Tag: judges

Federal Appellate Court Rules In Favor Of AI Child Porn

While proponents of artificial intelligence (”AI”) paint an idyllic picture of how the groundbreaking technology is poised to eliminate the ills plaguing society, their unbridled optimism continues to be met with skepticism by their opponents. From fears over the economic repercussions of the rapid loss of jobs that advancements in AI may not be able to outpace to the technology’s applications as the framework for the apparatus of a panopticon surveillance state, concerns over the impact of AI mar the utopian vision its advocates have with an even more dystopian outlook of the future it will usher in. A look inside of the Pandora’s Box being opened by AI was glimpsed following a decision by a federal appeals court ruling in favor of protecting AI-generated child pornography.

On August 25th, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled thatthe First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privately possess images and videos of child sexual abuse created using AI, so long as the child sex abuse material (”CSAM”) does not depict a real child and remains in the privacy of the possessor’s home. The federal appellate court issued the unanimous ruling from a panel of three U.S. circuit judges: Judge John Z. Lee, Judge Doris L. Pryor, and Judge Joshua P. Kolar. The case came to the court in the matter of U.S. v. Anderegg, a title that now stands poised to challenge longstanding Supreme Court precedent governing how the law addresses CSAM.

The pivotal case centers on Steven Anderegg, 42, of Holmen, Wisconsin. Anderegg was arrested in May 2024 on suspicion of mass production of AI-generated CSAM. Prosecutors alleged that he used an AI image generator called Stable Diffusion to create over 13,000 images depicting child sex abuse by entering prompts into the platform, including thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors. In a press release announcing his arrest, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed Anderegg described how he created the AI CSAM through the text-to-image generative AI model in a chat with a 15-year-old boy on the social media platform Instagram. The DOJ press release chronicled how Anderegg not only described how he generated the images to the minor, but that he sent the boy several AI-generated images of minors displaying their genitals. Following their exchange, Instagram reported Anderegg’s account to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (”NCMEC”) through its CyberTipline. The NCMEC followed suit by alerting federal authorities.

On May 15th, 2024, a federal grand jury in the Western District of Wisconsin returned an indictment against Anderegg, charging him with producing, distributing, and possessing obscene visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and transferring obscene materials to a minor under the age of 16. Under those charges, Anderegg faces a maximum penalty of 70 years in prison and a mandatory minimum of five years.

Ahead of his trial originally scheduled to begin on February 18th, 2025, Anderegg’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the four counts brought against him on September 23rd, 2024. His defense counsel cited a myriad of federal cases in support of their argument that the statutes Anderegg was charged under were unconstitutional because the AI CSAM he created, possessed, and shared did not depict any actual children, thus the charges violated his rights under the First Amendment.

Keep reading

US Deports Ex-Ecuadorian Minister Tied to Cartel Murder of Presidential Candidate

ICE overrode judge’s decision blocking José Serrano’s removal.

Ex-Ecuadorian minister José Serrano, accused of aiding a cartel murder presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in 2023, has been deported by ICE.

Ecuadorian conservative Presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated at a campaign rally in August 2023.

Fernando Villavicencio was reportedly shot in the head three times.

Supporters of the popular conservative, Fernando Villavicencio, managed to capture a suspect after the assassination.

A grenade was also found at the scene.

The criminal gang “Los Lobos,” based in Ecuador, later claimed responsibility for the assassination.

José Serrano’s removal took place even after a US judge blocked Serrano’s removal arguing he may be tortured if returned to the South American nation.

Keep reading

Judge Halts Another Democrat Scheme To Rig State Congressional Maps

Democrats have done a lot of weaselly things in the pursuit of power, but their ploy to grab a congressional seat by a quick and crooked change to Maryland’s constitution is a real doozy. 

A Maryland judge this week saw through the legally tortured redistricting scheme and put the kibosh on the hastily made ballot question. 

Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Robert J. Thompson on Wednesday enjoined the Maryland State Board of Elections from putting an amendment question on the Nov. 3 ballot that the legislature unlawfully conceived. 

“Because the legislature did not follow the very laws it enacted, the court finds the enactment of HB2100 to be legally deficient,” Thompson wrote in his pointed opinion. The Board of Elections immediately appealed the decision to the Maryland Supreme Court. 

Shrugging Off the Law 

The rushed plan effectively seeks to wipe out the Old Line State’s sole Republican-held congressional district, just as Democrats tried and failed to do in Virginia earlier this year. 

As court records spell out, the General Assembly just last session passed a bill that established new content requirements for statewide ballot questions and set a July 1 deadline for amendment questions to be submitted to the Board of Elections. Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat with presidential aspirations, backed the Senate bill. The law went into effect on June 1. 

A month and a half later, Moore issued a proclamation calling the General Assembly into “Extraordinary Session” to begin on Aug. 3. The purpose? To “pass legislation to amend the State constitution to clarify and reaffirm that the provisions which govern the requirements of our State legislative districts to not apply to Maryland’s congressional districts.” 

But the special session convened more than a month after the July 1 ballot certification deadline. The General Assembly disregarded a law that it recently had passed. It was fresh of mind. They couldn’t have forgotten about it. 

Keep reading

How Endless Injunctions Are Manufacturing Election Chaos

SCOTUS dragged its feet on an emergency motion, finally clearing the way on August 24 (Trump v. California) by staying an injunction against EO 14399 on technical standing grounds and ‘ripeness’. Everyone thought the fight was over – now the next battle has unfolded.

While the Supreme Court focused on docket No. 26A124, a separate, standing injunction was sitting in League of Women Voters v. Trump. Here is what actually went down after August 24:

· Aug 24 (Emergency Motion to Reconsider): The federal government rushed to District Judge Indira Talwani, using SCOTUS’s brand-new ruling to vacate the second injunction.

· Aug 25/26 (Injunction Lifted): Judge Talwani agreed with SCOTUS’s logic, vacating the August 11 preliminary injunction because challenging the order before official rules were published was deemed “premature”.

· Aug 26 (The Rule Drops): With the court barriers down, the USPS immediately published its Final Rule in the Federal Register. In response, the League of Women Voters and state AGs instantly filed supplemental complaints and NEW emergency motions for a TRO against the finalized rule.

· Sept 3 (The Next Showdown): Judge Talwani scheduled a hearing for September 3, 2026, to rule on these new TRO motions against the USPS.

SCOTUS didn’t end the fight – it triggered a lightning-fast procedural reset. The administration published the rule, and the plaintiffs filed new emergency filings targeting the finalized regulation.

While the plaintiffs argue that the timing and magnitude of these executive requests will adversely affect election administration, the plaintiffs themselves are directly contributing to the timing issues, confusion, and chaos.

By continually dragging these measures through endless litigation, they keep the entire country in a perpetual state of limbo – leaving voters, election workers, and government agencies trapped in a web of uncertainty over whether rules will stand or if another TRO will drop.

The judicial process was designed for checks and balances, not perpetual obstruction that turns the rule of law into a chaotic mess.

Unite4Freedom has consistently used existing state and federal laws as the bedrock for their arguments and efforts to achieve valid, transparent, and auditable elections.

While the administration is stepping up to implement common-sense measures necessary to bolster election security and verify voter integrity, certain individuals, political parties, and special interest organizations appear to have an extreme aversion to any meaningful improvement in election administration, security, or validity

…we have to ask ourselves why.

Keep reading

Judge Throws Out 9/11 Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Confession Days Before 25th Anniversary of September 11 Terror Attacks

A judge threw out a key confession made by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohmmed just two weeks before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks.

This is the latest blow to the federal government.

Recall that in July 2024, under the Biden Regime, three September 11 masterminds reached plea deals with the US government, the Department of Defense said.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his co-conspirators Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawhi will avoid the death penalty in a pre-trial plea deal reached.

An appeals court later canceled that agreement, so the death penalty is back on the table.

3,000 Americans were killed in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon, and a downed plane in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

On Friday, the New York Post reported that a military judge tossed out a confession by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Keep reading

Minnesota Just Got Handed a Loss Following Its Absurd Request Over ICE Agent Christian Castro

Minnesota has been fighting for the longest time to override Texas’s laws surrounding the incarceration of ICE agent Christian Castro. But a judge just reminded it that all the requests in the world from Gov. Tim Walz will fall on deaf ears when they don’t make any sense.

As you know by this point, Minnesota has been showing absolute fury against ICE agents. Ever since President Donald Trump ordered agents to enter the state to arrest violent illegal immigrants, Mayor Jacob Frey has been pushing back, riling up his citizens to angrily protest their every move.

Since that time, we’ve seen a number of shootings after citizens went on the attack against ICE agents. Renee Good, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and Alex Pretti were all killed trying to act against ICE while they were trying to do their job. And rather than coordinating efforts with them, Frey actually made things even worse – at one point even saying that ICE needs to get the (censored) out of our city.”

Earlier this year, an arrest warrant was issued for ICE officer Christian Castro by the state, who was taken into custody shortly thereafter in Cameron County, Texas. He was formally charged with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime after being accused of firing into a Minneapolis home and striking a Venezuelan national’s leg.

Now, this is an incident that could’ve easily been put under investigation by the Department of Justice, but Minnesota decided to push the matter into overdrive. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz had been demanding the extradition of Castro to the state, and even making such demands as public as possible to look good for his audience.

Following suit, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a lawsuit last week, citing that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott needed to pay attention to the request at hand, and demanded the judge issue a temporary restraining order to prevent Cameron County from releasing Castro.

“Gov. Abbott’s withholding of the rendition warrant threatens to deprive Minnesota of its constitutional right to Castro’s return,” Ellison noted in a public statement again. 

Madness, isn’t it? The good news, however, is that Abbott wasn’t having any of it.

Keep reading

Federal Appeals Court Rejects Democrat Rep. LaMonica McIver’s Immunity Defense After She Assaulted ICE Agents

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected Democrat Rep. LaMonica McIver’s immunity defense after she assaulted ICE agents at a Newark ICE detention center last year.

The Third Circuit Court of Appeals rejected LaMonica McIver’s argument that she was immune from prosecution because of the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause.

This is the latest legal set back for LaMonica McIver.

Last year, a federal judge declined to toss out the federal charges against Rep. McIver.

Politico reported:

Rep. LaMonica McIver is not immune from prosecution for her contact with ICE officials during a heated scrum at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall detention facility, even though it occurred during a legislative investigation, a federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday.

“The charged conduct … is unambiguously non-legislative,” 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Cindy Chung, a Biden appointee, wrote in a 2-1 opinion joined by Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee.

McIver is facing three federal charges related to alleged assaults on ICE officials and interference with them during a May 2025 oversight visit to Delaney Hall. McIver and two other Democratic lawmakers were present when federal officials moved into a small crowd to arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who joined them on the oversight visit. The confrontation escalated and became physical, and McIver was ultimately charged with making physical contact with the officials.

The 3rd Circuit ruling sustains the bulk of the criminal case against the Democratic lawmaker despite her protestation that the charges were brought for political purposes. McIver pointed to commentary by Trump, his allies and the former federal prosecutor who brought the case at the time: Alina Habba, a former Trump personal lawyer and current White House aide.

In June 2025, a federal grand jury returned a 3-count indictment charging Democrat Rep. LaMonica McIver with forcibly impeding and interfering with federal law enforcement officers at the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark.

McIver is facing a maximum of 17 years in prison for all three counts.

Keep reading

Write Code, Go to Prison. Slaughter Children, Get a Pardon: Welcome to American “Justice”

If you want to understand the true nature of the American justice system, look at who it pardons and who it cages. This is a regime that hands full clemency to executives who admit, in writing, to laundering money for hackers and drug cartels, while it hunts down software developers who never touched a single dollar that wasn’t theirs, who had zero victims, and then buries them under decades of federal time. The hypocrisy is not incidental. It is the modus operandi of the machine: the state does not actually care about fraud, laundering, or victims. It cares about control, and control is exactly what open-source financial privacy takes away from it.

We said it after Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht in January 2025: the pardon was a great start, but the debt owed to the rest of the political prisoners rotting in federal cages was nowhere near paid. Nineteen months later, that debt has been settled only for the defendants with the most useful political connections, while the actual innovators, the ones who built tools instead of stealing from innocent people, are still being ground up by the exact same machine.

Take for instance, Roman Storm, who is still fighting for his freedom for the “crime” of writing code. A Manhattan jury convicted him in August 2025 on a single count tied to Tornado Cash, a privacy protocol, and deadlocked on the far more serious and entirely unprovable money-laundering and sanctions charges, and rather than take that hung jury as the warning it was, federal prosecutors are pushing for an October 2026 retrial on the very counts they couldn’t get a conviction on the first time. This is happening while the Justice Department’s own March 2026 report to Congress admits that lawful Americans have every right to use mixers to protect their financial privacy. The state knows it is prosecuting a man for building something it has since conceded is legal to use. It is pursuing him anyway. Storm’s own team has called this what it is, an attempt to make writing code a crime, and this past week Storm pointed out that if prosecutors’ theory of liability were applied honestly, it would put Google and OpenAI in a federal courtroom right alongside him.

If you want to be even more angry, read about Dexter Taylor’s case. Taylor is still in a maximum-security cage for building firearms in his own apartment that he never sold, never trafficked, and never used to harm a single human being. He is three years into a ten-year sentence, parole-eligible only in 2032, still appealing a conviction his attorney says could take years and go all the way to the Supreme Court. A software engineer with zero prior criminal history is serving longer than plenty of people convicted of manslaughter, for a hobby with no victim, and the state has shown no interest in correcting that.

Ian Freeman already lost his appeal, which is what happens when the machine runs its full course, and the state simply wins by default. Freeman helped people convert cash into Bitcoin through Bitcoin ATMs and church-run kiosks, and for that he was locked in a state-run cage after a federal appellate court affirmed both his conviction and his sentence in the summer of 2025. He is still in that cage today for giving people a way to hold their own money outside the banking cartel.

Keep reading

Man Accused of Threatening Mass Shootings at Five North Carolina Schools Released from Jail Days Before Classes Resume

A Charlotte man charged with making detailed threats to carry out mass shootings at five public schools has been released from jail just three days before students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district were scheduled to return to class.

The man’s release has sparked outrage among parents concerned for their children’s safety.

Drew Andres Owens, 33, was released from the Mecklenburg County Jail at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday after posting a reduced bond, according to jail records obtained by the New York Post, with the new school year beginning today.

Owens faces five felony counts of communicating threats of mass violence on educational property and has pleaded not guilty. The case remains pending.

Court documents explain that Owens allegedly sent emails on February 15, 2025, threatening to “slaughter staff and students” at West Charlotte High School, Ardrey Kell High School, Community House Middle School, and Hawk Ridge Elementary School.

A separate indictment involves a mailed threat against Garinger High School.

The affidavit claimed a student armed with two shotguns and an AR-15 would carry out the attack, though school administrators found no such student enrolled.

Owens’ own father, a West Charlotte High School ROTC instructor, confirmed to police that his son was responsible for the threats.

The Post reports:

Darryl Owens allegedly told authorities that his son had harassed relatives, neighbors and family friends after being removed from the family home in 2021, and had sent unsigned emails and letters threatening to kill or shoot people at multiple locations.

The father told police he had previously obtained a restraining order against his son, that Owens had been arrested for violating it and that the order was later dismissed.

He also told police that Owens had recently sat outside neighbors’ homes and photographed his car at West Charlotte High School “to try to lure him outside.”

His original combined bond of roughly $200,000 was later reduced to $60,000 for the primary case.

Owens is reportedly under electronic monitoring and ordered to stay away from school campuses.

Parents don’t think that is enough.

“Is he going to show up at one of the schools? It’s not good,” one parent told local station WSOC. “I’m not going to feel at ease; I’m not going to pretend it’s OK.”

Another parent told the station, “It’s really unnerving for some of us. We live in the area where he knows people, and again it’s not positive; it’s scary.”

“He’s out, and that’s it, and the rest of us have to deal with it, and teachers have to go to school on Tuesday and deal with it,” they added.

Keep reading

Leftist Obama Judge Indira Talwani Goes Completely ROGUE – Spits in the Face of the Supreme Court and Rules Trump’s U.S. Postal Service is in “Complete Noncompliance” With Her Block on Mail-In Ballot Security Rules

Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani escalated her war against President Donald Trump’s election-integrity agenda Tuesday, declaring that the U.S. Postal Service violated her nationwide injunction by completing new security regulations for federal mail-in ballots.

Just one day after the United States Supreme Court UPHELD, for now, President Trump’s executive order and the new U.S. Postal Service rules designed to secure America’s mail-in ballots, this Obama-appointed radical in Boston just ruled that Trump’s Postal Service has VIOLATED her earlier injunction.

She’s going off. Aggressively. Accusing the Trump team of “complete noncompliance.”

This is pure judicial warfare against the American people and against free and fair elections.

Talwani’s nationwide injunction (entered earlier this month in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump) explicitly barred the USPS Defendants “from implementing, giving effect to, or enforcing Section 3 of Executive Order No. 14399… or otherwise initiating or completing rulemaking to promulgate the specific regulations outlined in Section 3(b)(i)-(v) or (d) of the EO for the November 3, 2026 or any earlier election.”

On Friday evening, August 21, the USPS completed the rulemaking process. They sent a Final Rule titled “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections” to the Office of the Federal Register, with an immediate effective date of August 21 and publication set for August 26.

The Final Rule itself nods to the injunctions and states the Postal Service “will not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from those injunctions.”

Keep reading