Complaining about automagic enforcement of copyrights on the internet through copyright bots is so old hat at this point so as to be cliché. But there is a very good reason for that. Even in the narrower realm of PC gaming, we have seen examples of how copyright enforcement has ensnared totally innocent games, or fallen victim to clear fraud and abuse, resulting in the delisting of those games from platforms like Steam. This often happens in the all important early release windows for these games and, to be sure, it’s smaller indie studios that are hurt the most by this failed process. It’s incredibly frustrating to watch all of this in the macro and then witness the major platforms do absolutely nothing about it.
This, in fact, despite the absolutely absurd situations all of this produces. Take the demo for Wired Tokyo 2007 that was supposed to be released recently, but wasn’t, all because indie dev Daikichi dared to use intellectual property existing outside of the game. Except, of course, that said IP was the property of Daikichi itself.
As reported by VGC via GameSpark, a post to X from the developer lays out the situation, in which they explain that (via machine translation) “the motif of a board game I personally created in the past, placed within the game Wired Tokyo 2007, is getting caught by Steam’s side as third-party intellectual property.” As a result, Valve has blocked the release of the game’s promised demo which is currently listed as “Coming soon.”
The copyright-violating aspects, as claimed by Valve, include “dinosaur themed card-games shown on the environment within your app in gameplay,” which refers to a board game called Dinostone, created by one Daikichi. In Daikichi’s response, they link to the Board Game Geek page for their table-top game, which lists the same developer name.
“It’s not a third party,” says Daikichi on X. “It’s just me wanting to use my own intellectual property rights myself.” They add, “I have no idea what the meaning of this is at all.”
In an incredible response from Valve, the platform is demanding Daikichi provide some form of documented agreement to license the images used in the game, or else provide a documented letter of authorization from an attorney in order to get the demo approved for release. This is a “papers, please!” moment in video gaming, and it makes no sense.
The situation gets even more Monty-Python-esque from there. Daikichi decided their best course of action was to send a signed letter to itself, signed by itself, authorizing itself to use the assets it had created in the game it also had created.
Then over the weekend, rather wonderfully, the developer says they “created a signed document granting myself permission to use all of my created works, including board games, and resubmitted it for the demo review.”
We’ve crossed the Rubicon, folks. And now Valve is in the uncomfortable situation of having to choose between accepting this “evidence” of IP ownership when the evidence is literally a dev writing himself a letter like a crazy person, or else Valve refuses to accept it and a developer remains unable to release a game demo because they used their own property within it.
It’s a choice that only has two wrong outcomes. Sympathy is in short supply, however, as this is the result of the guilty-first process Valve has come up with for copyright takedowns on its platform.
Given how often we’ve seen AI-generated fake citations show up in legal filings and even legal decisions, you’d think the lesson would have sunk in by now: if you’re going to use AI to help draft something, you have to actually check what it produces. Apparently that lesson has not reached every government ministry.
South Africa has withdrawn its first draft national AI policy after revelations that it contained fictitious sources in its reference list which appeared to have been AI-generated.
“The most plausible explanation is that AI-generated citations were included without proper verification. This should not have happened,” Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi said.
“This failure is not a mere technical issue but has compromised the integrity and credibility of the draft policy,” he wrote in a post on X on Sunday.
Compromised the integrity and credibility of the policy? Bit of an understatement, I’d say.
And, look, it’s perhaps no surprise that those looking to put in place an AI policy would be using the tech themselves, but it’s difficult to think that they can regulate it well when they don’t even appear to understand how to use it well (and when not to use it at all).
Naturally, the minister’s takeaway is that the tech needs more regulation:
“This unacceptable lapse proves why vigilant human oversight over the use of artificial intelligence is critical. It’s a lesson we take with humility,” he wrote.
That really feels a lot like blaming the tech for humans making dumb decisions with the tech. He’s not wrong that we need human oversight of the tool. The power of AI tools is only recognized when they are there to assist humans, not replace them, but it’s not clear how a policy position fixes that.
To me, this is more evidence that we need to do a much better job educating people about what these tools can and can’t do. And that’s harder than it sounds, because the companies selling these products have spent years aggressively overselling what AI can do while burying the caveats about how it should actually be used. The gap between what vendors promise and what the tools actually deliver is a big part of why people keep reaching for them in exactly the wrong contexts.
Malatsi’s instinct — regulate harder — is understandable, but it addresses the wrong problem. The behavior you’re trying to regulate here isn’t malicious; it’s lazy and uninformed. Regulation is reasonably good at deterring bad intent. It has a much worse track record against ignorance. People are going to keep trying to force these tools to do things they’re not good at, regardless of what the rules say, because convenience and overconfidence are powerful forces. The better outcome comes when people learn, through repeated direct experience, that the tool fails in these situations — and when the companies selling these tools are honest about where they fail.
There are still genuinely useful ways to deploy AI, even if stories like this make people think that the tech is never good at anything. But using it to generate citations for official government policy documents, without verifying a single one, is not among them.
Of course, rather than actually dealing with any of this, expect a new crop of startups offering tools that claim to review your AI-generated content for hallucinated citations — and are just as unreliable.
Let’s hope the word “possibly” can be stricken from this headline in the near future. And while contempt charges don’t mean much to an administration that is openly contemptuous of anything that hints at checks or balances, it would, at the very least, encourage other judges to stop treating the Trump DOJ like it’s worthy of anything less than contempt.
A federal judge said Monday that the Trump administration had put her security at risk by posting a “patently false” allegation that she knowingly released an ICE detainee with an international warrant for murder.
Justice Department attorney Kevin Bolan profusely apologized to Rhode Island-based U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose for the press release posted last week by the Department of Homeland Security, which Bolan acknowledged “simply was not true.”
Let’s go live (because — for whatever reason — the press release is still “live”) to the DHS website posting, which leads off with this headline because it’s operated by unserious people who have chosen to serve an autocratic megalomaniac rather than the nation itself:
A judge ordering the release of an arrestee on bail is rarely reason for a public statement by a federal agency. Normally, they’ve got better stuff to do that engage in personal attacks on judges who have done nothing more than interpreted the law and ruled accordingly.
Every alleged crime is noted in bold type in the press release, which also includes this statement from the DHS (emphasis in the original):
“Bryan Rafael Gomez is a criminal illegal alien from the Dominican Republic with an international warrant for homicide,” said Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis. “An activist judge appointed by Joe Biden released this wanted murderer back into American communities. This is yet another example of an activist judge trying to thwart President Trump’s mandate from the American people to remove criminal illegal aliens from our communities. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS will continue to fight for the removal of criminal illegal aliens who have no right to be in our country.”
Even if you choose to ignore the headline and the politically motivated attacks on the judge, you’re still left with something that isn’t normally the way the federal government does business. After all, judges are part of a co-equal branch, and there’s little to be gained by pretending normal court stuff is “activism.”
There’s even less to be gained when it’s discovered that the government’s lawyers didn’t bother to apprise the judge of this homicide warrant the DHS is now using to attack the judiciary. And what’s left of the DOJ appears to have realized this belatedly. There’s a lot of contrition in this short filing that Assistant US Attorney Charles Calenda (who oversees the affected jurisdiction) hopes will defuse the judge’s righteous anger.
Signed by Assistant US Attorney Kevin Bolan, the response to Judge DuBose’s order to show cause blames ICE for misleading the judge, even though it was Bolan who ultimately did the misleading:
Before the response was filed, I had been informed by ICE about the Petitioner’s pending arrest warrant issued on January 24, 2023, from a court in the Dominican Republic and that I could not disclose that information. I was not aware that ICE had previously disclosed that same information on April 16, 2026. In failing to disclose the information regarding Petitioner’s criminal history, I relied on ICE’s representation that I was not permitted to disclose that information and understood that a legitimate law enforcement reason prevented disclosure. Judge DuBose, therefore, lacked that information about the Petitioner’s criminal background when she granted the petition.
I sincerely apologize to Judge DuBose, personally, and to the entire Court for the consequences of this lack of disclosure.
Sure, contrition is welcomed. But it’s not quite as welcome when (1) ICE had already disclosed this fact, (2) the DHS continues to post an unwarranted attack on this “activist judge,” and (3) nobody in the government appears willing to act honestly until a court forces them to do it.
The DOJ may have some plausible deniability, but that relies on everyone assuming this administration is so disjointed some fingers may not even know what other fingers are doing, which is something that needs to be addressed before we get to larger questions vis-à-vis right hands and left hands knowing what each other are up to.
And while the DOJ may have some legitimate complaints about being both understaffed and overwhelmed by immigration cases, the problem lies with Donald Trump and his cabinet full of bigoted middle managers. The administration is still hoping to eject nearly a half-million more people by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the DOJ continues to bleed talent thanks to loyalty purges and prosecutors walking off the job because they can’t stomach what they’re being commanded to do.
The solution is contempt charges. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a start. Judge DuBose says she’s looking at both the DOJ and DHS. If any entity should bear the brunt of this, it’s the DHS, which continues to post misleading invective targeting this judge, as well as being instrumental in the burial of information the judge should have had access to while making a release determination.
And while I understand that contempt charges just mean taxpayers will continue to bail out an administration unworthy of its tax dollars, it will at least contribute to the steady drip of adverse rulings. When enough of those pile up, it becomes a flood this administration won’t be able to contain.
John Roberts has a point: the Supreme Court—even this Supreme Court—sometimes gets things right. Maybe one could even fairly say it often gets things right. After all, just recently it produced good decisions in Case v. Montana, Cox v. Sony, and First Women’s Choice Centers v. Davenport, and arguably even Chiles v. Salazar, along with plenty more that have quietly taken their place in the annals of American jurisprudence with little fanfare but the staying power we look to the Court’s opinions for, to continue to speak well into the future about the contours of our law. These were decisions where there was significant accord among all the justices because the legal questions before them were just not that hard to resolve. Either statutory language, constitutional text, or previous precedent required certain results, and Roberts is correct: this Court is fully capable of producing them.
The issue, however, is that it doesn’t always. And when it doesn’t it is not because it’s getting tripped up by close calls where either the precedent or guiding text isn’t clear, or the facts are so unfortunate that they obscure what the law requires. The issue is that the law is as equally clear in cases where the Court produces deviant results as in the cases where the Court gets things right; it just doesn’t care to follow it consistently. If it wants a different result than what the law directs then that is the result it will find the votes for.
Roberts is of course also right that non-lawyers often can’t tell what the law indeed requires; the general public is much more likely to judge a decision based on how it affects the interests they favor. Which is why Roberts has a fair point to think the Court may be unfairly criticized in decisions like Chiles, First Women’s Choice Centers, or even 303 Creative, cases where interests many understand to be harmful to others nevertheless apparently prevailed. It is difficult, for instance, for non-lawyers to see how a win for those who discriminate is nevertheless a win for those who are discriminated against, because while a win for the former may seem like a loss for the latter in the short term, it’s the rationale being upheld by the decision that will ultimately amount to a more important gain for the vulnerable in the long term.
But one reason people are struggling to see these controversial but correct decisions as fortifications of their own future freedom is because they don’t believe that when their interests are at stake the Supreme Court will still apply the same principles this time in their favor. They fear that the Court will instead find a way to advance the interests it prefers, and it’s a fear that is eminently reasonable. The hypocrisy the justices regularly display in their jurisprudence when one of their favored interests is at stake forecloses any rational person having any faith in them as neutral jurists ably applying the law, even if it’s true that sometimes they are.
Roberts only has himself and his Court to blame for so many having that view. They have made it impossible for anyone to believe the Court will uphold principle and precedent because of how often it has not. It is happy to change the rules that we must all play by whenever it suits it, redrawing the rights we depend on as well as the ability to use the courts to shape them. And it’s not just laypeople who’ve noticed the problem but legal professionals. It’s lawyers, including members of the Supreme Court Barwho practice before them. It’s law professors, including those who have been teaching new generations of law students what were supposed to be timeless principles of American jurisprudence, which the Court so regularly and casually upends. It’s legal commentators, including those who specialize in watching this court. It is people who are experienced, if not expert—and if not at least as expert as anyone on the Court—in the American legal tradition who are calling foul. They are noticing how the Court keeps inventing arbitrary and imaginary rules, if not also facts, in order to arrive not where the law points but where the conservative justices steering the Court’s majority instead prefer to go.
It might be one thing if it were the rare case here and there in its busy docket where the Court has simply been sloppy in its jurisprudence. But the cases where the conservative majority has refused to produce jurisprudentially conservative results, instead elevating preferred outcomes over precedential reasoning, are hardly the exception; at this point it has become the apparently deliberate rule that when certain issues are on the table—partisan politics, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, race relations, to name just a few areas where the conservative justices have particularly strong views—the Roberts Court will eagerly jump in to advance them, regardless of whether either substance or procedure—or consistency—even invites such an intervention, let alone their favored result. In fact it is fairly shocking to encounter the rare occasion where the Court has instead restrained itself—although it is certainly glad to when other interests the conservative majority is less dogmatically interested in advancing are instead on the table.
Furthermore, that its docket is so busy is entirely because the Court has abdicated any pretense of restraint, greedily helping itself to matters that historically would have been regarded as unripe for its consideration. In fact, it is a bit rich for Roberts to complain how the Supreme Court is being unfairly disrespected given the extent to which its new practice of aggressively insinuating itself in substantive adjudication of matters before there even is a lower court ruling or record ready for review has itself undercut the respect due the lower courts. What the Court has been doing, particularly with its Shadow Docket, goes far beyond the appellate review it is normally entitled to do. Not only does the Supreme Court’s incessant snatching of matters away from the lower courts prematurely arbitrarily diminish the lower courts’ power to render considered opinions on the questions before them, but it has also been having the practical effect of undermining their ability to speak with any authority on the law at all, let alone enforce it. Would only Roberts shed the same tears for the insult the lower courts have actually suffered as he does for himself as the cause of it.
Instead, and apparently without any capacity for introspection or self-reflection, he protests that the criticism increasingly directed at the Court is not also increasingly deserved. We should, he insists, be judging his Court based on what it gets right. But we do not celebrate a reckless driver for all the people he didn’t run over, or careless chef for all the diners he didn’t poison, or distracted doctor for all the patients he didn’t kill. In the American legal tradition we judge harshly those who cause injury to the public well-being, especially with behavior beyond the bounds of what law allows.
And with the Roberts Court there is so much to judge.
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In a ruling that will clearly be remembered as one of the worst in the history of the Supreme Court, two years ago, the court gave Donald Trump a get out of jail free card, which he appears to be trying to take full advantage of with all the criming in his second term. But, as always with this guy, it’s never enough.
We’ve already covered in detail the ridiculous situation in which Donald Trump acting in his supposed personal capacity, while still being the president, sued his own IRS for $10 billion, because a contractor leaked his tax returns a while back (that contractor is currently in prison for doing so). Again, there is zero indication of any actual harm. Every president — and nearly all major candidates — for the past 50 years released their tax returns to the public. Except Trump.
A decade ago he claimed that it was because he was being audited, and promised to release them once the audit was over. But he’s never done anything. And, as many people have noted, when President Richard Nixon started this tradition of releasing the president’s tax returns, he was actually being audited by the IRS, and was able to release his returns without a problem.
Either way, a contractor (not an IRS employee) leaked some of Trump’s returns to ProPublica and the NY Times, which resulted in a few stories before the news cycle moved on within days. It certainly didn’t stop Trump from being elected in 2024. And even though the returns were leaked in 2019 and 2020, Trump waited until he was back in the White House (and, in charge of the IRS and the DOJ) to file this $10 billion lawsuit.
We’ve covered the ridiculous claim that the “two sides” (there aren’t two sides) were “negotiating a settlement” and how the judge in the case has tried to call timeout, noticing that since Trump is effectively negotiating with himself there’s no cause or controversy, and thus there may be no jurisdiction for the court to hear the case. There’s still briefing going on over that, but the NY Times reports that the supposed (not really) “negotiations” have continued, with Trump apparently proposing that the settlement include the IRS dropping audits of Trump, his businesses, and his family, which would just be a shocking level of corruption from an administration that has spent its first year and a half in office trying to be as blatantly corrupt as possible.
One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.
Again, even though the news cycle moved on quickly, perhaps it should return to exactly what those leaked tax returns showed: which is that at a time when Trump was publicly claiming to be rolling in cash, he basically paid effectively no income taxes and was racking up massive losses — figures that raise serious questions about his financial entanglements and what he stood to gain from his first term in office.
To have the audits of what happened during those years completely dropped — and not just for him, but for his entire family and related businesses — is another form of a get out of jail free card. Call it a “tax cheat for life” card.
To do this at a time when the public is struggling, due almost entirely to Donald Trump’s ridiculous policies — tariffs driving up inflation massively, an illegal war quagmire in Iran driving up energy prices — is even more insulting to the public that Donald Trump is supposed to be working for. The same day this story came out, Trump was asked about whether he was thinking about the impact of his out-of-control war on Americans’ financial situation, and he responded “not even a little bit” and that “I don’t think about Americans financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”
Flimsy and corrupt authoritarian populism is dedicated to pretending that the oligarchs and autocrats really care about the people. One way Trumpism has done this is by pretending they actually care about reining in corporate power. That’s included an elaborate, multi-year performance about how MAGA Republicans were going to curb abuses by “big tech” and bring back meaningful antitrust reform.
“Netflix’s years-long bait-and-switch has led the company right to where it promised never to be: addicting children and families to its platform, mining those users for data, and then converting that data into lucrative intelligence for global advertising juggernauts.”
Granted Netflix is not unique here. In a country too corrupt to pass meaningful privacy laws (because MAGA Republicans just like Ken routinely work to kill them), nearly every company you interact with on a daily basis now monetizes your every movement and online choices, “anonymizes” it (a meaningless term), sells access to dodgy international data brokers, then repeatedly lies about it.
They do this because Republicans, corporate lobbyists, and many “centrist” Democrats have, quite unsubtly, worked tirelessly to dismantle corporate oversight and regulatory autonomy. Most companies have been eager to take advantage, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who, like countless other CEOs, used to at least pay empty lip service to never tracking or monetizing consumer data.
Paxton’s lawsuit insists Netflix has built a vast surveillance economy that includes peoples’ kids viewing habits, violating Texas consumer protection law:
“Netflix built this surveillance machinery to scrutinize how users and their children behave—what they click, how long they linger, what they avoid, when they pause, what draws them in, what they replay or skip, where they are, what devices they use, what other devices are in their home, what other apps they interact with, and much more. Each action is a data point revealing something about the user. This is not simply about deciding what show to queue up next.It is about learning who the users and their children are.”
Again: almost every single company you interact with does this now. Many in ways that are far worse than Netflix (see: the entire unregulated data broker economy). Paxton knows this. So why single out Netflix? And why now?
These sorts of lawsuits take a while to build momentum, so I suspect Paxton’s inquiry began during the mad conspiratorial heat of MAGA’s Netflix breakdown earlier this year, and is only culminating now. And I suspect Paxton will be eager to share any juicy and harmful tidbits found during trial prep to help frame the company (which in reality has been pretty amicable toward Republicans and trans bashing comedians) as a useful “woke” culture war prop.
That’s not to say Netflix doesn’t do anything wrong and isn’t (like every tech company) abysmal on surveillance and privacy, but it is to say that authoritarians don’t actually care about the public interest. And they certainly don’t actually care about mass commercialized surveillance, given they’ve played a starring role in cementing it and eliminating all accountability for it.
The American public’s broad and growing hatred of corporations and the extraction class has long been a fertile recruitment playground for autocratic zealots like Trump and Paxton, who love to put on adorable little stage plays where they pretend to be “reining in corporate power” and “embracing meaningful antitrust reform.” But it’s uniformly a performance always driven by ulterior motives.
If guys like Trump and Paxton actually cared about consumer privacy, they’d openly and loudly support a national privacy law that holds all companies (and executives, personally) accountable for privacy and security failures when it comes to consumer data. If they cared about consumer privacy, they’d relentlessly target data brokers that sell oceans of consumer data to any nitwit with a nickel (including foreign intelligence). They’d fund and staff U.S. regulators tasked with policing privacy abuses.
They don’t do that because that might impact them and their friends financially, and disrupt the U.S. government’s ability to spy on Americans without a warrant. So instead you get these highly selective and flimsy populist performances that single out administration “enemies” for failing to adequately bend the knee, while tricking rubes into thinking they’re being tough on corporate power.
I’ll let you all in on a little secret: I love pickles. Yes, let that statement spawn a million jokes in the comments; I don’t care. Pickles are great and the fresher the better. I began gardening specifically so that I could grow cucumbers, garlic, onion, and dill, just so I could make my own at home. And, because I investigate pickle brines the way a sommelier inspects a glass of red zinfandel from a freshly tapped cask, I’ve been to my share of pickle festivals.
So perhaps I’m in a slightly protective posture having come across an article about how one pickle festival in Canada, the Downtown Brandon International Pickle Fest, had to rebrand under threat from Picklefest Canada, which somehow has a trademark on the term “Pickle Fest”.
Aly Wowchuk, who is one of the organizers, said the trademark issue forced a name change — but not a change in spirit.
“It’s the same event, we have the same heart and soul, it just has a different name,” she told the Sun. “We were not sued … we received an email on behalf of Picklefest Canada’s lawyer about the use of ‘Pickle Fest.’ There was a lot of back and forth between lawyers about the use of the name, but ultimately, it was easier for us to move forward and change the name of the Brandon Pickle Fest event.”
This is the outcome of a point we’ve made for years and years: Trademark bullying happens because it generally works. And this is trademark bullying. As in the States, Canadian trademark law does include prohibitions on trademarking descriptive marks. Picklefest Canada is an organization with a trademark on its name and logo and it primarily, you guessed it, puts on pickle festivals. To that end, its trademark rights ought to be extremely limited. Limited, I would say, to its use of the term in overall branding and marketing iconography, as that can be described as original and creative.
But the idea that such a trademark could be wielded to prevent other people, groups, or municipalities from putting on their own pickle fests is plainly at odds with how trademarks are supposed to work. But when a small entity is bullied by a larger one, they often feel they have no choice but to rebrand.
Wowchuk said the new name, Brandon Brine Bash, was chosen in part to stand out in an increasingly crowded field of pickle-themed events.
“With the popularity of pickle festivals across Canada and internationally, almost every variation of ‘pickle party’ or ‘pickle palooza’ has been used,” she said. “We wanted something unique that included Brandon and was easy to find.”
The rebrand also required updates to the festival’s logo, created by local artist Alexander Matheson. While the iconic pickle design has been retained and modernized, references to “Pickle Fest” have been removed.
It’s too bad that a simple festival to celebrate one of man’s greatest inventions has to devolve in overly protective intellectual property bullshit. And it’s equally too bad that nobody has yet stood up to Big Pickle to get this nonsense trademark cancelled.
To the narcotics agents investigating drug smuggling in Puerto Rico prisons, it seemed at first like a typical scheme: associates of an inmate gang sneaking drugs into the prison, gang members distributing them inside and bank records showing the money flowing.
Then the agents discovered something unusual.
Leaders of the prison gang known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, were selling drugs to inmates not only for money, but for their votes. Specifically, votes for now-Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón, a longtime Republican and supporter of President Donald Trump, investigators found.
To make sure the inmates — many of whom were addicted — complied, the gang’s leaders threatened violence and to withhold drugs, the investigators learned. Corrections employees in on the plan looked the other way as the gang, formally known as Group 31, ran the enterprise.
What at first seemed like a routine drug case had turned into something bigger. Puerto Rico, along with just a couple of U.S. states, allows inmates to vote. Puerto Ricans living in the territory can vote in all contests except federal general elections. It is a felony to willfully offer money or gifts in exchange for support at the polls. A conviction carries fines of as much as $250,000 and imprisonment of up to two years.
Investigators had gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff, and they were working toward determining whether González-Colón or her campaign was involved, four people with knowledge of the case told ProPublica. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.
In December, they filed an indictment charging 34 inmates and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm. And while prosecutors described the drugs-for-votes scheme in the court filing, they did not include a single charge related to it.
Soon after Trump took office, the lead prosecutor, Jorge Matos, was told by a supervisor to take the investigation no further, according to four people familiar with the case.
“Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead,” said one person familiar with the case. “After the election, that all changed.”
Matos, who left the Justice Department in June 2025, did not respond to phone calls or texts from ProPublica or attempts to reach him on social media.
For those working on the case, the decision to scrap the investigation was especially puzzling given the new president’s agenda; Trump issued executive orders in early 2025 aimed at eradicating drug traffickers and declaring election integrity “fundamental” to maintaining American democracy.
“We invested so much effort to make a difference,” said another person. “We’re frustrated, but there’s nothing we can do.”
People close to the case wondered if politics had played a bigger role than law and order. Trump congratulated González-Colón in a letter shared at her January 2025 inauguration saying, “I am so proud of your resounding victory.” That same month, she pushed to erect a statue of him at the Capitol building in San Juan alongside other presidents who’ve visited the island. “He deserves that,” she said, according to an official post from the Federal Affairs Administration of Puerto Rico on X.
W. Stephen Muldrow, the U.S. attorney for the District of Puerto Rico, was appointed by Trump in 2019 and has served continuously since then. His name appears on the indictment along with those of three assistant U.S. attorneys. Muldrow told ProPublica his office does not comment on open investigations other than in press releases or press conferences. While a couple of the inmates have accepted plea deals, most of the drug and money-laundering cases against the inmates and associates are still making their way through the court system.
In a follow-up email, a spokesperson for the office noted the indictment was filed during the Biden administration and under the previous governor of Puerto Rico.
Charging corrupt public officials “has always been and remains a top priority” of the office, wrote spokesperson Lymarie Llovet-Ayala.
“When sufficient admissible evidence exists to charge persons involved in public corruption, as required by the Justice Manual, the Puerto Rico U.S. Attorney’s Office will aggressively pursue such charges,” she wrote.
In court documents tied to a different case, in October 2025, a magistrate judge mentioned “an unrelated white-collar investigation involving the Governor of Puerto Rico.” Muldrow’s office responded in a filing, stating, “There is no white-collar investigation (or any other investigation) of Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González-Colón.”
González-Colón has not been charged with a crime. The governor declined ProPublica’s repeated requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions sent to her communications team.
Muldrow had a friendly working relationship with former Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general in Florida and he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the middle district of that state, according to people who know him.
A Department of Justice spokesperson said in an email, “Neither Attorney General Bondi nor Acting Attorney General Blanche was involved in any charging or investigative decision in this Biden administration prosecution.”
The attorney general’s office noted in a statement that the indictment mentioned allegations of voting coercion, and said: “This office did not limit the underlying investigation in any way.”
In May 2025, in a move that federal prosecutors and political observers alike said was highly unusual, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seized the voting machines from Puerto Rico over concerns about “vulnerabilities,” according to testimony in March by Director Tulsi Gabbard to Congress.
A spokesperson from the office told ProPublica the seizure was at the request of the U.S. attorney’s office in Puerto Rico and was “not about any election in particular.” The goal was to “assess risk to this critical infrastructure, given similar infrastructure is used throughout the United States,” the spokesperson said in an email.
Muldrow didn’t answer questions from ProPublica about the matter.
Lydia Lizarribar, an attorney for Juan Carlos Ortiz-Vazquez, a Group 31 member who prosecutors named as one of the leaders of the drug operation, declined to comment on the case.
A Party “Stronghold”
The Puerto Rican prison system has a long and well-documented history of overcrowding, inadequate medical care and other human rights violations so egregious that in the late 1970s they prompted federal oversight that continued for decades.
The grim conditions spurred inmates to form advocacy groups like Group 31, which was officially created as a nonprofit to lobby corrections officials and lawmakers to improve inmates’ quality of life. Over time, federal prosecutors say, several of these groups operating in the prisons evolved into violent criminal organizations such as Los Tiburones and Ñetas, with memberships in the thousands.
The poor conditions were also the backdrop for a push in 1980 by the New Progressive Party governor at the time, Carlos Romero Barceló, to codify voting rights for prisoners.
Inmates have been aligned with the party ever since, political analysts said. Political parties in Puerto Rico differ dramatically from those on the mainland. They don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, the two main parties center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.
It’s not unheard of for politicians of all parties to court the inmate vote, but the New Progressive Party has made it a “stronghold,” said Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a political scientist with expertise on Puerto Rico and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.
“It’s been a huge advantage for them particularly as elections in Puerto Rico have been decided by small margins,” Tormos-Aponte said of the New Progressive Party. In the 2024 general election for governor, the party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to a ProPublica tally of voter returns on the State Elections Commission’s website.
Inmate votes were especially key in the 2024 gubernatorial primary as González-Colón, a longtime New Progressive Party member, was challenging the incumbent governor of the same party.
She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide.
In her first months in office, González-Colón signed a law allowing people with criminal records to obtain professional licenses in Puerto Rico.
In July, she signed off on a law expanding inmates’ ability to hold jobs in the private sector, calling it “part of a vision of social justice,” adding “we believe in the second chance, in the value of work and in the capacity for transformation of the human being.”
In March, González-Colón signed a law requiring the parole review board increase the pace at which parole denials are reconsidered. She said in a press release the law is aimed at a “fairer, more transparent system focused on rehabilitation.”
Political analysts said rumors have swirled over the decades about coercive tactics being used to mobilize the prison vote, raising significant questions about the extent to which that support comes in exchange for favors from the ruling party.
This time was different, sources said. They had evidence. Prosecutors had “locked up” the voting-for-drugs scheme among the gang, inmates and staff, and were deep into investigating a potential political connection when Muldrow’s office pulled the plug.
“These are the type of questions you would think an administration that has publicly declared this war on drug trafficking would investigate further,” Tormos-Aponte said of the Trump administration. “You would think it would be a priority.”
For the people familiar with the prison election fraud investigation, it was clear politics were at play in the decision to abandon charges prosecutors were confident they could win. What wasn’t clear, they said, was who was pulling the strings and how. It was “like you’re watching a puppet show but you can’t see the strings,” one person said.
“You know what you’re seeing isn’t telling the whole story,” the person said. “There was some kind of invisible hand.”
Drugs for Votes
Although they excluded drugs-for-votes charges, prosecutors didn’t scrub the Dec. 12, 2024, indictment of how they believed the operation worked.
Outside associates of Los Tiburones, the indictment alleged, primarily used drones to drop drugs on prison grounds. Then staff participating in the scheme helped in the “introduction and distribution” of the drugs inside the prison or acted as lookouts. The employees also allowed the gang members to enforce their own discipline system against those who didn’t do as they asked, including when voting. Punishments included withholding food from inmates or forcing them to sit with their arms folded while they were beaten and kicked. In four cases, the drugs led to overdose deaths, the indictment says.
The indictment also alleged that Los Tiburones made connections with government officials “for the purpose of reducing prison sentences,” and the gang mandated both the prisoners’ political affiliations and “who to vote for in primary and general elections.”
A relative of one of the prisoners told ProPublica that inmates had to show their ballots to gang leaders when they voted to avoid punishment.
Puerto Rico’s Civil Rights Commission, which for decades has sent observers to polls across the territory, reported “serious difficulties” in gaining access to several prisons during the 2024 general election. After being denied entry at multiple locations, the commission successfully sought a court order, but much of the day had already passed by the time the observers were allowed in.
“We strongly condemn the lack of diligence and indifference shown by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in hindering the functions of this Commission on the day of early voting in correctional institutions,” the agency later wrote in a special report on the 2024 elections.
The report said observers witnessed prisoners voting in cramped quarters that didn’t allow for privacy and having to hand their ballots to others to put in the box.
Ever Padilla-Ruiz, the commission’s executive director, told ProPublica that inmates sent written complaints to the office detailing their experiences of being pressured to vote in the primary — some for González-Colón and others for her opponent, Pedro Pierluisi. They did not mention any gangs by name, Padilla-Ruiz said.
He said inmates reported that inmate group leaders were “always sending messages” up until election day, adding that they were too afraid to say much more.
Several people familiar with the case said investigators had evidence that González-Colón had spoken to a Group 31 member, but they had not determined whether she was involved in vote buying.
One of the imprisoned gang leaders had bragged on Facebook about his connection to González-Colón, posting a picture of him talking with her on WhatsApp while the primary campaign for governor was underway, two sources said.
She clearly benefited from the scheme, they said. “There was no doubt about that,” one said, noting that thousands of votes were likely at stake.
The indictment notes that gang members were provided preferential treatment such as relaxed visitation policies and the use of Sony PlayStations, big screen TVs and cellphones, but investigators had not connected the privileges to González-Colón or her campaign.
“Latinos Are Winning”
González-Colón has been a longtime advocate for Puerto Rico statehood and has been engaged in Republican politics for more than 20 years. She was elected chair of the Republican Party of Puerto Rico in 2015 and two years later became resident commissioner, a role similar to a U.S. representative but with limited voting power in Congress.
She’s been an active participant in Latinos for Trump, praising the president over the years as “wise” and in 2019 saying on social media, “Latinos are winning under his leadership.”
As she continues to lobby for Puerto Rico to become the 51st state, González-Colón has also leaned in to her relationships with other members of Trump’s Cabinet, posting well wishes on social media to Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, and congratulating Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security director Trump picked to replace Kristi Noem, calling him “my good friend.”
“I know he will provide strong leadership as he works with President Donald J. Trump to strengthen our nation’s security,” she wrote in a March Facebook post.
Experts on Puerto Rican finance and politics say the relationship between González-Colón and the Trump administration is symbiotic though lopsided.
“I see it more as a situation of unrequited love,” said Alvin Velazquez, an associate law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law and an expert on Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy in 2017.
The territorial island, whose residents were granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, receives less federal funding than most states. Political leaders in Puerto Rico, González-Colón included, have perpetually lobbied for more support.
Republicans in turn have capitalized on González-Colón’s rise as she helped bolster GOP support among the Puerto Rican diaspora and other Latino voters on the mainland. Now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed González-Colón in her 2024 gubernatorial election.
Polls specifically isolating Puerto Rican voters show that Trump saw at least a 4 percentage point uptick in votes from Puerto Ricans living in states compared to the 2020 election, garnering 45% of the group’s vote in the 2024 election, according to the nonprofit research center Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.
And perhaps most importantly, experts say, Trump has counted on González-Colón to support his strategic geopolitical initiatives in the region, including the controversial reopening of long-abandoned naval bases in Puerto Rico. González-Colón welcomed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the island in September and thanked Trump on X for “recognizing the strategic value Puerto Rico has to the national security of the United States and the fight against drug cartels in our hemisphere.”
That’s despite the sentiment among many Puerto Ricans who were angered by Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria in 2017 and a comedian at one of Trump’s 2024 campaign rallies who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” And while Trump has said that González-Colón was “wonderful to deal with and a great representative of the people,” he later called Puerto Rico “one of the most corrupt places on earth.”
