homes of two former university researchers.
20 years ago, we cold emailed Tim Strachan, who was a big shot at the FCC & asked if he’d give a 20-something he didn’t know who happened to graduate from his same high school five minutes of his time for career advice. He spent an hour and a half with us and was always available to bounce resumes off of and give job recommendations. As luck would have it, Tim’s and our professional and personal lives crossed paths quite a bit over the years. We never forgot that initial unwarranted kindness. May your memory be a blessing, Tim. You were a good man.
Prosecutors charged five men for allegedly running an illegal Halibut fishing ring in Alaska. It’s fitting that the first federal charge in Alaska since the beginning of July was about fishing.
In our favorite court document of the week, the whiskey company Sazerac is suing an unknown Facebook user to stop them from impersonating their Master Distiller.
Thanks for reading. One last thing. This week, a judge unsealed a docket involving law enforcement receiving large swathes of a good number of innocent folks’ cell phone data from at least one telephone carrier in their “tower dump” search warrant to attempt to track down one Missouri man who was involved in a series of antisemitic incidents.
Meanwhile, an update from our past stories (here, here, here, and here) covering a Mississippi federal case where a judge ruled law enforcement practices like the ones in Missouri are unconstitutional. Last week, on the eve of the DOJ's deadline to appeal the Mississippi order and shortly following our latest story, the entire Mississippi docket mysteriously became sealed on PACER. This is in spite of a judge’s public order saying that it would not be sealed pending additional Amici briefing motions. We inquired, but Judge Harris’s chambers declined to explain why. The Justice Department did not respond. The lawyer for civil liberties groups that filed Amici briefs against the use of Tower Dumps, which were only alerted to the existence of the docket because of our stories, did not respond to a request for a status update.
As a small news organization, we don’t have the monetary resources to hire a First Amendment lawyer to draft a motion and then hire a local attorney to file it to force an unsealing. So, congrats to everyone involved in making major legal and policy decisions in secrecy. You win. There’s no national security or investigative operational reason to seal the docket, as demonstrated by the fact that it was open for the last six months. We know it. You know it. But no one besides us gives a damn.
While everyone takes buyouts at the Democracy Dies in Darkness paper, we’re just a scrappy news startup that's begging someone – anyone – to step up with a flashlight because we’re out of batteries.
At least The Clash warned us that this may happen.