U.S v. Martin, Nebraska Federal District Court
Welcome to Court Watch #140. Fresh off our very serious victory for court transparency, we decided to pivot back to our core subscriber base in this week’s issue with an impressive clickbait level of court records that include Hunter Biden, Alina Habba, Piers Morgan, Ja Rule, and Matt Taibbi. Never say we don’t give the people what they want.
The court dockets were a ride this week. In addition to the aforementioned, New Orleans tried to do a reboot of The Bodyguard. It ended in federal charges. The original movie’s level of acting should have had the same result but we digress.
Also, we buried the story in a random bullet below about the Windy City consuming 6.4 million dollars worth of cocaine weekly at the same time the Bears were 4-8. Guess, we all deal with football losses in our own ways. As Commanders fans, we channel our disappointment by simply disliking any person named Dan. To each its own.
The summer may be winding down but the U.S. Courts are still bringing the heat. Let’s dive in.
The Docket Roundup
Prominent Republican lobbyist and former McCain confidant Vicki Iseman was ordered to hand over documents to the Justice Department in her case over alleged PPP fraud.
A judge in Arizona took a stern approach to sanctioning another attorney accused of filing a motion that included AI hallucinations. In addition to revoking the attorney’s pro hac vice status and telling her to send a copy of the order to every judge in all of her cases, the judge ordered for her to write letters of apology to the authors of the faux judicial opinions.
If you like drama, you’ll enjoy this superseding indictment targeting the former Mayor of New Orleans for a scandal involving an affair with a member of her security detail.
A pro se litigant was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York.
This filing reveals how undercover DEA agents and sources infiltrated a cartel’s money laundering operations.
JP Morgan is being sued over almost twenty million dollars that was reportedly stolen by an ex-employee and a now-accused fraudster.
Things are going just fine [insert burning house meme].
Hunter Biden’s lawyers don’t want to “chase a billionaire around the world simply because Defendant elected to fire his attorneys on the morning of trial.” To be honest, that would make for a great podcast series for Democrats to reach the young male demographic.
In non-court filing but also somehow court-filing news, two men who worked at a digital filing company for financial institutions are accused of using their positions to commit insider trading.
A twenty-year-old man from Ohio pleaded guilty to committing a hate crime after getting into a fist fight outside a bar in Columbus over a student’s Hebrew necklace.
Piers Morgan is being sued by one of his show’s guests for defamation.
Alina Habba and Todd Blanche intervened to defend a <checks notes>...California Democratic Congresswoman from….<checks notes>... Matt Taibbi. Attorneys representing Taibbi pushed back, “Talking to voters on Twitter is not lawmaking, it is politics.” It actually might shake out to be an interesting case on how elastic the speech and debate clause is. Or it’ll just help convert more subscribers to paid on Taibbi’s Substack. Who can really tell at this point.
A North Carolina man pleaded guilty to civil rights violations for an incident in which he threatened to kill eight people inside a Charlotte pizza parlor, calling them “terrorists,” and then retrieved an AR-15 rifle from his car. The group was able to flee the pizza parlor without being harmed.
An Illinois judge dismissed an effort by the Trump administration to pressure the state into complying with its immigration operations.
There’s a copyright battle over which humane society is the most humanest.
A patient at the VA who suffers from mental illness was charged for allegedly making unhinged threats toward VA staff.
The Trump Organization put up a $10,000 court bond in its case against knockoff MAGA merchandise sellers.
One man in Louisiana learned too late about the consequences of agreeing to YouTube's terms of service.
Stick around for the hook at the one minute mark but since we have very few Canadian subscribers, this is our song of the week.
Finally, something that matters. Two plaintiffs are standing up to United Airlines for placing customers in windowless seats after paying for premium window seats.
One alleged fraudster tricked an elderly couple into handing over more than half a million dollars worth of gold coins while impersonating a Department of Treasury official, “Special Agent Bessent.”
In non-cash-in-potato-chip-bags news, Eric Adams continues to find creative new ways to make legal news.
Unusually solid tires on a vintage 4Runner led Border Patrol agents to discover 116 pounds of meth.
A Florida man was arrested for allegedly threatening his ex-wife and her boyfriend in a very Florida man-sounding Facebook post.
If you want the trial exhibits for a lawsuit of national importance, don’t check PACER, instead go to the courthouse, they’re in a manila folder on a thumb drive on a shelf in a room. Trust us, you don’t hate the PACER system enough.
The man who purportedly spraypainted “kill ice” on a field office in Nebraska and left an unlit Molotov cocktail behind is set to plead guilty.
This is a fun case name.
Judge Lamberth extended a preliminary injunction for the Bureau of Prisons to continue providing transgender care.
The FBI arrested a man for allegedly running a human trafficking ring out of hotels in Nebraska.
Citing conversations a Delaware man had with mental health professionals, a federal judge is refusing to let a defendant withdraw his guilty plea prior to sentencing.
The Trump Administration's recent influx of federal law enforcement to fight crime in DC is making for some really fascinating filings. For example, a Diplomatic Security Service agent, who would typically be assigned to protect the State Department and its embassies, was instead allegedly kicked by a man he was trying to arrest for having an open alcohol container in his car. There’s a lot to unpack in this. First, DSS is patrolling D.C. to look for crimes. Second, the complaint doesn’t quite explain why the police decided to randomly approach a parked car. Third, they found weed on the guy, but it was within the legal limit for DC (awks for federal agents). Fourth, there were multiple folks in the car, the open container was sitting in the middle console, and the complaint does not indicate how they established that it was the defendant. Fifth, they decided to arrest someone for an open container in a parked car. Sixth, the DSS agent was with “several Federal Law Enforcement Officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), patrolling with [DC Police Officers] Officers."
Continuing the theme, here’s another arrest in DC involving DC police and federal law enforcement. In this case, cops and feds saw a man walking down the street with a satchel, the man moved his satchel closer to himself, the cops immediately did a u-turn, followed him into a Trader Joe’s and found two guns on him. It’s gotta be a fun time to be a defense attorney in DC.
The government forgot about international law and diplomacy for a bit but realized their oversight so it’s all good.
An energy company is taking on the Illinois Attorney General’s office’s ability to hire outside private law firms to participate in investigations and prosecutions.
Jail calls remain law enforcement’s best investigative tool.
If you don’t create an entire website for your pro se filing to recuse a judge, are you really trying? By the way, the website is an absolute trip, from an incredible intro graphic, fake press releases written in the third person, a female-only football league, and a thirty-minute video explaining the filer’s plight that features a picture of her posing with… the rapper Ja Rule.
Queue the ‘Dems might be in disarray’ headline.
Rangers at Yellowstone National Park arrested a man for a long list of poor decision-making.
Here’s an interesting filing by a Mexican bank about how the Trump administration’s efforts to combat cartel money laundering have impacted international commerce.
Japanese denim might be more than a little racist?
The FTC might finally get us out of our twenty-year contract at Planet Fitness.
Your foot fungus isn’t being treated properly.
We broke this story when the arrests first came in, but the sentencing documents are really worth looking at how entrenched with ISIS the DOJ says an Afghan translator in the U.S. was.
Thanks for reading. No, seriously, thanks. On Monday we told you that we spent hundreds of dollars to win a legal transparency battle. It was a leap of faith for our small scrappy news organization and a line in the sand we decided to draw against courtroom secrecy. In response, a lot of you stepped up and became paid subscribers to help defray the costs. We sincerely appreciate it.