Court Watch #97: Introducing & Then Canceling Our New Podcast

By Peter Beck and Seamus Hughes

Welcome to Court Watch #97. This week, we highlight some court cases involving a purportedly stolen Defense Department drone, orgasmic meditation, World Series rings, a January 6th former FBI agent, an intercepted dump truck of weed at the border, Iranian government assassins, and one federal judge in Wisconsin carrying our collective water for transparency in the courts. But that’s just a small sampling of this week’s roundup. Also, make sure to stick around to the end of this newsletter where we close the circle on this issue’s headline and ensure you have yet another good reason to become a Luddite.

But first, let’s talk about thousands of illegal guns. 

The AK Guru

A man reportedly known as the “AK Guru” was arrested this week after federal agents with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force searched his property in rural North Carolina and recovered dozens of machine guns and homemade suppressors. The FBI says Eric Carter Jr. “made and sold hundreds of machineguns to date” by modifying legal firearms and piecing other parts together to create fully functioning and illicit machineguns.

According to a criminal complaint, the FBI used a confidential informant and another defendant, who agreed to cooperate with law enforcement, to learn more about Carter’s operation to manufacture hundreds of machine guns and suppression devices. Carter reportedly taught the cooperating defendant how to manufacture machine guns and would often have “hundreds of fully automatic machine guns” stored inside his workshop. 

Altogether, the cooperating defendant estimated Carter had sold at least a thousand automatic AK-47 rifles to “different groups” in the Carolinas. The criminal complaint alleges that some customers identified as from the “mountains” bought multiple AK-47s from Carter every week.

The cooperating defendant also told agents that Carter is “well connected and has sold machineguns to multiple prominent local individuals” and “has connections around the world” who “smuggle firearms from Europe” into the U.S., charging documents allege.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of North Carolina, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment on the case outside of what was filed publicly in the docket. A public affairs officer with the FBI’s Charlotte office held the same position when asked for comment. A lawyer for Carter’s lawyer did not respond to a Court Watch inquiry. On Thursday, a judge ruled that Carter should be detained pending trial. 

The Docket Roundup

• “In the end, my proposal is a modest one. I simply ask that the rules be amended to permit courts to use technology that was already purchased during the pandemic to handle pretrial hearings as we did during the pandemic with the defendant’s consent,” says Federal Judge Brett Ludwig to the U.S. Courts Advisory Board asking that they consider allowing virtual hearings. They declined citing, in part, a pre-COVID era finding that, “members stressed the crucial importance of the judge addressing the defendant face-to-face, which gives the judge the opportunity to read subtle cues”

• A woman accused of running a ‘wellness education company’ that allegedly groomed and abused victims has retained a defense expert to discuss “Orgasmic Meditation” at trial. 

• A Florida man was charged on Monday with threatening an election official. He still has pending charges from a few years back involving threats to other victims for their political beliefs.

• A Defense Department employee pleaded guilty to unlawfully retaining classified information. As part of her plea, she must get pre-publication approval before being interviewed by the media.

• A New Hampshire woman went to the Massachusetts Social Security Office to file a claim for benefits. The government employee said he was unable to process the request. Shortly after that, he allegedly texted the woman and propositioned her for sex in exchange for money.

• The family of a deceased Florida teenager with cerebral palsy is suing the school system, alleging that it did not properly supervise the lunch period where the young man choked on a meatball and died.

• Seems like a lot of money flowing overseas for one fraud case.

• The National Republican Senatorial Committee is suing ‘Red Senate’ alleging that it's a scam PAC.

• A California man was indicted for allegedly setting off a bomb in a courthouse.

• The ACLU is suing a Colorado town, arguing their client, a Native American artist, was prevented from keeping her artist in residence there because of her views on the war in Gaza.

• An update from our story in March, a judge will decide in two weeks whether the search of a storage unit that resulted in the seizure of a purportedly stolen Defense Department drone from a former special forces operator was legal.

• Rudy Giuliani’s son can keep America’s Mayor’s World Series rings, at least for now.

• A Texas judge has denied a pro se motion for ‘Declaratory Judgment That Joseph Boden and Kamala Harris Through the Department of Homeland Security are Guilty if a Crime Against Humanity and Genocide and Petition for a Writ of Error Coram Nobis’ (sic).

• Another missed opportunity. The Advisory Board on Criminal Rules “removed from consideration a suggestion to eliminate PACER fees, because it is not a subject governed by the rules.” We agree in some respect because PACER fees have always operated outside the rules of good government.  

• A Boston cop who was fired after his previously anonymous Twitter account was revealed to have made a series of comments in support of January 6th and election denial is suing the city.

• This flight to Boston is the stuff of nightmares and explains very succinctly why women choose the bear every time. The Independent has a good write-up of the case.

• Drug traffickers apparently tried to use a dump truck to smuggle 319 kilograms (703 lbs) of weed across the border. 

• Two men in South Carolina pled guilty to hate crimes for targeting Hispanic victims in a string of armed robberies.

• There’s a RICO tow truck driver case from the Bronx, with one driver accused of murder.

• An Orange County Supervisor pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme in which he directed more than 10 million dollars to a charity his daughter ran in return for $550,000. 

• A person recruiting poll workers for the election was the target of death threats.Subscribe now

• New York prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against seven agents working for the Iranian government in an alleged plot to kidnap and assassinate a prominent critic of the regime on U.S. soil.

• A federal defender representing a former FBI agent accused of breaching the Capitol on January 6th is running into some trouble with the Bureau’s FOIA policies.

• The former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch is accused alongside two other men of operating a male prostitution and sex trafficking ring.

• The Wall Street Journal is suing Perplexity AI, arguing the company has been sucking up their copyrighted materials.

• Turns out a standard Supreme Court writ denial letter is mildly underwhelming. We had hoped for at least some cooler-looking letterhead from the highest court in the land.

• More machine guns. A Rochester man was arrested after ATF agents purportedly found dozens of 3D-printed ghost guns and modified machine guns during a search of his property. When one of the man’s acquaintances admitted to throwing some of the 3D-printed gun parts given to him off a bridge, perhaps fearful of what was to come, the ATF and other local agencies sent divers into the Erie Canal to recover the guns.

• The Central Park Five are suing former President Donald Trump for defamation.

• The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alaska is moving to vacate a sentence in a case involving ex-Judge Joshua Kindred and the senior Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) who reportedly sexted him. The motion to vacate came on the same day prosecutors filed a motion against the defendant’s request for discovery into the relationship between the judge and AUSA. Bloomberg Law News had the scoop on the filing. 

• ‘Operation Nazare Wave’ yielded more than a million dollars and an arrest of a 16-year-old juvenile who is accused of attempted murder.

• Thanks to a FOIA lawsuit by The Appeal, we may have better data on deaths while incarcerated. 

• A legal consultant firm that specializes in helping law firms with jury selection is suing a former employee for trade secrets theft. 

• After a man in New York was arrested for allegedly robbing a Craigslist drug buyer at knifepoint, the feds say he has continued to sell drugs via Craigslist, leading to one person’s fatal overdose of fentanyl. 

• The FBI arrested a man in Tennessee for reportedly harassing two women, including contacting family members of the women and creating TikTok accounts titled with their names and STDs.

• A veteran was arrested for purportedly making violent threats against the Veteran Affairs Hospital in New Orleans.

• A man from Chicago’s suburbs was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after pleading guilty to giving $500 to an undercover officer to support an ISIS soldier in Syria and trafficking fentanyl in the U.S.

• The New York Times wants to show OpenAI’s code to a member of a small Chilean AI consulting company.

• IRS agents say a convicted fraudster impersonated law enforcement to steal $800,000. He reportedly told law enforcement that the money was to go into a hedge fund for the alleged victim.

• A man was sentenced to 11 years for committing arson at four Jehovah’s Witness Halls in Washington.

And now, a final note. We ran every word before this sentence through Google’s NotebookLM to create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated podcast featuring two fake hosts. Here’s a link to what it created. A few quick takeaways. First, we regret to inform our readers, they mispronounced Seamus Hughes’ name. Though that actually tracks pretty consistently for how his offline human interactions go. Second, the AI-generated podcast hosts have very strong feelings about Rudy Giuliani keeping his World Series rings, and the hosts are worried about the fairness of paying for losing a defamation lawsuit with the rings given that they “represent his connections to New York after 9/11.” For the record, the World Series rings in question are from the 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 titles. Third, they also seem to hate the idea of having virtual court proceedings because the internet may go out or the proceedings will be hacked? We didn’t write anything about that in this issue nor did the U.S. Courts Advisory Board raise those concerns in rejecting the request for virtual proceedings. Fourth, the AI hosts believe drug cartels are ridiculous for thinking they could load up a dump truck of weed and get away with it. That may be right. Fifth, Google’s AI strongly believes U.S. democracy is very fragile because we had two cases involving threats to individuals. Sixth, to be fair, the banter between the “hosts” is as good and phony as any other real podcast you’d listen to. 

And lastly, and of the most concern, the AI made a series of logical leaps on what we wrote. That may be fine as a one-time pilot test to show our subscribers. However, when you’re writing about legal cases, if there are mistakes, a general lack of adding qualifiers like ‘allegedly’ or citing a source document, could get you into trouble. At the end of the day, we’re writing about people and their lives, sometimes at the worst moment of it. We don’t get to make assumptions like the AI did or play fast and loose with adding information outside the four corners of a court document. 

When asked about all this, a Google spokesman noted that, “Audio Overviews (including the voices) are AI-generated, so there might be inaccuracies and audio glitches” and that, “Audio Overviews are not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic, but simply a reflection of your sources.”

Upon reflection of our sources, federal affidavits tend to be filed under the penalty of perjury. Take from that what you want. 

Additionally, Google stated that “NotebookLM is grounded in a user's uploaded source material, which helps prevent the model from generating responses based on information outside of those sources.” 

But the inclusion of information about Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York, and September 11th was not within the confines of our newsletter. That seems to indicate that Google’s AI leaned quite a bit on “information outside those sources” and then made inaccurate assertions.

This is all to say, AI-generated podcasts are a fun novelty act right now. But if news reporters (or even those ridiculous MrBeast-like growing crop of Court proceedings channels on YouTube) use it more regularly, they may end up on the wrong side of the defamation suit.

As our fake podcast AI host asks when talking about one of the cases, apparently blissfully unaware of its own shortcomings, “Can technology truly capture all those nuances?... In a courtroom, the stakes are so high.”

By Peter Beck and Seamus Hughes

Welcome to Court Watch #97. This week, we highlight some court cases involving a purportedly stolen Defense Department drone, orgasmic meditation, World Series rings, a January 6th former FBI agent, an intercepted dump truck of weed at the border, Iranian government assassins, and one federal judge in Wisconsin carrying our collective water for transparency in the courts. But that’s just a small sampling of this week’s roundup. Also, make sure to stick around to the end of this newsletter where we close the circle on this issue’s headline and ensure you have yet another good reason to become a Luddite.

But first, let’s talk about thousands of illegal guns. 

The AK Guru

A man reportedly known as the “AK Guru” was arrested this week after federal agents with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force searched his property in rural North Carolina and recovered dozens of machine guns and homemade suppressors. The FBI says Eric Carter Jr. “made and sold hundreds of machineguns to date” by modifying legal firearms and piecing other parts together to create fully functioning and illicit machineguns.

According to a criminal complaint, the FBI used a confidential informant and another defendant, who agreed to cooperate with law enforcement, to learn more about Carter’s operation to manufacture hundreds of machine guns and suppression devices. Carter reportedly taught the cooperating defendant how to manufacture machine guns and would often have “hundreds of fully automatic machine guns” stored inside his workshop. 

Altogether, the cooperating defendant estimated Carter had sold at least a thousand automatic AK-47 rifles to “different groups” in the Carolinas. The criminal complaint alleges that some customers identified as from the “mountains” bought multiple AK-47s from Carter every week.

The cooperating defendant also told agents that Carter is “well connected and has sold machineguns to multiple prominent local individuals” and “has connections around the world” who “smuggle firearms from Europe” into the U.S., charging documents allege.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of North Carolina, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment on the case outside of what was filed publicly in the docket. A public affairs officer with the FBI’s Charlotte office held the same position when asked for comment. A lawyer for Carter’s lawyer did not respond to a Court Watch inquiry. On Thursday, a judge ruled that Carter should be detained pending trial. 

The Docket Roundup

• “In the end, my proposal is a modest one. I simply ask that the rules be amended to permit courts to use technology that was already purchased during the pandemic to handle pretrial hearings as we did during the pandemic with the defendant’s consent,” says Federal Judge Brett Ludwig to the U.S. Courts Advisory Board asking that they consider allowing virtual hearings. They declined citing, in part, a pre-COVID era finding that, “members stressed the crucial importance of the judge addressing the defendant face-to-face, which gives the judge the opportunity to read subtle cues”

• A woman accused of running a ‘wellness education company’ that allegedly groomed and abused victims has retained a defense expert to discuss “Orgasmic Meditation” at trial. 

• A Florida man was charged on Monday with threatening an election official. He still has pending charges from a few years back involving threats to other victims for their political beliefs.

• A Defense Department employee pleaded guilty to unlawfully retaining classified information. As part of her plea, she must get pre-publication approval before being interviewed by the media.

• A New Hampshire woman went to the Massachusetts Social Security Office to file a claim for benefits. The government employee said he was unable to process the request. Shortly after that, he allegedly texted the woman and propositioned her for sex in exchange for money.

• The family of a deceased Florida teenager with cerebral palsy is suing the school system, alleging that it did not properly supervise the lunch period where the young man choked on a meatball and died.

• Seems like a lot of money flowing overseas for one fraud case.

• The National Republican Senatorial Committee is suing ‘Red Senate’ alleging that it's a scam PAC.

• A California man was indicted for allegedly setting off a bomb in a courthouse.

• The ACLU is suing a Colorado town, arguing their client, a Native American artist, was prevented from keeping her artist in residence there because of her views on the war in Gaza.

• An update from our story in March, a judge will decide in two weeks whether the search of a storage unit that resulted in the seizure of a purportedly stolen Defense Department drone from a former special forces operator was legal.

• Rudy Giuliani’s son can keep America’s Mayor’s World Series rings, at least for now.

• A Texas judge has denied a pro se motion for ‘Declaratory Judgment That Joseph Boden and Kamala Harris Through the Department of Homeland Security are Guilty if a Crime Against Humanity and Genocide and Petition for a Writ of Error Coram Nobis’ (sic).

• Another missed opportunity. The Advisory Board on Criminal Rules “removed from consideration a suggestion to eliminate PACER fees, because it is not a subject governed by the rules.” We agree in some respect because PACER fees have always operated outside the rules of good government.  

• A Boston cop who was fired after his previously anonymous Twitter account was revealed to have made a series of comments in support of January 6th and election denial is suing the city.

• This flight to Boston is the stuff of nightmares and explains very succinctly why women choose the bear every time. The Independent has a good write-up of the case.

• Drug traffickers apparently tried to use a dump truck to smuggle 319 kilograms (703 lbs) of weed across the border. 

• Two men in South Carolina pled guilty to hate crimes for targeting Hispanic victims in a string of armed robberies.

• There’s a RICO tow truck driver case from the Bronx, with one driver accused of murder.

• An Orange County Supervisor pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme in which he directed more than 10 million dollars to a charity his daughter ran in return for $550,000. 

• A person recruiting poll workers for the election was the target of death threats.Subscribe now

• New York prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against seven agents working for the Iranian government in an alleged plot to kidnap and assassinate a prominent critic of the regime on U.S. soil.

• A federal defender representing a former FBI agent accused of breaching the Capitol on January 6th is running into some trouble with the Bureau’s FOIA policies.

• The former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch is accused alongside two other men of operating a male prostitution and sex trafficking ring.

• The Wall Street Journal is suing Perplexity AI, arguing the company has been sucking up their copyrighted materials.

• Turns out a standard Supreme Court writ denial letter is mildly underwhelming. We had hoped for at least some cooler-looking letterhead from the highest court in the land.

• More machine guns. A Rochester man was arrested after ATF agents purportedly found dozens of 3D-printed ghost guns and modified machine guns during a search of his property. When one of the man’s acquaintances admitted to throwing some of the 3D-printed gun parts given to him off a bridge, perhaps fearful of what was to come, the ATF and other local agencies sent divers into the Erie Canal to recover the guns.

• The Central Park Five are suing former President Donald Trump for defamation.

• The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alaska is moving to vacate a sentence in a case involving ex-Judge Joshua Kindred and the senior Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA) who reportedly sexted him. The motion to vacate came on the same day prosecutors filed a motion against the defendant’s request for discovery into the relationship between the judge and AUSA. Bloomberg Law News had the scoop on the filing. 

• ‘Operation Nazare Wave’ yielded more than a million dollars and an arrest of a 16-year-old juvenile who is accused of attempted murder.

• Thanks to a FOIA lawsuit by The Appeal, we may have better data on deaths while incarcerated. 

• A legal consultant firm that specializes in helping law firms with jury selection is suing a former employee for trade secrets theft. 

• After a man in New York was arrested for allegedly robbing a Craigslist drug buyer at knifepoint, the feds say he has continued to sell drugs via Craigslist, leading to one person’s fatal overdose of fentanyl. 

• The FBI arrested a man in Tennessee for reportedly harassing two women, including contacting family members of the women and creating TikTok accounts titled with their names and STDs.

• A veteran was arrested for purportedly making violent threats against the Veteran Affairs Hospital in New Orleans.

• A man from Chicago’s suburbs was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after pleading guilty to giving $500 to an undercover officer to support an ISIS soldier in Syria and trafficking fentanyl in the U.S.

• The New York Times wants to show OpenAI’s code to a member of a small Chilean AI consulting company.

• IRS agents say a convicted fraudster impersonated law enforcement to steal $800,000. He reportedly told law enforcement that the money was to go into a hedge fund for the alleged victim.

• A man was sentenced to 11 years for committing arson at four Jehovah’s Witness Halls in Washington.

And now, a final note. We ran every word before this sentence through Google’s NotebookLM to create an Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated podcast featuring two fake hosts. Here’s a link to what it created. A few quick takeaways. First, we regret to inform our readers, they mispronounced Seamus Hughes’ name. Though that actually tracks pretty consistently for how his offline human interactions go. Second, the AI-generated podcast hosts have very strong feelings about Rudy Giuliani keeping his World Series rings, and the hosts are worried about the fairness of paying for losing a defamation lawsuit with the rings given that they “represent his connections to New York after 9/11.” For the record, the World Series rings in question are from the 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 titles. Third, they also seem to hate the idea of having virtual court proceedings because the internet may go out or the proceedings will be hacked? We didn’t write anything about that in this issue nor did the U.S. Courts Advisory Board raise those concerns in rejecting the request for virtual proceedings. Fourth, the AI hosts believe drug cartels are ridiculous for thinking they could load up a dump truck of weed and get away with it. That may be right. Fifth, Google’s AI strongly believes U.S. democracy is very fragile because we had two cases involving threats to individuals. Sixth, to be fair, the banter between the “hosts” is as good and phony as any other real podcast you’d listen to. 

And lastly, and of the most concern, the AI made a series of logical leaps on what we wrote. That may be fine as a one-time pilot test to show our subscribers. However, when you’re writing about legal cases, if there are mistakes, a general lack of adding qualifiers like ‘allegedly’ or citing a source document, could get you into trouble. At the end of the day, we’re writing about people and their lives, sometimes at the worst moment of it. We don’t get to make assumptions like the AI did or play fast and loose with adding information outside the four corners of a court document. 

When asked about all this, a Google spokesman noted that, “Audio Overviews (including the voices) are AI-generated, so there might be inaccuracies and audio glitches” and that, “Audio Overviews are not a comprehensive or objective view of a topic, but simply a reflection of your sources.”

Upon reflection of our sources, federal affidavits tend to be filed under the penalty of perjury. Take from that what you want. 

Additionally, Google stated that “NotebookLM is grounded in a user's uploaded source material, which helps prevent the model from generating responses based on information outside of those sources.” 

But the inclusion of information about Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York, and September 11th was not within the confines of our newsletter. That seems to indicate that Google’s AI leaned quite a bit on “information outside those sources” and then made inaccurate assertions.

This is all to say, AI-generated podcasts are a fun novelty act right now. But if news reporters (or even those ridiculous MrBeast-like growing crop of Court proceedings channels on YouTube) use it more regularly, they may end up on the wrong side of the defamation suit.

As our fake podcast AI host asks when talking about one of the cases, apparently blissfully unaware of its own shortcomings, “Can technology truly capture all those nuances?... In a courtroom, the stakes are so high.”