Welcome to Court Watch #180. The most consistent thing about being a small news organization is that we will, on a semi-regular basis, discover a court filing before a plaintiff or the government is ready for its national media rollout. Being the old-school reporters that we are, we’ll ask for a comment and provide more than sufficient time to decide whether they want to offer a remark for the forthcoming story. And inevitably, they’ll completely ghost us in favor of larger media outlets and push out a hastily written press release before we publish.
It’s a rinse and repeat type of thing. But as Detective Bunk reminds us, a man must have a code. Ours, it turns out, may ultimately amount to something like ‘they did not immediately respond to a request for comment.’ This is all to say, expect us to break a lot of news in the coming weeks.
But before we take a flamethrower to everything taught in J-School 101, let’s take a moment to see what the federal courts brought us this week.
The Docket Roundup
We picked up forty new subscribers from this story entitled ‘Federal court newsletter sparks Wisconsin Watch sextortion story’. Which means there’s at least one reporter who will never be on our shame list. In honor of all the new Cheeseheads who joined us this week, we went fishing in your state’s federal dockets. Here's a denaturalization docket that no one noticed yet. That makes 44 such cases around the country in the last 60 days.
One of the largest Muslim American charities says it’s facing an “existential threat” to its existence if it continues to be associated with its overseas chapter.
NOTUS and the Washington Star have settled their beef over who owns the Star as a newspaper name. We’re putting all parties on notice that Court Watch is taken.
A federal judge denied a pro-se motion to recuse herself from the anti-weaponization fund lawsuit, finding that “the fact that this Court sat on a Fourth Circuit judicial panel by designation with Judge Luttig over twenty years ago is far-fetched.”
The Chicago Mercantile thinks the CFTC carveout for Kalshi and Coinbase is a losing bet.
We’ve written extensively about a Texas man accused of threatening a Christian rock concert in the name of ISIS. In an exhibit asking for his home detention to be lifted, we get a window into what life looks like awaiting a terrorism trial.
Michael Wolff took his drama with First Lady Melania Trump to the Second Circuit.
The Atlanta judge who had an affair in her chambers with a high-ranking city police official granted the Department of Justice’s motion to recuse herself from an election case.
Good news for people who hate sunlight. Local journalism is still dying. Shoutout to the major journalism foundations that can’t wrap their head around funding the type of reporting that attempts to fix it.
A New Jersey developer is accused of bribing Newark public employees and creating IDs with Homeland Security insignias on them.
A former contractor at an undisclosed intelligence agency pleaded guilty to accepting roughly $500,000 in kickbacks to help steer government contracts.
CBS News and Paramount were sued by a former employee for discrimination.
Here’s the order that let the UFC fight at the White House go ahead. It didn’t mention anything about fireworks at 1:30 AM, but whatever.
A 25-year-old man was charged with a federal hate crime for alleged attacks on a synagogue and a Jewish Community Center in Albuquerque.
Well, folks, it’s official. The court case that will decide the future of the written English language: Shakespeare v. Anthropic.
A sailor pleaded guilty to helping run an oil tanker in Iran’s shadow fleet.
Google wants to use RICO to go after phishing scams.
The feds pulled down two deepfake websites, using the Take It Down Act.
A North Carolina man, who apparently hated the name Operation Epic Fury so much that he threatened President Trump, decided to make it easy on the Secret Service by listing his full name and date of birth.
It’s way too wonky for anyone to notice or write it up (editor’s note: we assume that’s the point...), but Google is playing lawyerly games about having to pay for people to monitor its anti-trust settlement requirements.
Look, if you’re going to (allegedly) fly with a ton of drugs, don’t also fly with the cash.
Speaking of drugs, we humbly suggest coming up with a hipper name than “daddybiden.”
If you want to start your weekend disappointed in society, there are details about a dogfighting case. The defendant is set to plead guilty soon.
Your weekly reminder that the line between real and fake crypto is sometimes vanishingly thin.
An IT consultant allegedly tried to blackmail his company.
On a slightly related note, your pro se of the week is from Alaska, suing Sabrina Carpenter, and boldly begins with, “The plaintiff is certainly a brighter legal eagle than anybody on Cable News Network (CNN).”
A 26-year-old member of the online terror ring 764 pleaded guilty to possessing and distributing child abuse materials.
In case you need a weirdly upbeat tune about infidelity, here’s our song of the week. Give it till at least the 1:45 mark to gain steam.
We regret to report that even astronauts are receiving threats in this increasingly polarized environment.
Two Florida men were charged for allegedly selling counterfeit Ozempic.
A former federal employee with the inspector general’s office said she was retaliated against after claiming that the Health and Human Services placed unaccompanied minors with “MS-13-affiliated sponsors.” She says she had a whistleblower agreement with the current administration that they pulled back on.
Despite the president’s lawyers’ repeated attempts, MAGA Burger will not go quietly into the night.
In this week’s worst of humanity, a former director of an orphanage in Nepal was indicted in North Carolina for inappropriate conduct toward a minor outside the U.S.
There’s a wild ride from an Oregon man who identifies himself as “Trump Genius.”
A pro se litigant is upset that the FBI won’t respond to his FOIAs about bank robberies.
Prosecutors are trying to convict an ‘innocent’ man.
Trump administration lawyers successfully got a lawsuit dismissed by a former FBI analyst who said she lost her security clearance for supporting Trump.
Apparently, TikTok, bad breakups, and the Postal Service don’t go well together.
Matt Taibbi really doesn’t want to pay a reporter’s attorney fees for a lawsuit that may or may not be absolute garbage.
Let’s end the issue with a copyright case invoking the Fear of God.
Thanks for reading. A final note: last week’s The Rabbit Hole was all about access, or lack thereof, to the U.S. Court system. Our Sunday stories are typically behind a paywall, reflecting the time, effort, and resources involved in choosing a single federal court docket, filing, or topic, and diving deep into the details. But last week, we tried something different. We noted, “We’re going to try a social experiment of whether people are inherently decent human beings…We can only continue Court Watch with the paid supporters, but we genuinely hate the concept of paywalling the news. If ten readers become paid subscribers today, we can make next week’s The Rabbit Hole free too.”
We’re happy to welcome 16 new paid subscribers this week as a result. And even more happy to welcome our renewed belief in the human condition. If we get at least four more new paid supporters today, we’ll make the next two weeks of The Rabbit Hole paywall-free. Join the more than 650 (!) supporters who believe in this reporting project. Make the leap to supporting our independent journalism here. If you’re already a paid subscriber but inflation hasn’t absolutely destroyed you, you can always avail yourself of our tip jar.