Ten Little Chances to be Free

Posted by Tim Cushing

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/doj-prosecutors-somehow-manage-to-secure-terrorism-convictions-against-anti-ice-protesters/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533889&preview=true&preview_id=533889

The DOJ is filled with grossly incompetent prosecutors these days. It’s a bunch of subservients acting in obeisance to the zenith of gross incompetence: the current President of the United States.

When not being sidelined by judges for not being legally appointed, the handpicked losers of Trump’s DOJ Revenge Squad are being shut out by the grandest of juries: grand juries. Asked only to hear the government’s side and nod obediently, grand juries have been rejecting a record number of presentations, leaving prosecutors scrambling to find something anything! to charge Trump’s enemies with.

More of the same is happening here. On two non-consecutive occasions, the Trump administration has attempted to equate unaffiliated people with a shared worldview to domestic terrorist organizations. It didn’t work with Black Lives Matter. And, for the most part, it hasn’t worked with Antifa, which is a semi-acronym that means nothing more than “anti-fascist.”

Not to go all Jeff Foxworthy years past his sell-by date, but you might be a fascist if you think people opposed to fascism are terrorists. So, of course, this administration firmly believes people opposed to fascism are terrorists.

In Texas, following a protest that ultimately resulted in the shooting of a law enforcement officer, the DOJ has somehow made terrorism charges stick against a bunch of protesters, despite its reliance on things that should never have been considered evidence.

Let’s go live to this reporting from The Guardian, which contains an absolutely hilarious phrase in its opening paragraph:

A group of protesters in Texas was found guilty of providing support for terrorism and other charges on Friday in a closely watched case in which prosecutors alleged anti-ICE activists were actually part of an antifa cell.

Imagine how much credulity you’d have to hope for if you trotted out the phrase “antifa cell” in open court. It’s a lot. Lots of actual terrorist groups may have “cells,” but antifa is pretty much anything but organized or centralized. It’s just people cohering around a central concept: an opposition to fascism.

The government charged and tried nine defendants following a protest that involved the setting off of fireworks and culminated in Benjamin Song (now convicted on attempted murder charges) shooting an officer in the shoulder. The government claimed the fireworks were part of distraction attempt in hopes of setting up an ambush. But it failed to connect enough dots to get any of the other protesters nailed on murder charges.

However, it did manage to convince a jury that some of the nine arrested were providing material support for terrorism. The rationale? Antifa is a terrorist group and people that represent as antifa (mainly through the wearing of black clothing) or act in support of its goals (opposing fascism) are engaged in material support of the kind of terrorism that… opposes fascism?

It’s all deeply stupid. And yet it has real consequences. While the jury wasn’t sold on most of the government’s wilder claims, it still sided with enough of them to net five protesters with terrorism-related charges that mean they’ll likely spend at least 10 years in prison if their convictions aren’t overturned.

For instance, there’s this nonsense, which managed to rope in someone who wasn’t even there when this all went down:

Sanchez-Estrada was the only defendant not at the protest, and was only charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, after prosecutors say he moved leftwing zines following the arrest of his wife…

That is fucking wild. Someone moved stuff written by someone else and the government claims its concealment.

That’s not even the worst/stupidest part of the government’s evidence presentations. This is:

During the trial, the government offered a slew of circumstantial evidence aimed at convincing the jury that the defendants were part of an antifa terror cell. They showed the jury zines and reading lists with incendiary titles that were seized from the defendants. One zine seized was titled The satanic death cult is real. The zine is an essay analyzing the films Hereditary and Midsommar. They also displayed anti-Trump stickers seized from one of the defendants that said “Make America not Exist Again” and a pamphlet from the Socialist Rifle Association that showed someone putting a swastika into a garbage can.

A magazine discussing films is evidence. Anti-Trump stickers are evidence. Someone putting a swastika into a trash can is evidence. This is shit even Lionel Hutz might consider too unreasonable to present to a judge, much less a jury.

Even if the zine dealt with an alleged, real-life US satanic death cult, how is that evidence of anything… unless the government is tacitly admitting it’s possibly the satanic death cult these antifas are informing each other about?

Everything here is easily covered by the First Amendment and is evidence of nothing but the administration’s desire to illegally punish people for not supporting Trump. And the government should know better than to claim a picture of someone literally trashing a swastika is evidence of criminal intent, because when it does make that claim, it’s admitting that it views speech against Nazis as something that must be met with criminal charges.

Then there’s the Second Amendment. Prosecutors insisted that the mere possession of legally obtained weapons by some of the arrestees was evidence of their malicious intent. But this DOJ in particular has never made that accusation against Trump supporters who wear/brandish weapons. They only pretend it’s unlawful when it involves people opposed to this administration.

With any luck, these convictions will be overturned. While it’s unlikely a review of the convictions will erase the charges facing the person who actually shot an officer, everything else included here is so far beyond the pale (no pun intended?) that it can’t possibly survive judicial review. Even the judge handling this prosecution made it clear he felt the government was seeking to punish protesters merely because they opposed the same administration that appointed him.

Mark Pittman, a US district judge nominated to the federal bench by Donald Trump in 2019, appeared to gesture at the irrelevance of antifa in the closing moments of the trial, asking prosecutors why he should mention it in his instructions to the jury, underlining the gap between the emphasis on antifa and the technicality of the criminal charges they faced.

“Whether it’s antifa or the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?” Pittman said.

The courts are doing what they can to hold back the daily onslaught of rights violations and vindictive prosecutions engaged in by this administration. But Trump (or, at least, his enablers) knows how limited that resistance is when the administration dares it daily to try to hold it accountable. For now, these ineptly-obtained convictions stand. And they will serve the purpose the administration intends them to: a latent threat that deters future opposition to it and its goals.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/doj-prosecutors-somehow-manage-to-secure-terrorism-convictions-against-anti-ice-protesters/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533889&preview=true&preview_id=533889

Posted by Mike Masnick

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/doge-didnt-cut-government-waste-it-was-government-waste/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533837

Look, I get it. Government waste is real. Bureaucratic bloat is real. The desire to have a federal government that spends taxpayer money wisely and operates without unnecessary friction? That’s a pretty standard and quite reasonable desire in American politics. So when Elon Musk showed up promising he could cut $2 trillion in federal spending by bringing the vaunted “efficiency” of the tech world to the government, a lot of people — not just MAGA diehards, but regular people who’d spent time cursing at a federal website built in 2003 or waiting on hold with the DMV — thought: sure, maybe give it a shot. A decade of fawning tech press coverage about Elon Musk will do that to your priors.

We now have the receipts on how that went. And they’re absolutely damning.

Between a comprehensive forensic accounting from the New York Times published in December and a detailed report from House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia released in February, we can now do a proper post-mortem on DOGE. The diagnosis: the patient was dead on arrival, the surgery was performed by people who lied about their credentials, and the bill for the operation far exceeded anything that was supposedly “saved.”

Let’s start with the most basic question: did DOGE save the government money? Because that was, you know, apparently the whole point (or so we were told).

The answer, as the Times bluntly puts it:

But the group did not do what Mr. Musk said it would: reduce federal spending by $1 trillion before October. On DOGE’s watch, federal spending did not go down at all. It went up.

Spending went up. Musk promised $2 trillion in cuts during the campaign, started walking that back almost immediately after the election, and the actual result was that the government spent more money. The entire exercise was supposed to pay for itself many times over. Instead, the taxpayer funded an $81 million operation that produced negative returns.

But DOGE had that website — the “Wall of Receipts” — proudly tallying up all those billions in savings, right? About that. The Times went through the 40 largest items on DOGE’s claimed savings list:

In DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, for instance, the 13 largest were all incorrect.

At the top were two Defense Department contracts, one for information technology, one for aircraft maintenance. Mr. Musk’s group listed them as “terminations,” and said their demise had saved taxpayers $7.9 billion. That was not true. The contracts are still alive and well, and those savings were an accounting mirage.

Together, those two false entries were bigger than 25,000 of DOGE’s other claims combined.

Of the 40 biggest claims on DOGE’s list, The Times found only 12 that appeared accurate — reflecting real reductions in what the government had committed to spend.

Two fake line items on a spreadsheet claimed more “savings” than 25,000 other entries combined. Of the 40 biggest claims, 28 were wrong. The 13 biggest were all wrong. The very first day the “Wall of Receipts” went live, its largest claim was an $8 billion Department of Homeland Security contract that was off by a factor of 1,000 — the contract was actually worth $8 million, as many folks reported at the time. That’s the kind of error that would get you fired from an introductory accounting course, and these were the people supposedly bringing precision and transparency to the federal government.

The accounting trick DOGE relied on most heavily is worth understanding, because it reveals whether this was mere incompetence or something more deliberate. The Times explains that in many cases, DOGE simply lowered the “ceiling value” of contracts — the theoretical maximum the government could spend, not what it was actually spending — and then claimed the full difference as “savings.” A defense contractor CEO explained this perfectly to stock analysts:

This summer, CACI’s chief executive, John Mengucci, told stock analysts that the change was meaningless.

“It doesn’t change a thing for this company,” he said. His company had always expected to be paid about $2 billion over the contract’s life span. And even if the contract ever did reach the ceiling, he said, the Pentagon could just raise it again.

“There’s no reduction of revenue,” Mr. Mengucci said.

Or to put it in even more understandable terms:

“Does lowering the maximum limit on your credit card save you any money?” said Travis Sharp, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which studies federal spending. “No, it does not.”

The core of DOGE’s operations was to manufacture pretend statistics so that Musk and friends could claim savings that weren’t real. It was how DOGE manufactured the appearance of progress while delivering essentially nothing. After DOGE initially claimed $55 billion in savings, the website’s own documentation only supported $16.5 billion. Media analysis then showed half of that was a single data entry error (that $8 billion instead of $8 million). A Politico analysis found DOGE had cut only $1.4 billion in actual spending — and even that money couldn’t reduce the deficit because it would be returned to agencies that were legally obligated to spend it. More than one-third of DOGE’s contract cancellations yielded no monetary savings at all.

The Garcia report traces a trajectory that any honest observer should find embarrassing:

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Elon Musk claimed he could reduce the federal deficit by eliminating “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, promising the destruction of the American social safety net. He began walking back these goals after President Trump’s election victory. In early 2025, Mr. Musk appeared on a variety of conservative-leaning podcasts and media outlets baselessly claiming that fake or stolen Social Security numbers led to more than $500 billion in fraud. Media analysis classified Mr. Musk’s claims about waste and fraud in the federal government as lacking evidence or misleading, saying that he misconstrued Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports or lacked basic understanding of the contracts in question.

So: $2 trillion, then $1 trillion, then $55 billion claimed, then $16.5 billion documented, then $1.4 billion confirmed, then spending went up anyway. That’s quite a trajectory for something that was sold as bringing Silicon Valley precision and efficiency to government.

Okay, fine — DOGE didn’t save much money. But did it at least make the government run better? Did it cut red tape, speed things up, make services less awful?

No. It did the opposite. And this is the part that should really bother anyone who genuinely wanted government reform.

The Garcia report documents in excruciating detail how DOGE’s “efficiency” measures actually added bureaucratic layers:

In one example, a State Department employee described a new requirement for a 250-word essay, extra forms, and days of work and approvals needed to hire a vendor for an embassy event, which previously would have taken a single day. In another, a NASA employee was required to write several detailed paragraphs justifying a purchase of fastening bolts. FDA employees have stated that DOGE requirements have caused significant delays in routine food monitoring tests for items like exposure to heavy metals because spending for every step—from purchasing lab supplies to paying to ship samples between labs—now requires separate department-level approval.

Much efficient. Very savings.

As one federal employee stated:

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to continue to work, which I fear is the point.”

Meanwhile, the services Americans actually rely on got measurably worse:

At the Social Security Administration (SSA), wait times for a callback ballooned to as high as two and a half hours for assistance between January and March 2025. Americans attempting to access the SSA website for assistance frequently found the webpage down or unresponsive as DOGE recklessly implemented changes while cutting information technology (IT) staff. SSA eventually discarded several of the supposed fraud checks implemented by DOGE because they significantly delayed claim processing without meaningfully combatting fraud. Career employees reportedly knew that DOGE’s anti-fraud measures would make little difference but were intimidated into silence for fear of losing their jobs. DOGE also implemented a new requirement for Social Security applicants to verify their identity in person instead of over the phone if they aren’t able to do so online, while at the same time closing regional and local offices and reducing the workforce at those offices that remained. More than six million seniors have to drive nearly 50 miles round trip to reach their nearest Social Security office, more than twice the average distance an elderly person expects to drive in a day.

This was a heist dressed up as a reform — and the damage to everyday Americans wasn’t a bug.

Layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) led to delays in clinical trials and getting new drugs to sick patients. Remaining FDA workers reported struggling to meet statutorily mandated schedules for approving both tobacco products and medical products after the Trump Administration announced 3,500 job cuts across the agency. At one point, FDA drug center leadership resorted to asking drug review staff to volunteer to work on contracting and acquisition tasks because the layoffs had eliminated the entire contracting office.

The Times talked to people on the receiving end of the small-dollar cuts that were DOGE’s actual handiwork. An organization providing counseling and rehabilitation services to torture survivors had to close its centers and stop paying 75% of its staff. A program that sent museum staff into low-income Baltimore schools to teach parents about child development was terminated by form letter because it “no longer serves the interest of the United States.” Research projects were killed at the stage where data had been collected but results hadn’t been published, rendering the government’s entire prior investment wasted. And the impact on American people was real.

Mr. Roehm said he was particularly concerned about possible suicides — around a quarter of the torture victims the group served had recently experienced suicidal ideation.

“We know for sure that survivors we are no longer able to serve are suffering,” he said.

Those dollar amounts were small, compared with DOGE’s largest claims. That is, in effect, how DOGE ultimately saved so little but still caused so much disruption. For small business and local communities, relatively modest sums had major effects.

“It’s the small numbers that hurt people,” said Lisa Shea Mundt, whose company, the Pulse of GovCon, tracks government contracts.

This is how DOGE managed to simultaneously save almost nothing and cause enormous disruption: the big-dollar claims were fake, and the real cuts targeted things that were individually small but collectively devastating to the people who depended on them.

And then there’s the corruption angle, which is where this moves from incompetence into something much uglier.

DOGE staff were embedded at nearly every executive branch agency, and many of them were associates or employees of Musk’s own companies. The conflicts of interest were staggering and barely concealed. The Garcia report details how DOGE staff were involved in firing FDA investigators responsible for oversight of Musk’s biotech company Neuralink. DOGE took aim at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which just happened to be the agency that would directly oversee a mobile payments function Musk wanted to add to X. The DOGE staffer who oversaw firings at the CFPB owned approximately $365,000 in shares of companies regulated by the Bureau. Executive branch employees are generally prohibited from working on matters in which they hold a personal stake, but there’s no indication this person took any such precautions.

Elon Musk and DOGE’s active involvement in knee-capping agencies with which he has a direct conflict makes clear that Musk, DOGE, and the broader Trump Administration are focused on weakening accountability for the American people while advancing their own interests.

DOGE staff at the IRS initiated mass firing of skilled specialists responsible for auditing the complex tax filings of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The Congressional Budget Office has found that reductions in funding for IRS tax enforcement reduce federal revenues. So DOGE’s “efficiency” move at the IRS will likely cost the government more in uncollected taxes than it could ever have saved.

The same pattern held at the CFPB, which since 2011 had received $7.3 billion in funding but returned over $21 billion to consumers through enforcement actions — a three-fold return on investment. DOGE gutted it anyway. The IRS Direct File program — a free electronic tax filing service that 86% of users said increased their trust in the IRS and was projected to save taxpayers $11 billion once fully operational — was killed after lobbying by for-profit tax preparation companies.

And perhaps most alarming were the data security violations that I’ve written about multiple times. A whistleblower from SSA reported that DOGE operatives had accessed a database containing “the entire country’s Social Security information,” copied it to a high-risk external system, and violated a court order barring them from continued access. The DOJ later had to file “corrections” to prior testimony from senior SSA staff, admitting that DOGE employees had in fact accessed SSA’s most sensitive data and covertly signed a “Voter Data Agreement” with a political advocacy group that sought to overturn election results. And here’s one I had missed:

DOGE’s forced access to Treasury data was particularly noteworthy as a Treasury threat intelligence analysis recommended that DOGE staff “be placed under insider threat monitoring and alerting after their access to payment systems is revoked. Continued access to any payment systems by DOGE members, even ‘read only,’ may have posed the single greatest insider threat risk the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has ever faced.”

At the NLRB, a whistleblower reported that DOGE operatives sent enormous amounts of sensitive case information outside the government to unknown recipients — information that companies like Musk’s SpaceX could use to “get insights into damaging testimony, union leadership, legal strategies and internal data.” OPM’s own Inspector General found that DOGE employees flouted cybersecurity and privacy laws, and that Trump appointees at OPM overrode career civil servants’ warnings about security to force implementation of DOGE’s systems, which may have resulted in a massive national security threat:

Experts have shown evidence raising concerns of potential Russian and Chinese access to OPM servers shortly after DOGE created the government-wide email infrastructure. Separately, information received by Committee Democratic staff indicated that DOGE employees lowered all firewall protections at OPM to enable the exfiltration of data for use outside of a government environment.

Yikes.

And while they were gutting agencies that protect Americans, they also gutted the agencies actually responsible for catching waste, fraud, and abuse. Offices of Inspectors General — the very watchdogs whose mission aligns with what DOGE claimed to be doing — were starved of resources. One OIG lost 20% of its staff and was operating with “the fewest number of auditors in decades.” The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of politicians accused of corruption, was purged of all but a fraction of its former employees.

The Garcia report’s conclusion is perhaps the most honest assessment of the whole debacle:

Many analyses have referred to the DOGE disaster as a failure, and DOGE did indeed fail at its stated mission of meaningfully reducing spending and increasing government efficiency. But in the Trump Administration’s vindictive, ideologically motivated, and pointless quest to break the federal government, drive out talented and committed public servants, and make flashy promises of cutting fraud while enriching themselves and their wealthy donors, DOGE was a resounding success.

Now, the Garcia report is a Democratic minority report, and the most committed DOGE defenders will dismiss it on those grounds alone. But the most devastating evidence comes from DOGE’s own website — which kept quietly deleting incorrect entries — from the Times’ independent analysis, from a defense contractor’s CEO telling his shareholders the “savings” were meaningless, from the GAO finding multiple violations of the Impoundment Control Act, from OPM’s own Inspector General, and from the DOJ having to file corrections to its own court filings.

You don’t need to trust a single Democratic politician to see what happened here. You just need to look at the numbers.

Oh, and yes: Musk himself admitted in a podcast interview with MAGA influencer and former DOGE employee Katie Miller (wife of Stephen) in December that DOGE had fallen short and said that if he could go back in time, he wouldn’t do it again, preferring instead to have “worked on my companies.” The man who was going to supposedly save the republic from government bloat decided his actual companies were more worth his time. Musk’s public admission probably shouldn’t carry too much weight either way — he knows DOGE was publicly perceived as a failure and he’s distancing himself — but it is a fitting coda.

This whole thing was billed not just by MAGA faithful, but also by many in the media, as an expected triumph of private sector brilliance over government incompetence. What it actually demonstrated is that when you hand the keys to people who don’t understand how government works, don’t respect the people who do, and have massive personal financial conflicts of interest, you get chaos, corruption, and a bigger bill for taxpayers. The people who were making government work better — the original U.S. Digital Service employees who were building more efficient systems and better websites — got fired and replaced with Musk acolytes who couldn’t tell the difference between a contract ceiling and actual spending.

The MAGA world continues to pretend DOGE was a ruthless cost-cutting machine. The receipts say otherwise: it failed in every direction except enriching corporations connected to the administration. It was a looting operation dressed up as reform.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/doge-didnt-cut-government-waste-it-was-government-waste/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533837

Posted by Karl Bode

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533919&preview=true&preview_id=533919

Brendan Carr is once again doing Brendan Carr stuff.

Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters that tell the truth about Trump’s disastrous war in Iran. In a post over at Elon Musk’s right wing propaganda website, Carr insists that news outlets that are “running hoaxes and news distortions” (read: telling the truth) about the war will face potential headaches when their licenses come up for renewal:

If you can’t read that, it says:

Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.

The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.

And frankly, changing course is in their own business interests since trust in legacy media has now fallen to an all time low of just 9% and are ratings disasters.

The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.

It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news.

When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen.

Time for change!

That’s certainly a lot of tough-talking bullshit.

Carr’s only authority comes over broadcast affiliates (not national media companies or cable TV outlets), most of which are already owned by Republicans and already kiss Trump’s ass (because they want to merge). The FCC hasn’t denied a license renewal in decades, and any attempt to do so would result in a massive, protracted First Amendment legal mess that the FCC would be extremely likely to lose.

Carr’s actual goal for this kind of stuff is three fold.

One, he’s putting on a show for our mad, idiot king that Carr is being a good boy. Two, he’s trolling the press so they’ll hyperventilate about his behaviors; those stories then advertise to the MAGA base the false impression that Carr is doing useful and bold culture war stuff (so he can potentially run for higher office). They’ll assume it all must be useful and important because he’s upsetting people of intellect, importance, and conscience, which they enjoy.

But most importantly it sends a message to media companies that they should get in line with the Trump administration or face costly and expensive (no matter how pointless) legal annoyances. Of course those threats haven’t really been needed, because most U.S. media companies (and big corporations) have been happy to bribe the president or kiss his ass anyway.

That sort of feckless journalistic failure in the face of power is why so much of the public has lost faith in U.S. news, not because they’ve historically been too critical of war or too tough on wealth and power.

While these sorts of threats certainly are dangerous, Carr is a monumental clown who is putting on a big show to try and pretend he’s a person of substance and power doing important things.

Meanwhile Trump is upset that some news outlets have been making it clear he was too stupid to understand the evolving nature of low cost, modern drone warfare (despite all the evidence in Ukraine). In his own post at his own right wing propaganda website, Trump went off on a local rambling tirade about Iran somehow misleading the entirety of U.S. media:

That one says:

Iran has long been known as a Master of Media Manipulation and Public Relations. They are Militarily ineffective and weak, but are really good at “feeding” the very appreciative Fake News Media false information. Now, A.I. has become another Disinformation weapon that Iran uses, quite well, considering they are being annihilated by the day. They showed phony “Kamikaze Boats,” shooting at various Ships at Sea, which looks wonderful, powerful, and vicious, but these Boats don’t exist — It’s all false information to show how “tough” their already defeated Military is! The five U.S. Refueling Planes that were supposedly struck down and badly damaged, according to The Wall Street Journal’s false reporting, and others, are all in service, with the exception of one, which will soon be flying the skies. Buildings and Ships that are shown to be on fire are not — It’s FAKE NEWS, generated by A.I. For instance, Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media, shows our great USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier, one of the largest and most prestigious Ships in the World, burning uncontrollably in the Ocean. Not only was it not burning, it was not even shot at — Iran knows better than to do that! The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information! The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they “win” are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets. The Radical Leftwing Press knows this full well, but continues to go forward with false stories and LIES. That’s why their Approval Rating is so low, and I can win a Presidential Election, IN A LANDSLIDE, getting only 5% positive Press — They have no credibility! I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic “News” Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, “FIRED.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

These are not the behaviors of competent, confidence people who believe things are going well. They’re the sad gyrations of pathetic men who know Trump is on historic trajectory to be the worst and least popular President in U.S. history (with ample room to fall). No amount of posturing can hide it.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533919&preview=true&preview_id=533919

Posted by Mike Masnick

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/16/a-reddit-post-an-ai-hallucination-and-two-lawyers-who-never-checked-citations-walk-into-a-dog-custody-case/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533908

We’ve been covering the growing parade of lawyers submitting AI-hallucinated case citations to courts for a while now. It keeps happening, and courts keep having to deal with it. But the pattern is usually the same: a careless attorney uses ChatGPT to draft a brief, the fake citations get spotted by the opposing side or the judge, and sanctions follow. Embarrassing, but contained.

What happened in a California state appellate case decided this month is something far more insane (found via Bluesky). A hallucinated citation traveled through an entire legal proceeding — from a Reddit blog post to a client’s declaration to an attorney’s letter to the opposing attorney’s draft of the court order to the judge’s signature to appellate filings — and at no point along the way did anyone bother to check whether the case actually existed.

Oh, and the whole thing was about custody of a dog named Kyra.

The published opinion from California’s Fourth Appellate District lays out the chain of absurd failures. The court published the opinion specifically, it says, to emphasize a point that really shouldn’t need emphasizing:

We publish this opinion to emphasize that courts and attorneys alike have a responsibility to protect the legal system against distortion by fabricated law, particularly in this new era of hallucinated citations generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools. In a system of precedents that is designed to achieve consistency, predictability, and adherence to the rule of law, the judiciary cannot function properly unless judges and lawyers confirm the authenticity of cited authorities and review them to evaluate their holdings and reasoning. When the participants fail to perform this basic function, it compromises these institutional values and diminishes faith in the judicial process.

Here’s how the case got there: Joan Pablo Torres Campos (Torres) and Leslie Ann Munoz dissolved their domestic partnership in 2022. Two years later, Torres wanted shared custody and visitation of Kyra (the dog). Munoz, represented pro bono by her cousin — attorney Roxanne Chung Bonar — opposed. In her opposition, Bonar cited two cases: Marriage of Twigg and Marriage of Teegarden.

Neither case exists. Or rather, the actual citations Bonar gave correspond to completely unrelated cases — one is a criminal case, and the other is a spousal support case from a different year with a different citation. But as cited by Bonar, with the holdings she described, these cases were pure fiction.

And where did the fake citations come from? Apparently a Reddit blog post. By someone named… Sassafras Patterdale. I am not joking:

Bonar did not submit any declaration of her own, but she submitted one from her client Munoz. Munoz explained that the Twigg case was discussed in a Reddit article a paralegal friend had sent her, and Munoz did not realize the case was fictitious. The Reddit article was attached as an exhibit to Munoz’s declaration. It was authored by “Sassafras Patterdale,” who was identified as “a blogger, podcaster, and animal rescuer, who writes about divorce, custody, and the messy, beautiful lives we weave.” The article was about pet custody battles. It cited “Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926” as a “watershed” California Supreme Court case holding “that custody determinations must consider the emotional well, being [sic] and stability of the parties.”

The Reddit article did not include the parallel reporter citations and date of decision for Twigg that were included in Bonar’s opposition to the second motion to reinstate the appeal. Neither Bonar’s response to our order nor Munoz’s declaration explained where this additional fictitious information came from.

And then Torres’s own lawyer — a reminder: he’s the one who filed the lawsuit to get visitation with the dog — drafted the proposed court order and included the same fake citations the opposing party had used, without verifying them either.

And the court signed it. Because of course it did.

Torres’s counsel submitted a proposed Findings and Order After Hearing, which the court approved as conforming to its oral ruling. The order cited the fictional Twigg and Teegarden cases as follows:

“The Court notes the follow[ing] cases: Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926 and Marriage of Teegarden (1995) 33 Cal.App.4th 1572 [(Teegarden)], in which the Court has to take the well-being and stability of the parties involved when deciding pet visitation and custody….”

So to recap: the fake citation originated on Reddit, traveled into the defendant client’s declaration, was used by the defendant client’s attorney, was then included by the opposing attorney in the draft order, and was signed by the judge. Nobody — not either attorney, not the judge — looked up the cases.

But that’s just the warm-up.

Torres appealed. His appeal was dismissed for failure to file an opening brief. He moved to reinstate it. In her opposition to that motion, Bonar — still representing Munoz — cited the fake cases again, this time telling the appellate court: “This isn’t new, courts decide these based on what’s best for everyone involved (Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926; In re Marriage of Teegarden (1995) 33 Cal.App.4th 1572).”

Torres filed a second motion to reinstate, and this time finally pointed out that these were “invented case law.”

Now, a reasonable response to being told your citations are fabricated might be to quietly check, discover the problem, and apologize to the court — ideally with some groveling, in hopes of limited sanctions.

Bonar, however, chose a different path. She doubled down. Hard.

Bonar filed another opposition on behalf of Munoz. The opposition stated: “Appellant’s Claim of Fabricated Case Law is Baseless.” It asserted: “This is a grave accusation, but it is entirely unfounded and reflects Appellant’s own failure to conduct basic legal research. Both cases are valid, published precedents, and Appellant’s inability to locate them underscores the incompetence that led to his appeal’s dismissal.”

And then she went further, providing additional citation details for the fake Twigg case — parallel reporter citations, a specific date of decision — none of which appeared in the original Reddit article and all of which were also completely fabricated:

“Marriage of Twigg (1984) 34 Cal.3d 926: This is a legitimate California Supreme Court case, reported at 34 Cal.3d 926, 195 Cal.Rptr. 718, 670 P.2d 340, decided on July 5, 1984. The ruling addresses custody determinations in dissolution proceedings, emphasizing the importance of the emotional well-being and stability of the parties involved.”

None of those parallel citations correspond to a Twigg case. No California case by that name was decided on July 5, 1984. The additional details were just as fake as the original citation — almost certainly generated by an AI tool when Bonar went looking for backup. During oral arguments (i.e., well after the judge had already issued an order to show cause about the fictional citations) she finally admitted maybe she had used AI:

At oral argument, Bonar claimed she could not remember where this additional fictitious citation information came from. She acknowledged she did not have a paid subscription to a legal research service at the time, and she was using other online resources including AI for this purpose. She also conceded she may have obtained fictitious information about Twigg and Teegarden using AI tools.

But the cherry on top — the part where you have to put the ruling down and go for a walk just to remind yourself that some other part of the world is good — is that in this same filing where she doubled down on fabricated case law with additional fabricated details, Bonar accused opposing counsel of being the incompetent one and mocks them for being unable to search and find the non-existent cases.

Appellant’s assertion that no such case or parties exist is incorrect; a simple search for ‘Teegarden marriage California’ reveals the 1986 decision involving Anne and Byron Teegarden. This misrepresentation not only fails to prove misconduct but exposes Appellant’s counsel’s deficient preparation, which mirrors the neglect that caused the default.

Again: she called the lawyer who (eventually) correctly identified her fake citations incompetent for failing to find cases that don’t exist.

The court was not amused. It hit Bonar with $5,000 in sanctions — significantly more than the $1,500 that the same court imposed in a recent similar case — specifically because she “persisted in and aggravated the misconduct by providing additional fictitious citation information” and “still has not been completely forthcoming with this court.” The opinion is also being forwarded to the State Bar of California.

As for Torres, the appellant who did finally correctly identify the fake citations? He lost anyway. The court found that because his own lawyer drafted and submitted the order containing the fake citations without objecting or verifying them, he forfeited his right to challenge those citations on appeal. In other words: his lawyer helped propagate the hallucinated citations by including them in the draft order, and he can’t now complain about the very thing his lawyer failed to catch.

Torres forfeited his claim of error both by his affirmative conduct and his inaction. Although Munoz and Bonar were responsible for improperly citing these fictitious authorities in the first place, Torres’s own counsel affirmatively drafted and submitted the proposed order with these citations that was ultimately signed by the family court. And even though his own counsel drafted the order, Torres failed to object to the court’s reliance on these citations or call the court’s attention to the issue.

There’s a lesson here that goes well beyond “lawyers should verify their citations” — though they really, desperately should. This case shows how hallucinated AI output achieves a kind of credibility laundering as it passes through the system. The fake citation looked more legitimate in the client’s declaration because it had been in a blog post. More legitimate in the court order because it had been in the declaration. More legitimate in the appellate filing because it had been in the court order. At each step, someone assumed that someone earlier in the chain had already done the checking. Nobody had.

In a legal system built entirely on the idea that citations to precedent mean something — that every case cited in an order actually happened and actually stands for the proposition claimed — this kind of cascading failure is really, really bad. And as AI tools get better at generating plausible-sounding legal citations — complete with reporter volumes, page numbers, and dates — the obligation on every participant in the system to actually verify what they’re citing becomes that much more important.

The court itself apparently recognized that its “please just check your citations” message might need some institutional reinforcement. Its footnote at the end of the sanctions section quietly recommends that the Judicial Council consider adopting formal guidelines or rules requiring verification of citations — particularly in party-drafted orders submitted for a judge’s signature. Which is, in hindsight, an obvious hole in the system. But it took Sassafras Patterdale, a Reddit post, and a dog named Kyra to expose it.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/16/a-reddit-post-an-ai-hallucination-and-two-lawyers-who-never-checked-citations-walk-into-a-dog-custody-case/

https://www.techdirt.com/?p=533908