Welcome to Court Watch #161. This week the dockets were all about the perception of truth. Did an agency lie to a host of judges 96 times or was it just repeatedly misunderstood? Are you a common criminal unworthy of investigation or large enough to catch a federal felony? Is the third floor of a hotel just a place to lay your head or is it more of a den of iniquities? Is the courthouse printer really broken or is it simply user-error?
But perhaps the biggest question looming this week…Is this the greatest weekly roundup of judicial records we’ve ever published or a muddling mix of mildly interesting random court cases?
We think it is the former. But it could be the latter. It’s all about your perception.
The Docket Roundup
President Trump is suing the IRS for 10 billion dollars over leaked tax returns. Pour one out for the U.S. government attorney who will be randomly assigned to represent the Treasury Department against the President.
We do not recommend staying on the third floor of the Red Carpet Inn in Dumfries, Virginia.
We also don’t recommend going base jumping. Ever. But if you do, definitely don’t sneak into Yosemite National Park during a government shutdown to do it and record yourself in a viral video because the Park Rangers will eventually find you (even if you try to blame AI for the video).
It's buried a bit in paragraph 18 of a random business dispute filing in Minnesota, but Mike Lindell told a slipper company that My Pillow owed millions that the company could get a cut of a potential DOJ settlement over the Arctic Frost investigation.
A couple Neo-Nazis tried to buy guns from an undercover FBI employee.
Kash Patel’s girlfriend’s lawsuit goes on against a former FBI agent turned conservative influencer.
Two lawyers were sanctioned for hallucinated artificial intelligence citations, in a case that should concern local counsels who take on cases for out of state law firms.
Apple is suing Apple Cinema over the word Apple. We live in the dumbest timeline.
The feds charged a woman after the Coast Guard reportedly rescued her with five other people from a capsized boat off the coast of Florida. The captain of the boat apparently escaped.
The Justice Department dropped its subpoena to unmask an anonymous online account tracking ICE activities.
“The Department currently expects that it will complete these processes with respect to substantially all of the potentially responsive documents, including publication to the Epstein Library website, in the near term. The Department is not able to provide a specific date at this time,” says the Justice Department in its latest Epstein filing update.
Here’s another civil suit against X/Twitter over Grok’s deepfakes.
One Maine man’s determination to call his opponents “beta males” and “cult” members at school board meetings led to a First Amendment lawsuit.
A West Virginia coal company sued a Canadian steel company over voiding its purported decision to void a contract over President Trump’s tariffs.
The SEC is still going after Elon Musk. We’re seriously starting to question whether Musk or the administration even knows this is still going on.
An 18-year-old from Washington was charged with allegedly threatening to kill an FBI agent, his wife, and his child.
Prosecutors apparently will take notice when you reportedly say you’re “very small out there” and that “[prosecutors say] they never chase a case like it again since its low punishment and high work load.”
We spend way too much time every week picking the perfect song of the week. But in full disclosure, this song spoke to us so loudly that there was no other choice but to choose it. It’s the trumpet that did it for us.
A civil case against Bank of America for its purported negligence regarding Jeffrey Epstein will go on, but not without a judge dismissing four counts of its complaint. For its part, the Bank of New York Mellon got the lawsuit fully dismissed.
The FBI says a man from Wichita, Kansas, threatened on TikTok to kill ICE agents.
Some more (slightly redacted) records related to the search of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s office and home were unsealed.
A Charlotte, North Carolina, man pleaded guilty to his involvement in online chatrooms that produced and distributed disturbing videos of animals.
The owner of several defense companies was indicted on charges of bribing for U.S. military and NATO contracts.
Two friends of Court Watch went on Jon Stewart’s podcast this week.
A credit union sued its website platform, claiming it doesn’t take adequate security measures to protect against cyber attacks.
The feds accused an apparent Neo-Nazi purportedly behind the X/Twitter account “Jack PosoB*tch” of issuing threats.
HSI arressted a woman who’s been living in the U.S. for almost two decades because she allegedly lied on an I9 form to work at a sports bar chain.
A twenty-three-year-old from Missouri was indicted on cyberstalking and threat charges for an alleged string of 911 school lockdown hoaxes in 2023.
The clerk’s office for the Central District of California apparently went a week without a printer.
Rocket Mortgage was sued for allegedly colluding with Rocket Homes Real Estate.
A man was sentenced in New York to 15 years in prison for his role in an IRGC-backed murder-for-hire plot to assassinate an Iranian dissident journalist.
The feds say an account in Missouri stole proceeds from the sale of an elderly man’s home to buy high-end cars around the country.
“In this country, we don’t enforce the law by breaking the law,” says one federal judge.
The Southern Florida Muslim Federation can’t argue racial discrimination when folks protest their conference because being Muslim isn’t a race, says a federal judge.
“This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law” according to another federal judge.
Judges were cranky this week: “Granted because the Court does not have the time to continue the back and forth with the plaintiff on the issue. Counsel perhaps has overlooked that its task is not just to make a record for appeal, nor does the length of a reply brief affect its record. The task is to persuade the court to do something. A shotgun motion that raises all possible arguments is not necessarily persuasive. A lengthy reply brief filed when the Court is attempting to study the unnecessarily long motion and reply and to provide a decision on a very short timeframe is not persuasive. Whether the Court will have the time to study the entire reply brief in this context is questionable.”
“It’s not worth losing your life over,” pleaded a robber.
Luigi has fans.
Flying under the radar: American Muslims for Palestine have given a lot of documents to the Virginia Attorney General’s office.
Changing your legal name to Ryan NoF*cks is but one of a series of increasingly poor life choices.
Not sure the DOJ flacks fully appreciates legal headline terms of art vs. press release headline terms of art.
A 360,000 dollar gift is at the heart of one lawsuit against a D.C. insider.
If you’re like us and you diligently follow a random case out of Alabama, you learned that the FBI office has moved agents into immigration enforcement.
Thanks for reading. There are a lot of unknowns in life. We can’t be sure that the federal government will be open this time tomorrow. We cannot count on our nation’s capital having walkable sidewalks or feces-free rivers. But we do know one thing: Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole will help pump some clean water into at least one news desert. Upgrade now read the full story while sipping your preferred beverage this weekend.