Welcome to Court Watch #188. And welcome to the hundreds of new subscribers who joined us this week when our friends at 404 Media republished our recent story about a team of volunteers doing yeoman’s work for the public’s right to access public records Our new readers’ first experience with our publication was receiving a 3,000 word tome about nihilism and murdered children in your inbox. We admit that’s a jarring introduction to Court Watch. Though we can’t promise our future coverage will always be rainbows and sunshine, we’ll endeavor to lighten the mood ever-so-slightly in today’s roundup of the most fascinating court filings from the last seven days.
In the federal courts this week, we’re sure there must be an innocent reason for why a Chinese national was really interested in American military planes, there’s a settlement brewing for the FBI Director’s girlfriend, and a cat with a couch can continue to troll our elected officials, just not with an injunction.
Plus, an appeals court finds that if you use AI, you’re still a creep but not necessarily an illegal creep.
The Docket Roundup
A month after the World Cup, the real futból match is going down in New York, featuring the new owner of the Los Angeles Lakers: Joshua Kushner.
We have questions about this Chinese student attending university in Canada and his questions about Trump Tower.
One Colorado man decided to go big or go home with his impersonations to get out of a criminal charge, allegedly signing letters to the court as Chief Justice John Roberts.
A judge dismissed an effort by DOGEd federal temporary employees to have the special counsel’s office investigate their cases.
It’s interesting how much things can change in 32 days. In July, a criminal complaint filed by the FBI accused Mohammad Hasna of posting support of Hamas online and helping provide food supplies and cash to Hamas for the last few years. All while working for U.K. based charity, Al-Khair Foundation. Interesting but also a relatively standard terror financing case. This week, an indictment was handed down that greatly expands the accusations. In it, prosecutors allege Hasna has been a military member of Hamas since 2003, holding positions in al-Qassam Gaza Brigade such as a platoon commander and brigade trainer. The feds say over twenty years Hasna rose to the rank of deputy company leader for the designated terrorist organization. Here’s the most interesting part, if you compare the employment record outlined in the complaint to the activities alleged in the indictment, you quickly realize that during part of the time Hasna is accused of being intimately involved in Hamas’ military wing, he was also the Gaza coordination office director at the Humanitarian Affairs Department of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC). We reached out to the OIC, the ‘second-largest intergovernmental organization, after the UN,’ on Thursday evening for a comment. We have not heard back yet.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that child abuse materials generated using AI within the home are constitutionally protected under binding First Amendment precedent. If you’re surprised, we wrote about it for the Rabbit Hole in March.
FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, might settle with a defendant in a defamation case.
Anthropic mostly won its initial case against the Defense Department.
Fired Stars and Stripes reporters are suing to get their jobs back.
Flying under the radar: An alleged member of the online terror network the Com was arrested after reportedly swatting a victim’s house more than 20 times since 2023, paying someone to throw a brick through her window, and hiring two others to fire bomb her brother’s car.
The Justice Department dodged catastrophe in the Abbey Gate case out of the Eastern District of Virginia.
A similar looking fake Coinbase website helped scammers steal millions.
Not to be outdone by our Alien Terrorist Removal court scoop, our colleague Ben Penn found his own secret old court.
The feds say “courthouse arrests are thus essential for operational effectiveness, officer safety, and protecting the community” in a new case against an Ohio municipal court.
For our song of the week, we picked a tune with only a few hundred views. And because you deserve it, here’s another song of the week if the first one wasn’t your vibe. Stick around till at least the one-minute mark.
A Maine judge didn’t go along with the ACLU’s attempt to obtain a preliminary injunction for a woman who runs a cat influencer/JD Vance trolling page and reportedly keeps getting kicked out of Vice President events. We highlighted the case in a Rabbit Hole last month.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s habeas petition was denied, likely exhausting her judicial avenues to appeal.
A Tennessee man was charged with threatening dismemberment and sexual assault against a victim.
A Washington man, whom prosecutors said his desire for child abuse “will not simply disappear; it will have to be managed,” was sentenced to 150 months in federal prison.
We have questions about this combined drug trafficking and material support to foreign terrorism case.
The Justice Department is going after an Albany deli for allegedly stealing folks’ SNAP benefits. The Google reviews called it. (editor’s note: at an initial hearing, the feds hinted at a national security angle in this case)
A 29-year-old former IT specialist at the Defense Intelligence Agency pleaded guilty to trying to share classified information with a foreign government.
Your all-too-frequent reminder not to ever allegedly call witnesses and threaten them if you’re under investigation.
Also, while we’re at it, please don’t expose yourself on a naval installation. Don’t expose yourself anywhere, but definitely not next to a destroyer.
The feds pulled down two hacking platforms, announcing that they had been used in Chinese state-sponsored hacks of U.S. critical infrastructure. Now, all we have to do is figure out how to get it out of our critical infrastructure.
(whispers) It’s curious that EDNY prosecutors brought an indictment in a hacking case that’s gone completely quiet for the past four years.
The attorneys of an alleged commander of an Iran-backed Iraqi militia, who is facing terrorism charges in the Southern District of New York, filed a motion arguing that he is a prisoner of war covered under the Geneva Convention.
There’s an interesting elections case over recounts in Portland, Oregon.
A Maryland judge ordered the Trump administration to arrange for the return of a man whom it had removed from the country three times despite an immigration judge finding that he was likely to be tortured if returned to Mexico.
A pro se plaintiff says the FBI hasn’t paid them for being an informant.
The FBI says a Florida man kept calling the NAACP with racist threats, resulting in the civil rights organization evacuating their offices.
The Justice Department couldn’t convince a Trump-appointed judge to dismiss Steve Bannon’s convictions for congressional contempt.
Federal defenders and prosecutors are quibbling over the defendant’s release conditions in the ISIS Roblox threat case.
The Justice Department is resisting turning over records about the weaponization fund that they say “has never existed and will not exist.”
This threat case, which ended in a deferred prosecution agreement, got a little territorial over Boston neighborhoods (no, it didn’t have to do with Southie).
We got a PowerPoint preview of an FBI cell phone expert’s testimony in the trial of a purported October 7th terrorist out of Louisiana.
On a related note, there’s an interesting order from a Florida judge about doxxing and social media comments after the October 7th attacks.
Lots of talk about Canada this week, but not a whole lot about its antitrust authorities trying to subpoena American tech executives.
Thanks for reading. For Sunday’s The Rabbit Hole, we’ll be diving into one federal judge’s decision to not take (legally) seriously a threat to his colleague.
