Welcome to Court Watch #149. It’s been a week of losses and gains. An NBA coach won some rigged card games but lost his freedom. The East Wing may be gone, but the U.S. government picked up a mid-century six bedroom, two bath house with a wrap around porch. The U.S. Army lost its nickels but acquired some cash. The U.S. Courts can’t get a paycheck, but they can collect our PACER fees. And the half a dozen folks arrested this week for threatening politicians have lost their cool.
Plus, we’ll never admit it in proper company but we’re quietly hoping one Illinois man forges 694 more federal judges’ signatures and achieves a complete Article III recusal on his case. We always appreciate a good loophole.
The Docket Roundup
The FBI has arrested a homeless man they were looking at for a potential material support for terrorism charge. Authorities say he threatened to kill the folks investigating him.
A man named Stalker was charged with stalking.
The feds obtained an indictment against the Texas eighteen-year-old who purportedly threatened on Roblox to commit a terror attack against a Christian music festival in the name of ISIS.
Two Jewish twins attending Columbia University are suing the school over its response to antisemitism on campus.
The former head of the Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline says the Colorado Supreme Court and the Attorney General covered up a multi-million dollar bribe.
If you are like us and desperately wanted to see what thousands of dollars worth of U.S. coins look like when seized by the U.S. Government, here you go.
A former U.S. Air Force member was charged with threatening to kill President Trump by posting on Instagram, “I am going to kill trump raise him from the dead and kill him again. Death to trump.”
We didn’t have the New York Attorney General charged with fraud citing unsolicited text messages between newly installed U.S. Attorney to Lawfare reporter in our 2025 bingo card.
A company that sought to help Amazon drivers find bathrooms around their delivery route say that Amazon stole their product.
Homeland Security Investigations busted a fake ID ring in Michigan.
A case in California gives us a window into the Justice Department’s determination of which cases to pursue during a government shutdown.
A grand jury in Louisiana indicted the Palestinian man whom the FBI says participated in the Hamas-led attack on October 7th.
An anti-affirmative action group, Students for Fair Admissions, sued a Hawaiian private school over its purported admission policy of giving preferential treatment to applicants with indigenous Hawaiian ancestry.
Jan. 6th lawyer Carolyn Stewart found herself in hot water with DC Judge Amit Mehta for submitting suspected AI hallucinations in a brief.
We thought it was interesting when we first noticed it and were surprised no one had picked it up yet, so off we went. Now, a case we wrote about two years ago is heading to the Supreme Court.
A couple from Virginia filed for a temporary restraining order on Thursday to stop the destruction of the East Wing. Our quick read of it is they lack standing and this will get tossed by a judge quickly.
Our editor is seeing this band next week in Baltimore. Ergo, here’s your song of the week to hype us all up.
Prosecutors seized over a million dollars in a four-year-old case from a contractor who reportedly failed to live up to his side of a deal with the Army for work at a New Mexico base.
A Florida man was arrested for allegedly threatening Hasan Piker, Nancy Pelosi, Christina Rampell, and Brian Tyler Cohen, among others.
Your sovereign citizen filing of the week is about a sacred thread.
CFO Squad, a company that provides outsourced chief financial officers to other companies, is upset that two former employees are starting their own spinoff. We propose a CFO versus CFO face-off. Maybe over squash or mid-way through a Coldplay concert?
We rarely see a public rebuke of a search warrant, but Alaska is always full of surprises.
Washington and fifteen other states won in court against the Department of Education, keeping alive a case to continue grant funding for mental health services in schools after the government sought to dismiss it.
The state of Arizona and Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva are taking the House of Representatives to court for not swearing in the Congresswoman-elect during the shutdown.
Last week’s issue covered one guy’s attempt to play 4D chess against the U.S. Courts. We now give you the case of Walter Brzowski, who successfully got all the judges in his district to recuse themselves from his case, after he <checks notes> allegedly forged two of their signatures. An order by the district’s chief judge explained the recusals, writing that the clerk of court and one or more of the district’s judges are potential witnesses. We know this may not ultimately be a winning legal strategy, but there are more than 670 federal judges in the U.S. so if he wants to hit the full Ginsberg of recusals, he’ll need to write some more.
Here’s an update on the case about the administration’s attempt to access the health records of minors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
A man suing the U.S. Center for Safesport, a nonprofit organization set up to review allegations of sexual misconduct in the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic programs, wants to remain anonymous. Court records indicate the Center had investigated the man for potential misconduct.
The feds are now in possession of several properties and motor homes purchased from an alleged Medicare fraud scheme in North Carolina.
There’s drama over who has the best feline leukemia vaccine.
ICE arrested a man alongside his three roommates in Portland, who the FBI later charged with pointing a green laser pointer at multiple law enforcement aircraft flying near the ICE facility, which has been a flashpoint for recent protests.
In honor of the World Series beginning this evening, we give you a case about whether your kids’ expensive new and improved baseball bat is actually new or improved.
A former middle school teacher was arrested at the border after he allegedly attempted to smuggle roughly a hundred pounds of cocaine across.
The ACLU’s civil case on behalf of a DC resident who was arrested for allegedly following around National Guardsmen begins in dramatic fashion, “In the Star Wars franchise, The Imperial March is the music that plays when Darth Vader or other dark forces enter a scene or succeed in their dastardly plans. It is also the soundtrack of Sam O’Hara’s protest against the National Guard deployment in D.C.”
A Minnesota man was arrested for reportedly posting a hit reward for Attorney General Pam Bondi on TikTok.
Three conservation groups sued the U.S. Forest Service over 25 new grazing allotments in Washington state’s Colville National Forest.
The SEC is still trying to clear up an attorney’s suspension for failing to pay her state bar dues after a pro se defendant challenged it.
A federal judge really wants Laura Loomer to send in some thumb drives of evidence because “the Court does not review unsecured links for security reasons.”
The feds say they averted a potential mass shooting at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.
In June, a former Army sergeant pleaded guilty to attempting to share military secrets with China. Federal prosecutors and his public defender are now laying out their cases for sentencing, with prosecutors arguing that the ex-soldier engaged in “deliberate” acts to share intelligence in hopes of obtaining Chinese citizenship. On the other hand, his defender describes the ex-soldier’s extensive struggles with schizophrenia and says his obsession with contacting Chinese officials came from paranoid beliefs that he needed to warn them about U.S. government mind control programs. Both sentencing memos are fascinating reads.
There’s a casino scheme in Florida to defraud the IRS.
The U.S. Courts are feeling the effects of the shutdown, with little to no indication of Congress reaching a bipartisan compromise to resume funding soon. Courts and federal defender offices are now furloughing employees, while other staff will have to work without pay to fulfill only the bare essential judicial functions.
The Ninth Circuit struggled over how to interpret its own precedent (see footnote 1 but honestly, we want you to read the other footnote 1 in the piece, towards the bottom of the document).
An American contractor is suing the government and the leaders of Honduras over decades of USAID contracts worth more than a hundred million dollars going unpaid.
It wouldn’t be the start of the NBA season without some scandalous legal news.
Newsmax and Fox News are fighting over accusations of judge shopping.
Prosecutors dropped a seven-year-old FARA Mueller era case against a man who was accused of being an alleged operative of Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
If you want to feel pessimistic about technology and where we’re headed as a society, here’s a case against an AI slop website, which a group of high schoolers reportedly used to generate sensitive images of their underage classmates. Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic is representing the plaintiff.
Well, folks, here’s a very literal case about “The Longstanding Hole in the Sidewalk in front of the IRS Building.”
Thanks for reading.