Court Watch #111: The Court Revolution Will Be Televised

Welcome to Court Watch #111. 

It’s an hour and sixteen minutes long. It’s a bit dry. There is no real story arc or character development. And we’ll grant you, there was a blank screen with no audio for the first 49 minutes. But not since Roger Williams has something this monumental happened in Rhode Island. Sure, it wasn’t the founding of an oasis of religious tolerance and only adequate lobster rolls compared to Vermont, but it did represent a significant step in public access to its government. 

We are talking, of course, about a live YouTube stream of a federal court hearing. Not the first of its kind for the federal courts but unique and important in its own way. It was the culmination of a week in the federal courts that was unlike any other. President Trump, fresh from his inauguration speech, started rolling out new executive orders on a whole host of issues ranging from government spending, gender, and birthright. But with nearly every order came a civil lawsuit in court. All told, more than twenty federal lawsuits were filed. Two were filed in between writing the first and third paragraph of this lede. True story. Some, like a case in Washington, resulted in an injunction. While others, the plaintiffs rescinded because they jumped the gun.

On Wednesday, U.S. District of Rhode Island Chief Judge John “Jack” McConnell presided over a motion to stop the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from freezing all federal grants. The problem was that in between the lawsuit being filed and the hearing taking place, OMB had issued new guidance severely limiting the scope of the original memo. But, like all things in life, a tweet had confused all the plaintiffs. As Matt Schwartz wrote in The New York Times, “During the hearing, the states introduced into evidence a social media post by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, in which she claimed the motion rescinding the Office of Management and Budget memo was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.”..“It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo,” she wrote…“We can’t cross-examine the tweet,” the judge joked.”

Both sides are now filing motions trying to convince Judge McConnell to rule in their favor. However, if Rhode Island local rules didn’t preclude non-party activity in dockets, we would seriously consider filing a motion of thanks to the Lil Rhody federal court system. Unlike Judge Hollander of Maryland (“Nor is Mr. Hughes an attorney” still haunts us eight years later), we’d like to think The Right Honorable Jack would have appreciated our injection into his docket. 

 The Judicial Conference has been playing footsie with video recordings and zooms of hearings for years. During the pandemic, they loosened rules on access allowing online hearings, not for really for public access rights, but more so because they had few other options if they wanted to keep Article III going.

But that decision was repealed in 2023. It was replaced by a new recommendation that “permits a judge presiding over a civil or bankruptcy non-trial proceeding, in the judge’s discretion, to authorize live remote public audio access to any portion of that proceeding in which a witness is not testifying.” 

Few judges took that recommendation up. And the past status quo of only being able to witness the American justice system inside the four walls of a marbled courthouse has largely won out. Which is why the hearing in Rhode Island matters so much. It was a high-profile civil case of national importance. And live streaming it went off without a hitch. The press could watch and report. And most importantly, the public was informed about how two co-equal branches of government settle their disputes in a democracy. 

But fear not old-school camera-hating court watchers. While the video is readily available on the court’s official YouTube channel, Judge McConnell did start the hearing by noting that, “I need to remind everyone [that] photography whatsoever of this narrowcasting [YouTube] is strictly prohibited. It’s a court order, by taking a picture or video, [you] will be subject to a contempt hearing.” 

For the record, we took no pictures. But we’ve watched the hearing multiple times to marvel at proof that open access to the courts is possible. The ball is in your court to encourage other districts to follow Rhode Island’s lead, Judicial Conference. 

But enough about how Rhode Island might have been the last state to ratify the Constitution but now is the first one in our hearts, let’s talk about the most interesting cases in this week’s dockets.

The Docket Roundup

• This week marked the start of the trial involving former Atomwaffen leader, Brandon Russell who is accused of trying to destroy Maryland’s electricity grid. At NCITE, our editor and his colleagues looked at all the federal arrests involving Atomwaffen in an effort to better understand the difference in prosecutions between domestic and international terrorism cases. A link to the study is here. 

• “And Wednesday, the night of the crash, was actually Keys’s birthday. As her longtime partner, David Seidman, told The American Lawyer, “It was a client matter and they ended up wrapping up earlier, and she was super excited to go back to D.C. so we could celebrate her birthday”, a David Lat piece on the passing of two law firm associates in the D.C. plane crash. May their memory be a blessing.

• Maybe the real church was all the friends we made along the way.

• A warehouse of illegal gummies and a nationwide trackdown of where they were all sent.

• A former vice president at the much-hyped energy drink company Celsius was charged with insider training after he purportedly made $1.6 million in trades after learning about the company’s better-than-expected quarterly earnings.

• Our editor has spent the better half of a year at NCITE studying groups like this, so we’ll have more to say but quickly, these types of prosecutions are important and will become more frequent in the coming months.

• There’s lots of Does in this lawsuit, but the Church of the Latter Day of Saints is referenced throughout for allegedly allowing a culture that fosters abuse of children.

• I mean, the 3D printing wasn’t a horrible plan.

• Background screeners would like Texas to tell them about crimes.

• “I remember that,” said a man who pleaded guilty this week after law enforcement played a recording of his threat against a public official.

• We’d be remiss if we didn't note there have been three federal arrests in the last month involving individuals who purportedly referenced Luigi Mangione in making their threats. Here. Here. And Here. 

• Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos’ fiancé and presidential inauguration meme generator, is being sued by a private yoga instructor who claims Sanchez copied her 2022 book, Dharma Kitty Goes To Mars. Sanchez published The New York Times best-selling children’s book A Fly Who Flew To Space in September 2024. 

• A former star reporter for a New York City TV station is suing the company for racial and gender discrimination.

• A Texas man has made a career out of threatening public officials, getting convicted, and then allegedly doing it again.

• The former assistant director of a federal community corrections center in Eastern Virginia was charged with accepting a bribe from an inmate.

• Three former FBI agents said millions were missing from an HOA set up by a condominium developer.

• We’re just simple newsletter operators but a billion dollar fraud seems like a big deal.

• There’s a lawsuit in Colorado on behalf of the construction workers who helped build stadiums and industry for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The suit targets several American-based construction companies, accusing them of profiting off of the alleged grim human rights conditions.

• The new DOJ v. Local Sheriff.

• A Navy employee says she was treated unfairly due to her age.

• A man was indicted in New Mexico for allegedly threatening two synagogues. Though we doubt they had an initial appearance hearing at 1:28 AM. He was released from custody pending trial.

• Mercury must be in retrograde again. A guy in Arkansas was charged with stealing crystals.

• A lot of ink, including our own, is being spilled about lawsuits against various Trump Administration actions, largely focused on well-resourced nonprofits and unions suing to invoke an injunction. As mentioned in our lede, it’s 22 federal lawsuits so far. But for our money, we found a pro se case out of Georgia to be the most underreported and interesting of them all. 

• The Heritage Foundation continues its quest to figure out how a guy named Harry got his visa. We’d just like to know how he got a podcast. 

• A 2020 search warrant unsealed last Friday outlines a Secret Service investigation into an insider ATM scam at Wells Fargo.

• A photographer is suing Daily Wire for reportedly using one of his pictures without permission. There’s always a tweet.

• The online marketplace Cracked and Nulled got cracked and nulled by law enforcement. 

• A few weeks ago we wrote about Zimnako Salah, a man who unsuccessfully tried to convince the FBI that a picture of him allegedly dropping off a fake bomb in a church was photoshopped. Last week, his case came up again when his defense attorney filed a motion to exclude his motorcycle’s license plate, “KA8OOM,” arguing that the “license plate is also most likely a reflection of the excitement and adrenaline associated with motorcycles, as opposed to any reference to bombs.” Now, prosecutors are pushing back, writing that they plan to use the motorcycle and its license plate to verify Salah’s identity at trial. The rest of the filing is worth a read, too.

• The feds seized three homes worth more than $5.5 million combined that were reportedly purchased from a $95 million (!) genetic testing Medicare fraud scheme.

• A man incarcerated at a federal prison in Michigan was charged with interstate threats, online stalking, and possessing a contraband cell phone after he allegedly threatened to harm and reportedly extorted the family of a man he is incarcerated with.

• Border Patrol had a boat chase off the coast of Miami with a smuggler that ended when they shot out one of the engines on his boat.

• A man from Indiana was arrested for purportedly posting TikToks with threats against President Trump on Inauguration Day.

• A Baltimore County school principal is suing the school district and a former school employee with claims the teacher used AI to manipulate a recording of his voice into saying racist and antisemitic remarks and then shared it with the school community. Unrelated, the former school employee was arrested this week for alleged sexual exploitation of children and receiving child porn.

• A Louisiana man was charged with reportedly hiding property during bankruptcy proceedings, including a 2017 Cadillac CT5V.

• The South Carolina branch of the NAACP, Ibram X. Kendi (of now Howard University), and several others are suing the state education superintendent and two school districts for the state’s decision to remove AP African American Studies from public school curricula. 

• The FBI didn’t forget about the $27,553.25, 130 Chinese Yuan, and 120 Hong Kong Dollars taken in 2023 from a massage parlor that allegedly served as a front for trafficking in Charleston, West Virginia.

• A decline in pizza sales resulted in a lawsuit.

• The ATF says a man used credit cards that he stole from restaurants in Woodbridge, Virginia, to order guns online in different people’s names.

• President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and each of the military service heads were sued by eight service members under the Fifth Amendment for the order banning transgender individuals from serving in the military.

• An arms dealer from Kyrgyzstan was arrested for allegedly attempting to ship $800,000 in American-made guns to a Russian arms company.

• A twenty-four-year-old man was extradited from Nigeria for his alleged role in a South Carolina seventeen-year-old’s death. The man reportedly posed as a young woman on an online dating app and persuaded the SC teen to send sensitive pictures of himself before threatening to send the pictures to the teen’s family unless he paid. The teen committed suicide two years ago following his purported threats. He was the son of a state legislator, and the state enacted Gavin’s Law, in his name, to criminalize sextortion.

• A woman reportedly turned herself in to police before walking into the Capitol with Molotov cocktails. Police said she admitted to planning to target Speaker Johnson, Secretary Hegseth, Secretary Bessent, and the Heritage Foundation. A defense attorney is arguing for her release.

• Regimes may change but one subcontractor in Afghanistan would still like to be paid.

• Lawyers for AP responded to a suit against the newsroom under the Anti-Terrorism Act for its reporting following the October 7th terror attacks on Israel.

• This sounds like it should be about sovereign citizens, but here’s a seemingly more legitimate pro se case involving admiralty law and the Sherman Antitrust Act.

• A man from San Francisco sued the EMD music festival promoter Insomniac on the grounds it gave his viewing history data to TikTok and Facebook.

• This suit between distinguished Baltimore police officers is a wild ride, beginning with a $50,000 puppy purchase, a murder, and a purported department cover-up.

Thanks for reading. Finally, for added court nerd fun for our free and paid subscribers who got this far down in today’s newsletter, we put all the more than twenty federal civil cases involving President Trump’s Executive Orders on this landing page with links to courtlistener which is updated in near real-time with docket filings. We’ll update the page as new lawsuits are brought. We’d also recommend checking out our friends at the Michigan Law’s Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse which has summaries of the cases.

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