Court Watch #107: Vexatious to the Spirit

Welcome to Court Watch #107. Despite the hope of a new year bringing glad tidings, there’s little to be particularly joyful about this week, as the fresh start brought with it the old sadness of human depravity that is both unsurprising and far too frequent. We started our reporting week with the largest seizure of homemade explosives in the FB’s history, continued with a U.S. military linguist supporting ISIS, followed shortly by a seemingly deranged man purportedly planning a mass shooting, and the murder of fifteen innocent people who sought nothing else but a fun-filled night in the Big Easy.  

We could say that our exclusive reporting on all that abject sadness spurred news stories from the New York Times, CBS, and half a dozen other outlets big and small, all citing our little upstart news site as the first media outlet to report those court cases. That would be true. But it is also true that those acknowledgements don’t really matter. They truly do not. It’s simply a fleeting feather in our cap that does little to lighten our mood while we all grapple with a citizenry that seems to be both so capable of enormous sympathy to the victims yet completely apathetic to the solutions to prevent tragedy in the future. 

Having spent our career interviewing victims of violence, be it traditional crime or spectacular terrorism, we routinely fight the urge to become numb to it all. We know that dark was the night, cold was the ground. But Fred’s mom was fond of reminding us to look for the helpers. And so we do. We take solace in the fact that it was a father’s concern that stopped a potential mass shooting. And that the music still plays on Bourbon Street. As Max Ehrmann wrote so eloquently nearly a century ago: for all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. 

So let’s go placidly amid the noise and the haste of the dockets and talk about what happened in the Federal courts this week. But before that, let’s talk about a seemingly shady court approved translator. 

Lost In Translation

A man who only speaks Urdu was arrested in North Carolina for allegedly operating a Medicare fraud scheme. But in a twist, the FBI says that a guy who served as an interpreter for attorney-client meetings and for court appearances of the Urdu-speaking defendant wasn’t just a current interpreter, he was also a previous co-conspirator. 

Now, in a case reported first by Court Watch, Hamza Altaf Khawaja faces a charge of witness tampering for allegedly manipulating his role as an interpreter to conceal his own involvement in the fraud scheme.

When the man was arrested, he reportedly instructed his attorney to hire an interpreter known as “Ali Bhatti” to translate their attorney-client privileged communications. According to court records, “Ali Bhatti” was actually Khawaja, the owner of Onyx Med Supply, which had received and billed to Medicare shipments of durable medical supplies deemed “medically unnecessary.” 

The man, whose name and his attorney’s name were redacted in documents filed in North Carolina, reportedly instructed his defense attorney to hire Khawaja under the belief that he would help him get out of jail while also fearing that outing Khawaja to prosecutors would lead to physical retaliation. 

After finally alerting his attorney to the translator ploy, the man waived his legal privilege and worked with the FBI to record a ruse of purported attorney-client meetings over the phone that included Khawaja in his interpreter role. According to the filing, the man repeatedly called “Ali” Khawaja instead, who warned him not to use names at all. In one recording, Khawaja allegedly told the man how to answer questions about the people involved in the healthcare fraud while he discussed with his defense attorney whether to cooperate with the government. 

On December 28th, Khawaja reportedly booked a plane ticket to leave the country for Pakistan on December 31st. An arrest warrant was issued, which was unsealed earlier this week.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of North Carolina, which is prosecuting the case, did not respond to a request for comment. Efforts to reach Khawaja were unsuccessful and a lawyer was not listed on his public docket.

The Docket Roundup

• An 67 year old retiree wants the courts to disqualify President-elect Trump from taking office. A judge says she has too much money to get her filing fee waived. 

• The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against Dave, Inc. and its CEO Jason Wilk. According to its website, Dave markets itself as promising customers to “get up to $500 in 5 min or less” without hidden fees. Yet, the Justice Department and the FTC now say that not only was it rare for customers to receive anywhere close to $500 but customers often received nothing at all while the company simultaneously charged a hidden “express” fee. Prosecutors also claimed that Dave offered a charity tip screen that it posed as donations to pay for meals for needy kids but that Dave actually kept most of the money for itself.

• Grant Cardone of TikTok fame is suing the Ultimate Human of TikTok fame.

• We’re Team Serena. But for the sake of full transparency, that other guy filed a complaint.  

• The New York Times has been fighting the good fight to unseal court records that should have never been sealed. Insider has the writeup.

• A U.S. military contract linguist pleaded guilty this week to lying on his national security clearance forms about his relationships with ISIS-K, a terrorist group based in Afghanistan. Authorities say he secretly sent money to ISIS-K, and while deployed in Afghanistan for the U.S. military, he attempted to get an arrested ISIS-K member freed.

• If we want Court Watch to survive with so few paid subscribers, let’s all agree that if anyone asks, we also wrote DJ Khaled’s ‘Do You Mind’ and are entitled to royalties. Also, Another One, why is Khaled picking roses in the music video?

• A jury found the owner of the gentlemen's club, Pharaoh's Club, in New York guilty of sex trafficking, bribery, witness tampering, narcotics conspiracy, and other charges.

• The guy that even Hezbollah was allegedly like nay, “that’s gonna be a no from me dawg”, got indicted.

• The Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) is suing two tutoring websites and their leader for offering AI-tutoring services on the LSAT.

• Authorities say a Florida man, Forrest Pemberton, scouted and planned to attack an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) office in Florida. He was arrested with an AR15 rifle, a Luger pistol, and ammunition on Saturday.

• $2,989.70. That was our PACER bill for the quarter that ended on December 31, 2024. Happy New Year to you too, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. As part of a reporting for a larger forthcoming piece, on November 12th, we downloaded 3,582 pages from PACER at 10 cents a pop. We picked up more than 700 free subscribers in the last week because we broke some news, only 6 of you chose a paid subscription. We can’t survive without paid subscribers. Just make the jump already. Stop making us feel weird for asking you to pay for news that consistently breaks news. It’s untoward. 

• The Justice Department announced the distribution of another 131.4 million dollars to Bernie Madoff’s victims, bringing the total amount recovered and given back to 4.3 billion dollars. The 4.3 billion accounted for almost 94% of the total money stolen by Madoff.

• A man in New Hampshire pled guilty in March to possession of child pornography and was ordered to begin his sentence in December. Then, in August, a software installed by U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services caught him again watching purported child porn. Probations, however, didn’t notice the software’s notification until October. The man was arrested shortly after and now faces a second prosecution for possession of child pornography.

• Prosecutors say an Austin, Texas, woman set up bank accounts in her ex-husband’s name and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars which she and her lover used to buy a Porsche and a Hermes bag all the while they allegedly operated a cocaine ring on the side. 

• Crypto drama doesn’t stop for the holidays. BlockCommerce, LLC, filed a suit against Savvy Wallet, LLC, and its leader with claims the company promised to transfer 1.2 million dollars into Tether and then never gave it back.

• A Florida CPA is suing Lawgical Insight, a computer forensics and case management company, for using an image mirroring software on his computers and cell phones, which the CPA’s attorneys say Lawgical used to view all of his clients’ tax filings and confidential information.

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a civil suit against Rex Healthcare for discriminating against an employee’s religious beliefs by failing to grant her a COVID-19 vaccine exemption and subsequently firing her.

• Eight people were charged with running a check and credit card scam in Georgia, including one who was indicted on an increasingly common count of possession of a postal service key that can be used on “any lock adopted by the Postal Service.” We have a forthcoming story about corruption at the USPS. We wanted to file it yesterday but we thought all of you would unsubscribe in mass if we sent one more email this week. It’ll go out early next week.

• Tory Burch wants Chinese knock-off sellers to stop using its logo.

• Twelve passengers who stayed on a cruise ship are suing Royal Caribbean after an attendant purportedly filmed them in their cabins and uploaded the videos on the dark web. The attorneys for the passengers say the attendant reportedly admitted to law enforcement that he would place cameras inside passengers’ bathrooms and sneak into their cabins to hide under their beds and record passengers. 

• Here’s the story we wrote up this week about the Virginia-based man who was arrested by the FBI in what prosecutors called the “largest seizure of homemade explosives in FBI history.” We will continue to monitor the case docket for updates and have created a landing page to bookmark for future filings. 

• The feds seized $57,200 from an illegal gambling house in North Carolina after a stolen car chase led law enforcement to investigate a “high-end Dodge Hellcat” theft ring that they obtained a search warrant for that brought them to the gambling house. Side note, honestly, what the hell is a high-end Dodge Hellcat? 

• Chief Justice Roberts released his annual report on the federal judiciary. The O.G. of Court Watching, Chris Geidner, had some thoughts. So does the Shadow Walker, Steve Vladek. (Editor’s note: We did appreciate the nod to former District Judge J. Waties Waring, whose impact in South Carolina was the subject of many of Peter’s college and high school essays.)

• A man is suing Director Chris Wray after he says the FBI erroneously listed a conviction of first-degree rape during a background check for a job with the TSA.

• We’re the answer to your prayers.

• On Monday, we reported that a linguist who contracted with the U.S. military and deployed to Afghanistan pled guilty to lying on his national security clearance form about his support for ISIS-K. 

• We felt a little bad that, unlike us after our New Year’s portions of Hoppin’ John and collard greens (editor’s note: That line was written by Peter, who is southern as comfort and we have no idea what any of those things are. His attempt of using a Northern paper’s story to justify it seems like carpetbagging), the roundup this week was a little slimmer than usual, so here’s an extra story that caught our eye. Michael Vigodner was arrested in Delaware after allegedly impersonating an investment banker with the private equity firm Lexington Partners to present an IRS refund check to a banker teller for almost nine hundred thousand dollars. Bank employees’ early suspicions about the check’s authenticity were confirmed when they spoke with Lexington’s managing partner who said the banker Vigodner purportedly impersonated couldn’t have possibly gone to the bank in Delaware because he was blind and bedridden in Florida. The FBI said it then connected pictures from the bank’s security cameras to a description matching two other reported fraud cases in Ohio and Delaware and a Lexus owned by Vigodner’s brother. Law enforcement arranged for the bank to lure Vigodner back in order to make an arrest. When Vigodner arrived earlier than expected at the bank, tellers tried to stall. According to the filing, law enforcement in marked vehicles arrived as an angry Vigodner left the bank and fled. At the time of his arrest, Vigodner was reportedly on supervised release for securities fraud. Lexington Partners, despite a fancy website and likely well-staffed PR team, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Thanks for reading. One last reminder, we've been posting some stories directly to our website instead of blasting it out on email, so if you didn’t check our site you probably missed two stories that ended up going national. We skipped the email blast mostly because we flooded your inbox far too often this week. So be sure to check the site frequently. Or don’t. We’ll report it no matter what. As Max correctly said: “Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.”