Welcome to Court Watch #105. We’ll get to our newsletter’s main gig of a weekly roundup for the federal court dockets shortly but first, let’s talk about side hustles.

Nowadays, it seems like everyone seems to have one. This week, the folks at CNBC say the next four in-demand side gigs for 2025 are going to be template graphic designer, AI content creator, podcast assistant, and short-term rental manager. Seems random. Having looked at ISIS graphic designers, reported on the creepy side of AI, started and canceled a podcast all in one day, and unmasked a massive Airbnb scam in 2024, we probably wouldn’t recommend any of those occupations. (editor’s note: we also wouldn’t recommend ‘newsletter writer’ if you want to stay in the black.)

But there are some more conventional jobs with a new online twist that may do the trick. For example, JustAnswer bills itself as a place to get “real help from real experts,” be it a lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, or any number of other credentialed individuals. For a set cost, you can ping them with a question. Think of it as a fancy version of Fiverr. We’d note that homework tutors make more money on the site than doctors which tracks if you’ve ever tried to help an elementary aged student with Common Core math. 

The problem with side gigs is they still involve payments. And those monetary transactions require paying taxes. Which brings us to our lede story about the IRS going after the ‘gig economy.’ 

The Tax Man Cometh.

The Justice Department and the IRS want answers from JustAnswer about who earned more than 5,000 dollars on its site from 2017 to 2020. The case may signal that the IRS is looking to crack down on the country’s gig economy, which includes platforms like DoorDash, Etsy, Uber, Airbnb, and JustAnswer.

The request to a judge to order a summons to JustAnswer comes after the IRS investigated five taxpayers who were “experts” on JustAnswer, making tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by responding to questions. None of the five taxpayers investigated reportedly filed a tax return with the IRS for any income made off of JustAnswer.

An agent with the IRS wrote in the filing that an estimated $182 billion was lost in tax revenue in 2021 because of underreporting by workers in the gig economy of their income. According to the IRS, underreporting was the projected number one loss of tax revenue. 

According to the filing, JustAnswer began reporting payments to the IRS in 2021 and 2022 totaling $26.2 and $32.5 million, respectively, but now the IRS still wants to know about the profits of its experts from 2017 to 2020. The IRS agent noted in the filing how JustAnswer advertises that its experts earn an average of two to seven thousand a month. That would mean the IRS has likely lost out on tens of millions of dollars in income tax revenue on JustAnswer alone from 2017 to 2020. 

The filing included exhibits with a list of JustAnswer’s experts who had each given thousands of responses, noting that every answer usually earns them 15 to 25 dollars. One of the JustAnswer experts cited in the filing is known as “Chris, Master Mechanic,” who seems to have had 60,004 satisfied customers. 

Last August, CNBC ran a story about a mechanic named Chris who quit his job at Ford in 2012 to answer questions full-time on JustAnswer and who matches the description of the “Master Mechanic.” According to CNBC, Chris works 40 to 60 hours a week and earned $170,500 off of JustAnswer last year. CNBC reported, however, that Chris files his taxes. Just yesterday, CNBC ran a new piece about a woman who makes “as much as $8,700 a month” doing valuations of antiques on JustAnswer. 

JustAnswer did not respond to repeated requests for comment, though we did have a lovely albeit confusing back and forth with their chatbot, a person running their Twitter account, and three customer service representatives until getting to the press shop, which did not respond. The Treasury Department was also equally unresponsive, though no IRS chatbot was available. 

A federal judge will soon rule on whether JustAnswer has to turn over its experts’ payment information. 

As the old Court Watch saying goes, there are only two constants in life: docket and taxes. So having dealt with the taxes, let’s move on to the dockets. 

In this week’s issue, we have groundfish, 20-year-old oil leaks, homemade bombs, a conscientious objector, tire tariffs, cryptocurrency is not your pal, a gunwoman at the Pentagon, shady consultants, the alleged health care CEO shooter’s federal charges, a dropped defamation case against Vice President Harris’ campaign, bath salt takedowns, escape room bigotry, and China tries to protect and serve in the Big Apple. Also like two dozen other stories. 

The Docket Roundup

• An Alabama man who wanted to create an “unorganized militia” to arrest “insurrected government officials” was arrested for trying to arrest a doctor he believed falsified his medical records. 

• This might be the most Alaskan title of a seizure notice ever. 

• The U.S. Government would like to get reimbursed for continuing to clean up … <checks notes>... 2004 oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that is still leaking.

• Former Congressman George Santos owes the taxpayers $205,002.97 dollars. Or to be put in terms we all understand: he needs to make 820 more cameos at his limited-time Christmas rate or 512 cameos at the standard rate. (editor’s note: we were about 10 monthly paid subscribers short of buying a Santos cameo this week just to strengthen this one bullet point).

• A Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agent was charged with selling bath salts to an HSI undercover employee. The investigation started when a lawyer for an existing government informant recruited by the accused agent alerted the U.S. Attorney’s office of shady dealings.

• Color us surprised that a company named ‘Crypto-Pal’ could be a scam.

• An FBI agent was indicted for cyberstalking. Authorities alleged he made a series of unwanted romantic overtures and attempted to convince the victim to enter into a sham marriage to save him from the inspector general investigation.

• In a new filing, DHS says there are “438 noncitizens” detained and then released that are “unaccounted for.”

• As a general rule, we hate escape rooms and this one seems particularly hate-filled.

• A Kentucky man, with a history of violent arrests, allegedly said “I will personally f****ing strangle you, save this email…and show it to the police.” The domestic violence victim did just that, and the man was arrested. 

• DOJ is still trying to claw back $60,000 from a COVID loan.

• Conservative podcaster Tim Pool has dropped his defamation lawsuit against Vice President Harris’ campaign

• Five years after his death, a deceased federal judge’s ongoing case has been reassigned to a new judge. 

• A Virginia man was charged with international kidnapping for allegedly taking his children to Afghanistan. According to court records, he sent his wife in the United States a picture of their two-year-old son holding a gun in Kabul. He was arrested at Dulles Airport on Tuesday.

• Pentagon Police arrested a woman with a loaded gun at the Pentagon metro.

• The crypto company bros are fighting and punching back.

• A woman thought she was communicating with a country music star, but alas, it was more of a money mule situation. As George Strait said, there’s always oceanfront property in Arizona.

• The Justice Department is suing CVS for allegedly filling opioid prescriptions they shouldn’t have. Here are the exhibits. 

• A man suing Substack says he can’t succeed in U.S. federal court so he’s moving to the U.K. High Court.

• ABCNews settled a defamation case filed by president-elect Trump.

• The FBI says a political campaign manager in California was secretly working for the Chinese government.

• The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division intervened on behalf of a Christian-run homeless shelter after the City of Brunswick, Georgia, tried to shut it down. The Justice Department is now suing Brunswick for violating the Christian shelter’s religious exercise.

• Two Colombian men were arrested for their roles in leading a human trafficking operation that led to a boat with forty migrants disappearing off the coast of Central America in 2023.

• A San Diego attorney who specializes in securities was indicted for tax fraud.

• An assistant federal defender in Maine lays out a well argued case why she believes detention is not needed in an immigration case.

• A twenty-two-year-old Michigan man pleaded guilty to plotting to commit a mass shooting at a local party headquarters and a bar in Eastern Michigan because he associated them with the LGBTQ community. Prosecutors say the man also fired sixty rounds into his gay neighbor’s property and spraypainted his car with the F-slur.

• An Army Captain and former valedictorian at West Point is suing for the Army to recognize her as a conscientious objector because of her Christianity and belief in the sanctity of life. She requested to be moved from being a military intelligence officer to a chaplain or medic. 

• A U.S. Post Office manager was indicted for making off with more than $80,000 worth of stamps.

• A Wisconsin man was sentenced to two years for building six homemade bombs.

• An Afghan man who tried to traffic heroin into the U.S. and fundraised for the Taliban was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He also purportedly planned the kidnapping of a DEA source while he was incarcerated in the U.S. in an effort to convince the DEA that they were just wrong about the whole thing.

• A twenty-year-old member of online terror groups 764 and CVLT known as “Convict” was arrested for allegedly producing child sexual material and cyberstalking minors on Discord. We’re currently tracking all the federal cases involving 764 at NCITE. The English language does not possess enough words to properly describe the depravity of these groups. 

• The new Brooklyn 99 spinoff looks lit. 

• A former Congressman was charged with being an unregistered foreign agent for a Venezuelan man targeted by the United States for sanctions. 

• We’re all reaching our breaking point with ticket platforms.

• Here’s the new federal charges filed against Luigi Mangione.

• A Michigan man pleaded guilty to spraypainting swastikas and “die” on a Black church.

• The Justice Department announced in a report that Arizona’s Department of Child Safety discriminates against foster parents and children with disabilities.

• A pilot is suing United Airlines for defamation after the airline pulled him from flight duty following a reported very hard landing.

• This case is particularly interesting as there are coming talks of tariffs.

• A Massachusetts man was charged with material support to terrorism for allegedly helping the Iranian government create drones that killed U.S. soldiers overseas.

• We still have no idea what consultants actually do, but we sure hope they stop doing this now. 

• Speaking of which, Deloitte is being sued for a data breach.

• One of the largest cryptocurrency terror financing cases ended in a conviction.

• The creators of the ‘Hawk Tuah’ coin are being sued. This will be covered by every media organization in America.

• Meanwhile, Wednesday we broke the story of the arrest of Virginia man who wanted to attack the Israeli consulate. About eight hours ago everyone else noticed. There were no hattips in their pieces to our reporting and Google News doesn’t think we exist despite being an approved Publisher with them. We’re channeling our inner dril.

• A non-court record note, but we wanted to mark the untimely passing of Robert O’Harrow. ‘Bobby O’, as we lovingly called him, was an investigative reporter with the Washington Post. We’ve known Robert for the last two decades. He was our first reporter we ever trusted with our congressional secrets as a Hill staffer. Robert always protected us, and his other sources. He was also a die-hard document digger and taught us the love of footnotes in thousand-page documents. The reporting world is a lesser place without his presence and we’ll miss him dearly.

• A Chinese man who stole 1.4 million dollars worth of electric car trade secrets and sent it to a company based in China was sentenced to two years in prison.

• An investigation into pandemic loan fraud led the feds to a fentanyl bust at a house in Niagara Falls (which the feds are now seizing because it was paid for by a loan for small businesses).

• A North Mariana Island man is accused of sending 1,000 threatening emails to probation services in addition to making threats to one federal judge and a TSA employee.

• We give the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts a lot of flack, but we truly appreciate their new tutorial for students on accessing the courts. Though we’d appreciate it more if they included a lesson plan on not quartering British soldiers, the most important amendment to our constitution.  

Thanks for reading. We hope the transition to beehiiv was seamless for all. You’ll notice some changes on our site and hopefully an easier mobile reading experience. You’ll also notice that we may not email blast every story we do so please check the site regularly for breaking stories (we also have an RSS feed). Additionally, we’re trying a new thing which we’re calling ‘CW Snippet’ where we post a breaking court record without a full story writeup so you can get the information quickly. We did that out three times this week. (editor’s note: though only 183 of you read it so far because of the ‘no email blast’ so turns out you can’t roll out a whole new publishing strategy without asking folks to bookmark our homepage and check back daily).

If you have any hiccups with our transition, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We’ve left the sweet embrace of Substack recommendation algorithms, so please do share Court Watch far and wide. Word of mouth is the only way we’ll grow now. That’s a lot of pressure for you, but we have faith in our readers. Welcome to the more than 500 new subscribers who joined us in the last week, including three of you who made the jump to paid. If you appreciated our decision to move from Substack to beehiiv, now may be the time to show it with a paid subscription. 

A final note, we’re taking the unusual step of not working on Christmas Day for the next docket roundup. We debated whether that was a good idea given that we just launched a new site but the better angels of our Christmas nature won out. We’ll be back to a regular publishing schedule in the new year. We’ll probably still do a story or two during that break because we’re a strong believer that Ebenezer Scrooge was simply a misunderstood workaholic and we start twitching if our PACER bill stays too sedimentary. 

An actual final note, if you got this far, you probably enjoy reading Court Watch. Your loved ones probably would too. A new beehiiv feature just dropped: You can now give someone a Court Watch gift subscription. Click on the gift tab on this page. It’s a perfect stocking stuffer and then an immediate conversation starter when they ask you what this newsletter is.