Welcome to Court Watch #144. Before we dive into the dockets for the week in this issue, we thought we’d pull back the journalistic curtain and show you a little bit of the reporting work that goes into Court Watch every week.
Unsealing Search Warrant Related to Charlie Kirk Assasination
More than a week ago, Charlie Kirk was murdered on the campus of Utah Valley University. Thus started a nationwide manhunt involving federal and local law enforcement from around the country. In the early days, as an increasingly unhinged online debate occurred about possible motivation, we thought there may be some indications of intent in court filings. As is typical in these cases, once a suspect is identified, his house is searched. The images of FBI evidence response teams taking part in the investigation raised an obvious question for Court Watch reporters.
There should be a search warrant, and very likely in the federal court system. Given our understanding of how dockets work in 94 districts and willingness to spend our evenings going fishing in PACER, Court Watch was uniquely positioned to find it.
We started by spending a few hours understanding the rhythm, pattern, and naming convention of past search warrants in that district to help narrow the universe of dockets we should care about. Utah federal court, to its credit, has a relatively consistent and open search warrant filing process. So when we saw a search warrant tagged as “RESTRICTED Level 3” posted on September 12th and not available on PACER, it was an outlier for a district which in the past does not limit public access to search warrants once there is a public docket number.
We reached out to Court Watch subscriber and first amendment media lawyer Christopher Beall to see if he wanted to take a flier on a motion to unseal that docket. Chris, who has pro bono assisted us on a previous successful effort to a unseal docket, immediately said yes.
However, no matter how great of a Christopher one newsroom has, you still need a local counsel admitted in Utah to file the actual motion. So we asked around until we found a prominent Utah law firm who’d be willing to do the deed. We signed engagement letters with hourly fees that should terrify any small news organization and agreed to pay the costs associated with filing. (To the credit of the local law firm, they waived the retainer fee).
We wanted to make our unsealing motion as strong as possible, so we reached out to the lawyers of a major media organization to see if they’d like to join our motion. We’d take care of writing the motion, paying for local counsel, all we needed was a sign on. They agreed.
Writing, in part, in our eight page draft motion, we noted that:
“In light of the foregoing, and thus the presumption of public access to search warrant materials that have been filed with the court, the Government bears the burden of establishing countervailing interests sufficient to justify continued denial of public access to the search warrant application, the affidavit in support of that application, and the search warrant itself. See Sealed Search Warrants, 868 F.3d at 397. Moreover, to the extent these search warrant materials relate to the assassination Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, these materials no longer constitute “pre-indictment” documents to which any confidentiality is required in light of the actions by the Utah County Attorney to file capital murder charges against Tyler Robinson in state court on September 18, 2025. In fact, in light of the overwhelming public interest in the Government’s actions related to the investigation of Mr. Kirk’s death, the balance of interests strongly favors public release of the search warrant materials in this proceeding.”
Given that the Administration has been on record recently supporting the unsealing of search warrants of news importance, we thought we might have a good chance of success.
There are some silly administrative things when filing a federal motion on a sealed case. If you’re not a party to the docket, do you file the motion on that docket or create a separate miscellaneous docket with the request? Each district and clerk's office has different guidance. So our local counsel called the clerk to ask how best to proceed. To everyone’s surprise, the clerk alerted us that the docket we intended to unseal should have been unsealed to begin with and that a motion would not be needed.
We prepped some baseline language for a story, left areas to fill in based on the documents, and awaited the unsealing. It would admittedly be a large news scoop for Court Watch, but much more importantly, it could provide a window into the investigation that has gripped the nation. It also could help the public better understand how these investigations work and provide some hard facts to an investigation that has led to rampant online speculation. The effort was fully in line with the goal and mission of Court Watch to tell good, nonpartisan stories and make the courts more transparent to the public in the process.
The search warrant was unsealed. Alas, it was a completely unrelated case about a Pittsburgh law student trying to evade an indictment from the Kingdom of Tonga. So the farthest thing possible from what we thought it would be. A lesson that even if you think you know it’s the docket, you don’t really know until you actually know.
And that’s the rub really, with the courts clamping down on providing access to sensitive cases after they got hacked, and a general vibe of courts of assuming that public records should not be read by the public itself, it’s a difficult time to try to find things that folks may or may not want to be found. If there is any consultation, we’re confident that every Utah search warrant with a public docket number is now available to the public because of our inquiries.
We do not yet know if there was a federal search warrant filed against Charlie Kirk’s assassin. It would be unusual if there wasn’t. A story in and of itself even. But barring a bit more information to crack the case, we’re back to wandering around the dark cave of the U.S. courts with nothing more than a wet match.
But we tried. And that’s what you do as reporters. You may not get the story but you damn well should try.
The Docket Roundup
Our newest first responders in the coming war against political violence may shush you from time to time. Law enforcement says they were tipped off by a librarian after a man asked for help with printing his 300 page manifesto titled “How to Kill a Federal Judge” at a library near Minneapolis. Court records state law enforcement discovered a list of federal judges, fireworks, and a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook in his car.
A Florida man was arrested for allegedly sending a gun selfie to his health care provider and threatening pharmacists.
Newsmax took another swing at Fox.
Tesla is being sued over H1B visas and its hiring practices.
A South Carolina magistrate judge who oversaw preliminary hearings for over two decades in Charleston County allegedly admitted to law enforcement that he had a thumb drive plugged into his computer containing “100s” of “videos” of CSAM. This happened when law enforcement, acting on a tip from NCMEC, arrived at his house to conduct a pre-dawn search. On Wednesday, Charleston’s top prosecutor announced her office would review the cases he ruled in, a number which could potentially be in the thousands given his long tenure on the bench.
It’s always in the Discord chat logs; this time, Texas state police and the FBI believe they averted a bombing at a Fourth of July parade.
By the law of averages, there’s probably a couple Court Watch subscribers who care about the happenings of Dan Bilzerian. First of all (and most importantly), touch grass. Second, he’s suing his father.
A suspected enforcer for the Aryan Brotherhood was arrested in Ohio following several wild run-ins with the law. The straw that finally broke the camel's back was when he reportedly showed a cop a picture of his AR-15, which he couldn’t legally own as a felon.
Don’t worry, we have more Matt Taibbi-DOJ drama for you.
Law enforcement reportedly caught a ring of robbers behind a series of break-ins in DC and Montgomery County.
Gambling Influencer ‘Mr. Hand Pay’ is wrapped up in a lawsuit.
There’s been a lot of talk this past week about the dangers of the internet, and while we love cat videos as much as everyone else, cases like this 764 one routinely serve as a disturbing reminder into just how dark the online world can get. We’re unfortunately going to likely hear more about nihilistic violent extremism going forward as the rise of the terminally online terrorist continues.
A Georgia man who had just been fired from Walmart reportedly went on Instagram to make some regrettable comments on video about his ex-coworkers.
Enrique Tarrio and other pardoned J6 related defendants pushed back against the DOJ’s motion to dismiss their civil case.
The IRS says a man on supervised release for a fraud scheme impersonated a law firm to steal almost $800,000.
A New York man was indicted on charges of threatening to assault and murder two federal judges.
After law enforcement confronted a Tennessee man last week over his threats to an Islamic community center, he reportedly emailed the community center again, writing, “You are stupid, send the FBI after me, they didn't do anything but walk away.” He was arrested the next day.
We needed a lowkey song of the week with a haunting voice that sticks with you.
The suspect in a Tesla arson case reportedly tried to throw his brother under the bus.
A man who says he was a victim of a crime allegedly threatened the prosecutor on his case.
Take it from two redheads not to chat with random “Ginger”s on the internet.
A mentally ill veteran who allegedly threatened staff at the VA, including on the VA’s Suicide Prevention Team, was indicted this week.
The feds say a woman trying to board a plane with a gun and the case got more interesting from there. (editor’s note: we edited this bullet post-publication)
An Oklahoma city man pleaded guilty to a federal hate crime violation (not speech) for a racially motivated attack on a Black employee at a restaurant in 2023.
A self-identified alum was arrested for purportedly threatening his university alma mater.
Some defense sentencing memos are better than others: “[The defendant] is a 23-year-old asylum seeker from Russia whose true love in life is pyrotechnics.”
The FBI clawed back some money out of the 33 million dollars stolen by fake websites posing as investment hubs.
Apparently “carpets” is the new hip slang for meth.
If anyone wants to be appointed as the interim U.S. Attorney for Delaware, now might be your one and only chance to apply. Full disclosure, we might throw our hat in the ring.
A pro-Palestine activist who was expelled from Ohio State University is suing the school under a First Amendment claim.
The Justice Department is taking on Maine’s Secretary of State for denying access to the state’s voter rolls.
One GOP megadonor’s war against American Express continues.
A Chinese dissident living in New York City pleaded guilty to spying on other dissidents on behalf of Chinese intelligence.
Prosecutors say a Sudanese man living in Goose Creek, South Carolina, lied about his ties to ISIS on immigration paperwork.
The subject of a Daily Mail story entitled ‘Sex attack scandal rocks Mar-A-Lago’ is suing the British tabloid.
Describing using access to CIA systems as his “personal Google”, the feds want a long sentence for a man accused of secretly lobbying for foreign clients. We have a piece with 404 Media on it here.
Our long national nightmare of who started the Steele Dossier pee-tape rumor has been settled in the courts.
A Kash Patel deposition soon?
In what will surely become another viral bluecheck mark thing on X at some point, the SEC and Elon’s lawyers aren’t playing together nicely, duking it out over the court venue.
Shark Tank, Daymond John, and Amazon purported business shadiness. What more do you need from one court record?
Thanks for reading.