Law

In July, Carlos Watson was convicted on fraud charges for misleading investors with falsified financial records, inflated audience numbers, and made-up business deals. The New York Times reported in 2021 that his co-founder, Samir Rao, had impersonated a YouTube exec on a call with bankers about a potential $40 million investment.

Less than three months after the BitMEX crypto exchange was hit with a $100 million fine for money laundering – and hours after he pardoned ex-Nikola CEO Trevor Milton for defrauding investors in his EV company – Trump issued pardons to Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Dalo and Samuel Reed, CNBC reported Friday. The three men had previously pled guilty to several felony charges related to money laundering and failure to police the exchange.

Rep. Ritchie Torres and the House Democrats, who are reportedly drafting a bill entitled “The HOUTHI PC SMALL GROUP Act” that would criminalize the use of unsecured messaging apps to send classified information. (Per Axios, it’s an acronym for “Homeland Operations and Unilateral Tactics Halting Incursions: Preventing Coordinated Subversion, Military Aggression and Lawless Levies Granting Rogue Operatives Unchecked Power.”)

Elon Musk has publicly railed against Delaware’s corporate law as its judges ruled against his wishes, moving the incorporation of Tesla and other companies out of state. Now, CNBC says a January WSJ report that Meta was considering moving its incorporation spurred immediate action from the governor on a new bill, SB 21, that might make its laws friendlier to folks like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

After a heated hearing in a California district court this morning, Judge William Alsup ruled that the Trump administration must offer to reinstate thousands of federal workers who were fired as part of the DOGE cuts. There were a lot of things that irked the judge, though most predictably, he did not like that an Office of Personnel Management official ghosted the court after being ordered to testify. (“I’m getting mad,” the judge said.)

Former Gizmodo EIC Dan Ackerman’s lawsuit alleging that Apple, the Tetris company, screenwriter Noah Pink and others ripped off his 2016 book, The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World, for their 2023 Apple TV Plus movie has been dismissed. Reuters reports Ackerman’s lawyer said he will appeal the decision.

Test administrator ProctorU / Meazure is already facing a lawsuit after California’s February 2025 Bar Exam “was an unmitigated disaster,” full of crashes, bugs, and delays. It was the state’s first try at a “hybrid, two-day remote and in-person exam without any components of the national bar exam,” according to Reuters.

A 60-day stay request made by Justin Sun and the SEC on Wednesday to “allow the Parties to explore a potential resolution” has been approved by a federal judge. The SEC lawsuit filed in 2023 accused Sun and three of his companies of illegally distributing crypto assets, market manipulation, and concealing payments to celebrity spokespersons.

Romanian prosecutors have cleared the self-described “misogynist” influencer and his brother Tristan to leave the country after the Trump administration pressed to lift travel restrictions. The pair had been under a travel ban pending a criminal rape and trafficking investigation.

Filed over the weekend by a WP Engine customer, the proposed class action lawsuit seeks an injunction to stop Automattic’s “meddling” with WordPress, writes ArsTechnica. From the outlet:

US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard wrote in a letter that her lawyers are “working to provide a legal opinion on the implications” of the UK’s reported demand for a backdoor to all Apple users’ encrypted data breaks the Cloud Act agreement, reports Reuters.

Serial podcast subject Adnan Syed was freed in 2022 after prosecutors questioned evidence presented during the trial over the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, but then in 2023, it was reinstated.

A panel of judges in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has upheld the convictions of Elizabeth Holmes and Ranesh “Sunny” Balwani on “numerous” fraud charges over their Theranos scheme.

Filed in Manhattan by conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who claims that Musk is her months-old son’s father, the petitions seek to establish his paternity and request sole legal custody of the child, according to Taylor Lorenz’s User Mag.

A federal judge in the District of Columbia has granted a temporary restraining order that enjoins the Trump administration from laying off or terminating without cause any more employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as from deleting agency data or transferring agency funds “other than to satisfy the ordinary operating obligations of the CFPB.”

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali is the third judge to press pause on Donald Trump’s sweeping freezes of government funding and the second to interrupt attempts to dismantle USAID, report Politico and the Associated Press.

“I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,” Danielle Sassoon writes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, and other publishers like Conde Nast, Forbes Media, and Politico filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit (pdf) against the enterprise AI company Cohere. They say evidence shows Cohere uses unlicensed copies of content to directly compete with publishers, and they list 4,000 specific examples of “verbatim regurgitations and substitutional summaries of news content.”