Welcome to Court Watch #191. We've been trained over decades that a good headline and a story's compelling opening paragraph are the most important factors of whether a piece gets read. We did the former, we think that it’s a good enough one to ignore the latter.
The Docket Roundup
Let’s just start with this opinion and just get it out of the way early…A federal judge ruled that the “two coke can” size of a former NFL player’s genitals was a "legitimate public concern.”
A D.C. judge issued a preliminary injunction against DHS to prevent ICE agents from showing up at a man’s house after he sent an email to the acting director calling him a Nazi.
Two Epstein victims sued his estate.
On a related note, a woman who received $750,000 from a JPMorgan Chase victims’ fund after falsely claiming she was an Epstein victim pleaded guilty to fraud
We propose a complete and total ban on judges trying to make jokes in opinions until they vet them through experts of such things like us. (Footnote 1.)
If you want a deep dive on a Russian cryptocurrency site’s connection to underworld, there was a fascinating seizure notice filed this week.
This Pennsylvania case of an alleged ISIS supporter set off all of today’s counterterrorism alarm bells, allegedly including the defendant’s past use of a school shooter as his handle on social media, child abuse materials sent over Discord, threats to commit a mass attack, Roblox, and communications with overseas extremists. The criminal complaint in the case paints a grim picture that the FBI may have averted an imminent attack. We’d also note that he was previously in custody for a similar crime and released. This is all to say, maybe re-read our now harbinger Sunday piece.
Speaking of ISIS and Roblox, the defendant in our favorite alleged threat case out of Texas will have to stay (?) in home detention after there was confusion between the judge’s written and verbal orders.
We’re looking for more readers to fill out a quick six question reader survey. If you’re a free subscriber, you get a temporary 30 day paid subscription with access to everything behind a paywall. If you’re a paid subscriber, you get our never-ending love. Thanks to the 150 or so of you that have already done so, we’d love to get to 1,000 by the end of next week. We spent a couple hours on this free roundup, do us a solid and spend 30 seconds on the survey.
The District of Maryland federal court has decided electronics are not allowed in the building anymore. Which, for the record, is horrible and people that made that decision should feel bad about their decision.
The New York Times moved to dismiss the President’s defamation lawsuit.
A 22-year-old pleaded guilty to bombing a Santa Barbara, California, courthouse. Three people were injured in the attack, which prosecutors say was in retaliation for local law enforcement seizing the man’s firearms earlier that year.
Putting your fingers in the shape of a gun and aiming it at a Deputy Marshall in a courthouse is an easy way to spend more time in a courthouse.
It took us going through three different federal districts where the defendants were arrested, two of which had the charging documents still sealed, but we finally hit paydirt in New York to unravel an elderly scam in Texas involving gold bars, a former master chief, and a staged robbery to cut out their co-conspirators.
Mercer University is settling a lawsuit with a former hourly employee who they allegedly didn’t pay overtime.
The Sixth Circuit decided that marijuana contracts aren’t federally enforceable, even when it’s done in states that have legalized cannabis.
CNN reporter Katelyn Polantz is doing the Lord’s work.
We’ll soon see if gold bars get a senior CIA officer a golden plea deal.
In a week when dozens of local journalists were laid off, putting yet another nail in the coffin of the state of journalism in this country, it was a local public radio that brought down the chief justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court after unearthing his involvement in a payout to an ally last year.
Listen, we know it’s a tough read but we would really appreciate it if you spent some time with this piece and shared it widely. Just open it up in another tab and get to it when you can. We’d very much welcome any feedback.
An exhibit in a Maryland case gives one a window into the closing of USAID and DOGE’s purported role in it all.
The self-described largest Muslim American civil rights organization in the United States is continuing to fight a forthcoming November deadline to be declared a “domestic terrorist organization” by the state of Florida.
A Chemical company in Pennsylvania with corporate headquarters in the Netherlands was a victim of a 16 million dollar business email compromise scam, by way of a love-seeking Texan.
The Fifth Circuit had some strong opinions about M. Night Shyamalan movies (see footnote 13). To be fair, we don’t think the judiciary properly appreciated the subtle (and not-so-subtle) religious undertones about faith in Signs because it’s hard to overlook the plot hole of aliens who hate H2O choosing to invade a planet that’s 70% water.
A Virginia judge kept a man detained who prosecutors say ran a massive Snapchat hacking (at least 1,000 accounts) and sextortion operation targeting minors. Prosecutors also filed a diary exhibit suggesting he may have a history of assaulting women.
The Associated Press is taking on the federal courts’ practice of not allowing access to any habeas petitions online. If you want to get a better sense of why this matters, see our past story here. Also, fun fact and one we apparently forgot to tell our readers when we did it, we’re one of the only news organizations in America that sued (and won…twice!) to get access to a habeas docket thus inadvertently helping set some solid legal precedent for the AP’s lawsuit. Please invite us to your Christmas party, wire reporters.
If anyone wants to help redo the carpets on the fifth floor of D.C.’s Prettyman courthouse, we got you. (Hat tip to Lawfare’s Roger Parloff.)
The Justice Department announced charges against five Russian intelligence operators for an alleged murder for hire plot in the United States.
There was a major fentanyl bust in San Diego.
Two engineers at the hobbyist stock trader company Robinhood were charged in the Southern District of New York for allegedly using nonpublic information to make crypto trades.
The FTC has been secretly jamming up Twilio for years.
Bell pepper fraud is a new one even for us.
A South Carolina woman allegedly embezzled more than $6 million from an HBCU and a church saying she’ll build them a football stadium, using the money instead to live it up in Miami.
In this week’s worst of humanity, a former youth minister in Falls Church, Virginia, was indicted on child abuse charges.
The feds seem to have seized some crypto tied to IRGC oil assets.
A group of victims from the October 7th and a series of Hezbollah attacks sued Iran and North Korea.
The only defense attorney in America we’d immediately hire if the Justice Department came knocking on our door is quietly trying to re-envision what a crime of violence is in a terrorism case.
We just want to lay down a marker for New York prosecutors that it may not happen today, or tomorrow, or even four years from now, but one day we will get the details of what’s happening in this case. That’s a Court Watch guarantee.
A Colombian alleged serial killer and FARC leader was indicted for material support.
Long time readers will know how much interest this indictment in Texas of a purported Moorish sovereign citizen cell brought us. Also, props to the SDTX prosecutors who got creative on the charges. (“False Claim to Be a Foreign Diplomat - 18 U.S.C. ' 915” is a novel on)
Like most red-blooded Americans who possess discerning musical taste, we disapprove of anyone who sounds like, but is not, Brooks & Dunn as much as the next guy, so we were already primed to dislike this song, but then it hit the 42-second mark, and we were objectively jamming out. Ergo, here’s your song of the week. If that’s too high energy and randomly dancey for you, maybe we humbly suggest slowing down with this song.
A former TSA employee sued the government over claims the TSA uses a quota system with promoting senior air marshals.
As a DMV-located newsroom, we really weren’t thrilled to read that our drinking water is hanging by a thread: “DC Water has also identified at least two additional PI segments in condition equal to or worse than the segment that collapsed, including a 1,750-linear-foot segment near the confluence of Muddy Branch and the Potomac River, in close proximity to WSSC Water’s drinking water intake serving more than one million customers daily.”
There’s some intra-administrative drama brewing at William & Mary over a student’s testing accommodations. A vice dean sued the college.
Next up in the October 7th case out of Louisiana: whether the government still gets to present geofence warrants. It’s mildly crazy to us that no one else is watching this entire docket, some quite creative legal defense arguments are being pushed around.
We have lots of questions about the murder of a Siberian husky in D.C.
But in better animal news, DOJ saved a bunch of dogs in Alabama.
The government wants a judge to order that a group of FBI agents suing over their termination for kneeling during a 2020 protest can’t proceed anonymously, despite the Justice Department previously allowing them to be identified as Jane and John Does.
The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office continues to be a mess. A judge disqualified DA Larry Krasner and an attorney he appointed from a habeas case over conflicts of interest.
80 years old is apparently still not old enough to stop allegedly being a pervert (editor’s note: trigger warning on the docket, it’s a tough read).
Homeland Security Investigations say a Nigerian woman illegally voted in Massachusetts, but what really caught our eye is that the agent on the case is a former election administrator himself. And that the criminal complaint states HSI has examined Massachusetts voter rolls.
It turns out, hats in the back of backpacks aren’t great places to (allegedly) store guns, especially when you have a murder conviction.
A Charlotte, North Carolina, man was charged for allegedly mailing antisemitic letters, including to AIPAC, American Jewish Congress, a Holocaust memorial in Miami, an unnamed Secret Service protectees living in Jupiter, Florida. Shoutout to the news orgs which took our tweet and made it their exclusive.
The Justice Department’s National Security Division issued a seemingly random press release announcing that it was still going to enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, despite very few recent prosecutions under the act, several prosecutions being withdrawn, and a significant chunk of the division’s personnel leaving during the Trump administration.
The docket is sealed, but authorities in the Northern District of California appear to be working a terrorism case.
Since you made it all the way through this loaded issue, let us tell you the story of an almost brilliant scheme. According to prosecutors, a man awaiting sentencing in Missouri for a $31 million Ponzi Scheme hired a political consultant to help drum up support for a more lenient sentence. Prosecutors state the two settled on having a state politician write an op-ed arguing for leniency and, to make sure the judge saw it, they planned to purchase online ads for the piece geofenced to the judge’s house. Where did such a clever scheme go wrong? Well, court records indicate the two hatched the plan over a recorded jail call. The judge ended up sentencing him to 11 years in prison.
Thanks for reading. A final note, there won’t be a The Rabbit Hole this Sunday. We spent our week in Pittsburgh talking to survivors of terrorism attacks, victims of 764, and all manners of human sadness and noble resolve in the face of such depravity. Frankly, we’re mentally spent and we have a story in mind for The Rabbit Hole that deserves fresher eyes. We appreciate your patience.
P.S. We made the ultimate Court Watch meme for this week’s roundup. Feel free to use it gently shame news organizations that don’t cite our reporting.
