Court Watch #29: Who Got Congressman Santos Outta Jail?

Parler gets sued by Jan 6er, DOJ returns millions, The elderly are falsely told they have cancer as part of a kickback scam, & PGA employee is tee'd off. Plus: Court Watch is Hiring.

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

Welcome to Court Watch #29. It’s been more than six months since we launched this newsletter. What started as a labor of love has grown to one of the more read reporting substacks on this site. That’s a testament to you all. We took your feedback and tips and tried our best to adjust to make a weekly piece that you’d want to read. The benefits of a substack platform is that we can dive into the analytics related to it. Here’s the biggest take away: you all appreciate original reporting. Our highest engagement piece was our exclusive reporting about a church that allegedly abused the G.I. bill to dope unsuspecting military members into paying for subpar education. That was followed closely by our reporting on a 90 million dollar diamond heist. You value reading pieces that you can only read here. We think we can marry our two loves, local reporting and original reporting. So today, Court Watch is announcing a new initiative. We’re expanding our universe of federal court coverage to something more than a weekly newsletter. We think there’s an appetite for it, we hope you’ll prove us right. 

Long time readers will recognize a recurring theme, we care deeply about federal court reporting. And quite frankly, we don’t think there’s enough of it. We also believe that there are plenty of unreported local stories that have national importance. So Court Watch seeks to change that. Starting today, we are happy to announce that Court Watch will commission freelance pieces from reporters on the topic of federal court proceedings. If that’s you, drop us a note. If you’re a national reporter who has a story that perhaps you knew was a story but your grumpy editor passed, we would be interested. Maybe you’re a local reporter who saw something on the dockets that you think deserves more than a quick hit piece. Or you're one of the far-too-many reporters who was let go recently due to media cuts, use us as an opportunity to continue reporting until you find your next gig. Pitch us. (For more information and rates, see here.)

This evolution of our newsletter is only possible because of the paid subscribers who have made a commitment to our work. More than 3,900 people subscribe to get our newsletter once a week in their inbox and thousands others come directly to our site. 106 of those email subscribers have made the jump to paid subscriptions. It’s not enough to make this sustainable in the long run (especially with PACER fees being astronomical), but it’s enough to take a chance on expansion and test the experiment that if you give readers something unique, they’ll support it financially. 

So if you’ve been on the fence, consider a monthly subscription. If you're a reporter with a story, we want to be your outlet. 

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. In this week’s dockets: it helps to make the criminal case of bomb threats when you leave a bomb threat message on the FBI voicemail system, the New York Times wants to know who let a Congressman out, the Justice Department is pro-type writer, and a guy in a fake lab coat convinced the elderly they may have had cancer in order to sell cancer genetic tests. That’s just a touch of what happened in an eclectic docket week. 

• White Flag: DOJ has returned the money it seized in its civil/criminal/who-really-knows-at-this-point, Amazon real estate investigation. For background on the case, see our early January newsletter. You may recall the infamous email between prosecutors and Amazon’s outside counsel where the DOJ admitted, and we quote, “we probably seized the money too early.” By our back-of-the-napkin count, DOJ seized 7 million dollars related to the Amazon real estate investigation and has returned all but $200,000. None of the individuals who had money seized have been charged criminally. 

• Tell us: The New York Times is suing to get the name of the individual who posted bail for Congressman George Santos. According to the filing, the Times believes (and so do we), that the court did not follow proper procedure on allowing public access to the court documents.

• Open, Shut: The Michigan man who allegedly called the FBI to tell them he planted a bomb has been indicted for making bomb threats.

• Well, ok then: January 6th defendant, Troy Smocks, who was sentenced to 14 months for making threats on Parler is suing <checks notes>…Parler for shutting down his account. 

• Not ok: A Louisiana man has pleaded guilty to defrauding Medicare. According to plea documents, Mark Kuehn and his co-conspirators wore lab coats outside of stores and convinced the elderly that they may have cancer, thus that they needed to get a cancer screening. There were kickbacks and bribes involved.

• No honor among thieves: A member of an online group, “The Comm” which allegedly ‘swats’ people for money, was charged with targeting a fellow member.

• War Dogs 2: A Pennsylvania man was convicted for torturing a person at a Kurdish military base and illegally exporting weapons.

• Old School: The Justice Department says CIA leaker Joshua Schulte should stick to using his court-ordered typewriter and stop asking for a computer. 

• Fast and Furious: A former employee of a luxury car brand has detailed very interesting allegations in his lawsuit against De Tomaso.

• Kazaam: Shaq is getting sued again about cryptocurrency. Thus starts a new game of cat and mouse over serving him again.

• Permit: The Southern Utah Drag Stars is suing the city of St. George, Utah for denying a permit for an event.

• Fore: A PGA employee is suing the golf organization for allegedly making his religious exemption request related to  the COVID vaccine burdensome. 

Thanks for reading. We hope you have a relaxing and somber Memorial Day. In honor of the day, if you read nothing else, we hope you’ll read this piece: ‘Ghosts of War in a Wisconsin Forest’. It’s truly one of the best pieces of writing in years and we find ourselves re-reading it frequently. 

P.S. A friendly reminder, that prosecutors tend to hide the ball on interesting court filings the day before a long federal holiday. We’ll be watching and will report back anything we see next week.