Court Watch #113: Trolling for A Federal Charge?

Welcome to Court Watch #113. We’ll get to our weekly docket roundup shortly but first, a quick observation. As a general rule, it’s never good when the FBI comes to your house to ask about your TikTok account. We don’t even like it when our friends ask us about our burner TikTok account we use to figure out how to open a door. We are, of course, kidding, we don’t have a TikTok account. As journalists, we have a visceral reaction to anything that makes us pivot to video. But Apple gave in last night, so maybe we should too?

However, the FBI also holds similar views to our concern about the pivot but for admittedly different reasons. This all somehow brings us to a man in the Grand Canyon State who maybe should have pivoted to silence. 

Trolling for Charges

Timothy McGill of Phoenix, Arizona, was arrested by agents with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force for allegedly making threats against President Trump and his supporters while streaming live on TikTok. The charges, arrest, and docket have not been previously reported on. 

According to charging documents, a week before the November 2024 Election, the FBI said it was tipped off that TikTok user “timinaz74” had recorded himself on a live stream stating that “he was going to kill as many people as possible when he blows up a trump rally.” A transcript of the livestream included in the filing reportedly quoted the TikTok user: “You got a problem with me being married to a man? Hm?” and “I can’t wait till all you maggots die… We’re going to f###### take you out. Next f###### rally boom.”

At the time, the Trump campaign was set to host a rally in nearby Glendale, Arizona, two days later. 

Agents with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force met with McGill outside his house that same day, where McGill told the agents that he was just a “troll,” according to court records. He reportedly said that he had created at least twenty accounts to go live and “troll MAGA” on TikTok.

As his wife purportedly tried to reassure the agents that he was “all talk,” McGill reportedly promised them that he didn’t own any guns. When an agent replied that not owning guns was not a valid defense and asked what “next rally boom” meant, McGill allegedly said, “It means next rally boom, I can say whatever… I want.” 

The complaint states that the interview then devolved into an argument over the First Amendment and that McGill said he would “say stuff to get people to call the FBI because people are dumb and afraid.” When agents asked if this was reckless or threatening, McGill allegedly said, “not with words, no, the words are to troll” and “the fact the FBI was interviewing him meant that he had won.” The agents left his house shortly thereafter without making an arrest.

Exactly three months later, on January 29th, the FBI said it received two more tips about a TikTok user named “mothmanxog” and “ismoke&iknowthings2.5” going on livestreams to threaten “MAGA.” The TikTok was reportedly linked to a Facebook account of a “Tim Mac” from Arizona with a profile picture resembling McGill and a status showing him as being married to a woman with his wife’s same name. The man recording as “ismoke&iknowthings2.5” allegedly said, “I can’t wait to kill all MAGAs” and “I can’t wait to kill all MAGA kids.” He then reportedly asked whether someone was recording and if they would “send it to ‘his’ agents.”

A preliminary review of cases by NICTE and Chapman University reveals that McGill is the third person arrested federally for threatening President Trump since his inauguration in January. 

According to the complaint, when someone watching the livestream asked whether McGill actually planned on killing anyone, he allegedly said, “Absolutely, absolutely I am planning on it. I am planning on killing every single MAGA voter in the country” and that the people watching the livestream were “not going to get anything specific out of me because I told you, I already know what to say.” He also allegedly wrote in the comments, “just stocked up on ammo,” “its maga hunting time,” and “can’t wait to add more maga heads to my wall.”

The FBI arrested McGill a week later. A federal defender assigned to him did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did the U.S. Attorney’s office of Arizona, which is prosecuting the case. Prosecutors did not seek detention pending trial, and McGill was released with restrictions on the use of electronics. 

And with that, let’s pivot from video to the dockets. 

The Docket Roundup

• An Alaskan man who charges 20,000 dollars to be a hunting guide is being sued in federal court over whether the hunts will ever actually occur. 

• A bunch of news organizations have a new lawsuit against a 5 Billion Dollar AI company.

• Sega says a company is abusing the arbitration process. Which may be the first time a multibillion-dollar company is against arbitration. 

• Listen folks, we don’t ask you to read a lot of stories. But read this one. It took a lot of reporters a lot of time to get the data and the story right. Check out the piece and make sure to play around with the interactive data in there. 

• 118,000 of you have checked out of the litigation tracker that we launched last week, which is the most read single story in our history. It’s exhausting to keep up but we serve at the pleasure of our subscribers. 

• Two fans are demanding that the NFL join BlueSky. We’re simply demanding the Commanders get a healthy O-line. 

• The guy at Main Justice who we have a professional jealousy about his mustache game has reportedly resigned out of protest for the Mayor Adams case dropping decision. We’d note that Mr. Keller would traditionally run point at Main Justice on cases involving threats to public officials, including the one that was our newsletters’ opening lede. 

• Last May, we reported on a lawsuit involving billionaires and the creation of a self-described ‘anti-woke” financial bank. Late last Friday, the other side filed their own court document with almost too much drama for a filing that starts with a bible verse. (editor’s note: We were pitched this complaint by a public relations shop which rightly thought we’d be interested. Upon reflection, we don’t know how to feel about becoming a large enough place that PR shops think we warrant a pitch.)

• A New York woman who has had run-ins with the NYPD in the past is suing a local NBC News affiliate for allegedly stealing her video of the Proud Boys entering a subway.

• A prominent defense firm in Charleston had a hundred thousand dollars stolen in a ransomware attack. The feds put aside their differences to help get the money back.

• AI hallucinations strike again with nine fake cases in a motion and confusing state and federal jurisdiction in Wyoming. It was enough that a Mr. Morgan of Morgan and Morgan law firm became the lead attorney and filed a hat-in-hand motion stating, “This matter comes with great embarrassment and has prompted discussion and action regarding the training, implementation, and future use of artificial intelligence within our firm. This serves as a cautionary tale for our firm and all firms, as we enter this new age of artificial intelligence.” 404 Media and Court Watch have the write-up here. Since our reporting, Morgan and Morgan lawyers have now filed an apology to the court and added a “check box” before filing using AI.

• In what is a first for the online platform, someone was arrested for threatening to kill students on BlueSky. Thus proving a truism, all social media is horrible and we should all just become luddites.

• A sanctioned Russian oligarch is suing the State Department to tell him why he’s not allowed in the U.S. We have some guesses.

• A former cameraman for The Hill says he was fired after taking time off for a hip surgery.

• The FBI says a man had three million dollars worth of crypto stolen by one of his daughter’s best friends while he was at basketball practice.

• In a relative rarity for domestic extremism cases, the Justice Department secured a terrorism enhancement for the pending sentencing of a 764 member. The online accelerationist cult has been the focus of prosecutors around the country in recent months. 

• “All officers and agents in your resident office will be killed within the next 30 minutes. Have a good day”, an Oregon man allegedly told the FBI which resulted in a local Bureau office closing temporarily.

• A man in South Carolina admitted to running a Ponzi scheme to pay female social media content creators and to cyberstalking. Prosecutors said he harassed two of the content creators after they tried to cut off contact with him and threatened that he was a sniper that the police could not save them from. Police arrested him after he showed up and tried to force his way into one woman’s home.

• We have a lot of questions about this sealed docket. 

• A reader claims the publisher of the Columbus Dispatch is cutting off their subscription early, making them lose out on $20. Meanwhile, you still haven’t upgraded to a paid subscription for Court Watch so won’t have legal standing to sue us when we quit reporting early to open a small beach bar selling cocktails called PACEuRself. For Shame. 

• The Justice Department seized a private jet purportedly used by Venezuela’s state-owned oil company. It’s the second jet that the DOJ seized from Venezuela after its pilots flew to the Dominican Republic in the last year.

• A man from Lichtenstein wants to stop being sanctioned by the Treasury Department.

• Three men were arrested for allegedly impersonating Border Patrol agents while smuggling people into Arizona in their own Border Patrol uniforms and marked-truck.

• The feds want the law office of a DUI defense lawyer accused of bribing local and state police officers in New Mexico to not show up to court for cases with his clients.

• President Trump’s attorneys filed a new amended complaint against CBS for its 60 Minutes segment with then-Vice President Harris.

• A photographer is suing Ozzy Osbourne for purportedly posting his picture on Instagram and Twitter.

• The search warrant for the residence of a woman who reportedly turned herself in before entering the Capitol’s visitor center with a knife and two mini-bottle Molotov cocktails was unsealed. Feds say they found writings that referenced her displeasure with President Trump’s transgender executive order.

• HSI reportedly figured out who was behind some of those spam phishing texts. Stick around for the picture on page 5 of the warrant.

• A search warrant was unsealed in the case of a man who was arrested in Virginia for purportedly possessing a destructive device. Law enforcement said they believed the man also posted antisemitic threats and encouraged attacks on law enforcement on the alt-right website Gab. Side note, the case was one of the justifications for an FBI analytical product that looked at “radical-traditionalist” Catholics. 

• Three men were indicted for allegedly attempting to smuggle millions of dollars worth of aircraft parts to Russia.

• A former finance director for Habitat for Humanity was sentenced to two years for stealing over half a million dollars from the nonprofit. 

• Last year, the value of Bitcoin shot up by more than a thousand dollars when the SEC Commissioner tweeted out that the SEC had approved it as an exchange-traded fund, creating a moment of what we imagine was vindication for the tumultuous crypto community. The only problem was that it was actually tweeted by a twenty-four-year-old from Athens, Alabama, who pleaded guilty this week to hacking the Commissioner’s account. Bitcoin’s value ended up dropping two thousand dollars, though the SEC did approve it as a fund later that same month. 

• Two Russian men were arrested for allegedly being behind the Phobos ransomware hack, which targeted over a thousand entities and stole more than $16 million. 

• A Canadian man is suing over a venture he invested $1.25 million in that reportedly represented itself as a “wealth training program purportedly designed to teach the heirs of ultra-high net worth individuals how to manage and invest their families’ fortunes.” There’s some irony here, somewhere.

• The California eighteen-year-old who made almost four hundred swatting and false threat reports, including to schools, religious institutions, and colleges across the country, was sentenced to four years in federal prison. 

• The SCOTUSblog founder (allegedly) showed us once again that no good comes from crypto.

• A woman is suing the city of Palm Bay, Florida after she claims she was arrested and detained for three days when she tried to fly to Europe for the first time and she had an outstanding warrant for a stolen U-Haul that was actually stolen by the same people who stole her driver’s license.

• Eleven people were indicted in Arizona for an alleged $200k+ Nike shoe train heist.

Thanks for reading. Please don’t make us write a compelling kicker. This is it. Rejoice in the simplicity of it all and just enjoy your long weekend.

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