Welcome to Court Watch #164. Another week, another fancy journalism award committee passed over Court Watch. The storied George Polk Awards were given to fifteen winners, from such long-established and respectable places as the New York Times, ProPublica, and the Boston Globe. Unfortunately, Court Watch was not among the recipients of the honored award.
It could be that our tone and writing style are best appreciated by the unwashed masses and not what we assume is an elitist-three-martini-cocktail-lunch-cigar-smoke-filled crowd that makes up every journalism award committee. It could also have been that no committee member wanted to be on record confirming that a media upstart discovered a rip in the spacetime continuum. Or they didn’t want to give us credit, against all odds and sage advice of our accountants, for singlehandedly keeping an entire branch of government open. Perhaps they are just secretly Booners and didn’t take kindly to our words about Benny.
Of course, it could just be that we never actually got around to submitting an entry before the deadline because we were super tired that day. Who can really know for sure.
And while we missed every award shot we didn’t take, we can confidently say that we have honored our readers with another weekly roundup filled with scoops, scandals, and…slushies.
The Docket Roundup
The Jeffrey Epstein estate is settling with more than thirty victims for millions.
Bradley Cadenhead, the founder of the online terror ring 764, had his federal appeal for a lighter sentence denied. He was 17 years old when a Texas state judge sentenced him to 80 years in prison on child abuse related charges.
The Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Assets Control announced a $1.7 million settlement with Florida high school IMG Academy for accepting tuition payments from two individuals sanctioned for their ties to Mexican cartels.
Attorneys representing a Congolese woman filed a complaint while she was mid-deportation flight to an African nation, arguing that her life was in danger after fleeing from abusers in her home country and that authorities had failed to notify her she would be moved. A judge denied their request for an emergency order to prevent her transfer, citing the attorneys’ lack of specific facts about which African country she was being deported to.
Victims of the 2015 Paris Bataclan attack sued a French cement company in New York for purportedly bribing ISIS to operate a cement plant in Syria.
Matt Taibbi, lover of errant blank pages in congressional testimony, champion of free speech in some online circles, and <checks notes> repeated filer of lawsuits against politicians and journalists for their speech, is up against a motion to dismiss. To be fair, Taibbi addressed the apparent dichotomy of actions and beliefs in this piece for Bari Weiss’ outlet.
The ATF charged a Georgia man for theft of government property after he allegedly robbed an informant of money that the ATF had given them to buy a gun.
Bad Bunny helped us crack some major national security news.
Some don’t get our love for court records. Which is fair. For everyone else, we give you this magnificent opening paragraph of a judge’s order: “What’s in a name? If we called a wing by any other name, would it smell as sweet? The plaintiff, Aimen Halim, says no. The defendant, Buffalo Wild Wings (‘BWW’), sells a product it calls ‘boneless wings,’ which are essentially chicken nuggets: pieces of chicken breast meat, deepfried and tossed in whatever sauce or dry seasoning the customer wants. Halim, apparently, found this confusing. He claims that he thought boneless wings were real chicken wings with the bones removed. He says BWW’s product should be called something different, something like ‘chicken poppers.’ Halim sued BWW over his confusion, but his complaint has no meat on its bones.”
The Justice Department announced a superseding indictment against 27 alleged members of a Tren de Aragua splinter group on racketeering conspiracy and murder in aid of racketeering charges.
There’s a new federal fraud case out of Minnesota.
The SEC’s civil suit against Elon Musk (yes, that’s still a thing) is getting interesting.
We’re really curious about what the talk between Nicolas Maduro and an official from the Venezuelan consulate was like.
The folks behind ‘www.trump.ai’ are said to have not paid their bills.
In this week’s worst of humanity, we have a group chat (paragraph 41 in the complaint) where individuals are teasing their friend for being a pedophile while he allegedly traveled out of the Mall of America to meet with an underage victim.
Vietnam Veterans are suing over the Trump Administration's proposed creation of a monumental arch in D.C.
Judges are growing more bewildered by ICE’s and DHS’s actions in court. This week’s edition began with a quote from the Federalist Papers and ends with a ruling that is sure to be overruled on appeal.
The George Mason freshman accused of plotting a mass casualty-style attack on the Israeli consulate in New York was charged in a superseding indictment with material support to ISIS.
Please don’t kick flight attendants.
Secret Service says a man who identified himself as Jesus and “the king” threatened to kill President Trump because of information from the Epstein files.
The Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division showed off its favorite tree. We’re very much here for this type of press shop energy. Keep it coming.
Throw our song of the week on in the background, as you finish the rest of this newsletter. You wouldn’t think so on first blush, but we’ll guarantee you’ll hit repeat.
There’s a shareholder suit against a solar energy company for a drop in market prices amidst changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Sorry fashionistas, Crocs are making a comeback.
A defendant in a securities fraud case in New York reportedly used Anthropic’s Claude to ask the AI model for legal advice and to outline his defense strategy, which led to the question of whether interactions with AI agents are protected by attorney client privilege. Judge Jed Rakoff, for his part, said no.
We were pretty sure this was a pro se case until the signature block. On a somewhat related note, one of the plaintiffs apparently lists one of his job experiences on LinkedIn as “toured my ass off” as a keyboard player for two years.
One civil case from Pennsylvania seeks to answer every lawyer’s most existential question of how much billing is too much billing.
SDNY prosecutors would like a reporter to let them know what he intends to report on so they can turn around redactions quicker. Here’s our immediate reaction to the request.
Worth a read but probably not over lunch: A judge in Ohio rejected a plea deal with a man who allegedly participated in an online animal crushing ring, writing that the seven-year prison sentence was too lenient.
Shark Tank’s Kevin O'Leary won almost $3 million from a crypto influencer.
You’d have to read the Justice Department Inspector General’s one-paragraph press release to learn that an FBI agent lied about losing his gun, because despite our inquiries to the press shop and the clerk’s office, it does not appear that the criminal case is on PACER.
Federal law enforcement in Minnesota finally found a set of masks they didn’t like.
At the start of the Lenten season, a federal judge laments the sin of indolence writing about a previously detained individual’s attempt to get back her passport: “Likewise, the suggestion that she embark on a lengthy FOIA process when no one who was responsible for Petitioner’s property while she was in custody even attempted to look for the passport just rewards laziness.”
Keeping with the theme of the intersection of judiciary and religion, a Massachusetts federal judge channels Proverbs to order authorities to bring back to America a woman who was deported overseas.
The city of Dayton, Ohio, would like clean water, please.
Speaking of which, has anyone checked what’s in the water in the Western District of Louisiana?
We assumed this was gonna be a normal YouTuber defamation case, but it really kicked into high gear starting on paragraph 6.
If you’re like us, you track every aspect of legal cases involving slushies. Our thanks to a Court Watch subscriber for spotting this judge’s order that takes a team of lawyers and a slushie company to task for using a forged document to advance a legal argument.
We have readers from both political perspectives, so let’s write a sentence geared to each. Option 1: A U.S. Attorney’s Office violated court orders 52 times, which is an unprecedented number over the history of that office. Option 2: Upon review of more than 500 immigration cases, the U.S. Attorney’s office found that it followed the law the vast majority of the time.
Only one of those options is the right framing for the story.
Popular opinion (maybe even ours): This is a dumb ruling, and the judge should be ashamed to issue it. Meanwhile, the federal court district of Rhode Island has a streaming YouTube channel for high-profile court proceedings, and somehow the world hasn’t ended.
To reinforce how untenable the no-streaming-for-federal-court-proceedings thing is, we humbly present you with a half-baked opportunity to watch the first Antifa material support terrorism trial happening this week. Normally, you’d do it at the actual courthouse where it’s being held, but nah, Judge Mark Pittman says you gotta go to another federal courthouse thirty two miles away to watch it on a screen because of spacing issues. Also, the judge, who wears a robe every day for a living, would like you not to wear something he deems untoward at court. Finally, and probably most egregiously, the exhibits introduced into evidence at a public trial won’t be available to the public. What fresh hell is this entire order, NDTX. We are reliably informed Chief Justice Roberts has been known to read Court Watch from time to time…if you see this, John, please get your guy in line.
Thanks for reading. This Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole takes us back to simpler times of the 1980s with a healthy mix of court record storytelling involving money laundering, synthetic pop, and marijuana.