Category: Litigation

So, to my surprise, I received a large envelope on Friday September 12, 2025. This envelope contained the response to a letter I sent to the NY Public Defender’s Office On September 4, 2025 where I requested “all e-mails regarding [my case] between this office (e.g Steven Slawinski) and Joe Gross, Joe Howard, Gerry Grant, Ashley Podhradsky, Matt Miller, Josh Stroschein, Keith Becker & Michael Norris from April 2013 until December 2016.”

Not to my surprise, Joe Howard (my Nebraska Defense Counsel) has ignored a similar letter. Here are the relevant parts to give you context:

Beginning in May, the DOJ began releasing pages in response to my FOIA action. Some of those pages contain bombshell information never disclosed before. As you know, I refer to Ashley Podhradsky’s team as government shills; because, I knew that they were colluding with Becker to railroad me. Now, I finally have proof and that you were aware of this fact since June 2015.
As you can confirm from the attached pages, the shills were in direct contact with Becker, a non-expert, answering “questions posed by the FBI team” – WTF?
Anyway, as you know, direct communication is not allowed because Becker (or the FBI) could have (and apparently did) influence my experts to help railroad me. Peculiarly, their May 2015 communications with Becker were (intentionally?) omitted from the FOIA page dump. I eagerly await the Vaughn Index to see their justification for withholding them. I know they exist because the shills reference them in their misleading/false 2015 report – note that they totally impeached their 2015 report in 2016.
Regardless, since you clearly had the un-redacted version of the enclosed e-mails, I’d like to formally request that you send them to me (since they’re technically apart of my case file, so I’m entitled) and every other e-mail you have in your possession regarding Becker and the shills.

With that information you can digest the following PDF:

June-25-2015

Ashley begins lying from the jump on page two, the NIT has been adjudicated as hacking software, specifically malware. On page three she continues lying to every question per her own report (Authored for a conference in 2016 after her team helped railroad me). For example, her lies on page 3 are totally exposed by the objective truth revealed for the first time on page 4 of her 2016 report, where you’ll see the NIT was run in a hidden iframe (Figure 3) and the session_id was fake (Figure 4):

Shills-Final-NIT-Report

When you knowledgeably compare the two posted PDF’s you must agree that the conspiracy has been confirmed. Now I’m in a huge fight to get redacted pages un-redacted, pages withheld released & forcing Joe Howard to produce his conspiratorial e-mails!

Below is direct evidence of Collusion between Keith A. Becker and the Shills (Ashley Podhradsky, Matt Miller & Josh Stroschein). The FOIA dump is missing their May 2015 correspondence (I’m litigating) and probably others, but these pages prove that my experts were in direct “conspiratorial” contact with Becker a non-expert. I wonder what’s redacted, because most of the four pages are blacked out. LOL, typical government coverup/corruption. See for yourself:

Colluison

The Court issued it’s ruling, the deadline has been moved to November 26, 2025… Typical! Now I await the Vaughn Index for their BS as to why they have withheld 3000+ pages and their BS “declaration” as to why they heavily redacted the 200+ released pages. Today I’m filing a motion to get those two things before the November deadline so that I can argue against everything they claim. For example, I’ll argue that all Exemption 7 claims are invalid do to them not meeting the foreseeable harm standard.

As you can see for yourself in the PDF below, they’ve redacted a lot of information, (under exemption 7 – shown in the documents as (b)(7)(*) – the * is whatever specific exemption 7 claim they’re making) that you can glean from other sources or other public documents thus it’s redacted illegally. As I pointed out previously, this FBI communication is a “smoking gun” because it declares that the Operation Started in 2011, NOT 2012 – thus the DOJ/FBI committed perjury many, many times regarding this specific operation. Removing all the Exemption 7 redactions will exonerate me.

FBI-Electronic-Communication

On June 18, 2025 I received 202 more pages, bringing the total to 242. Six of those pages were… interesting. Those pages were heavily redacted (which will be litigated at some point in the future) but contained bombshells nevertheless. The document was a FBI Electronic Communication (their term for an official e-mail) Titled: (U) HQ Concurrence to Operate [redacted] – Date: 11/08/2012. To: [redacted] From: Cyber DM-IIOU. On page two I was able to decipher the redacted text as such in “[]”:

[Hidden services] can only be accessed via the [internet] through the [Onion Router or “TOR”]. In August of 2011, the [Dutch National Police (“DNP”)] identified and successfully gained control of the [hidden services] listed below. The [DNP] copied the contents of the sites, as well as additional electronic data found within the servers.

Under that paragraph is a fully redacted table. As the previous 40 documents suggested, the latest 202 pages prove – beyond a reasonable doubt – that Keith A. Becker led the conspiracy against me. Other revelations have come out during the 2020s that I wasn’t aware of… For example: Dr. Matt Edman formed a company with Christopher Tarbell (both lied – under oath – about how they found the Silk Road). Edman testilied that he authored the NIT that couldn’t have worked against me.

I need to get this document unreacted, as it contains many more bombshells. Since it confirms that the DNP was the initial investigator (in 2011 not the FBI tesilied 2012) and actually hacked into the servers.

The Government filed its THIRD motion for an extension of time on May 21, 2025. I (of course) opposed the motion (probably in futility); BUT, on May 12, 2025 the DOJ released 40 pages of responsive documents (and I was shocked – LOL). Here’s a brief summary of the contents of that release:

• Becker references a DOJ “S:” drive, where they keep operational documents. (It’s the likely location of the “missing” NIT Reports as the bottom of the report clearly indicates it was printed from an S: drive.)
• Becker authored all of the NIT Warrant Affidavits and “obtained” all the NIT Warrants.
• Becker was a member of the team that petitioned for the Rule 41 change (allowing Magistrates to issue remote computer search warrants).

I’m supposed to get another page dump in June as they process the remaining pages. There are two dates that the DOJ is trying to extend, I petitioned the Court (in my opposition) to just extend their “search time” and not change the current litigation commencement (August 28, 2025); because, we’re really just waiting to litigate their inadequate search for the NIT Reports / Data and them currently withholding about 3000 pages due to various FOIA Exemptions. (Eventually they have to produce a “Vaughn Index” for those pages. That index will be illuminating – thus why they’re stalling.)

There is probably seriously detrimental information in those 3000 pages; because, the 40 page dump provided proof that Becker lied about the NIT Warrant Affidavits (He argued that the NIT Warrants deserved the “Leon – good faith” exception to the exclusionary rule.) and confirmed that the NIT Reports are on a DOJ resource referred to as an “S:” Drive. The S: drive revelation proves that they are acting in “bad faith” in regards to my FOIA request for the NIT Reports. So just imagine what those 3000 pages contain regarding Becker’s misconduct.

Ryan Shapiro has explained how the DOJ/FBI loves to violate FOIA, indicating that you have to sue them to get compliance, which is ridiculous but so are a lot of things today. (I agree with the pardon for Ross and a lot of the January Sixers but not the violent ones, but I do agree with Trump on one thing, the DOJ is definitely filled with a lot of scum. It’s just a Pot calling the Kettle black situation, IMO.)

Anyway… Ryan explains why the FBI claims they couldn’t find the NIT Reports succinctly:

[T]he FBI has designed a series of “Failure by Design” FOIA search protocols. The FBI conducts its FOIA searches in such a way that the vast majority of those searches fail to locate the requested records, even though the FBI absolutely has those records. So, the FBI superficially appears to be in compliance with FOIA because it conducted a search, but it doesn’t have to release any documents because that search (deliberately) found nothing.

Not surprisingly the DOJ says they found 2075 pages responsive to my request for proof of Becker’s crimes; BUT, are claiming (in bad faith) they’re all exempt from disclosure due to various exemptions.

So, the Vaughn Index should be interesting. I think we’re definitely heading towards IN CAMERA INSPECTION.

UPDATE: On January 30, 2025 the DOJ asked for an extension to process pages they should have already processed one day before they were due. I opposed the extension. The Court gave them the extension, so now I have to wait until May 30, 2025 to start litigating their nonsense.

So, my appeal of the ridiculous SORA order issued on January 5, 2024 was delivered yesterday. My previous attempts were thwarted by the arcane process known as “perfecting” an appeal in New York State.

Basically, my appeal was stymied by the RECORD ON APPEAL, an esoteric document that must be created and agreed upon by the parties of the appeal (in this case the Monroe County DA (“MCDA”) and myself). BUT the directions just state that the record must be certified, stipulated to or ordered (CPLR 5525).

The first obstacle was the fact that the Court Clerk doesn’t maintain these records, the County Clerk does… So there’s that peculiarity. When I got the certified record from the County Clerk, the Appellate Division, Fourth Dept. Court Clerk rejected my submission and told me that the certified record wasn’t sufficient to meet the certified requirement of 22 NYCRR 1250.7, but didn’t give me any further instructions.

The next obstacle was getting the MCDA to stipulate to the RECORD ON APPEAL because they just ignored my request. (Seems like an easy way for the DA to block appeals, NO?) I then attempted to get the County Court judge who made the decision I’m appealing to grant an order for the RECORD ON APPEAL and was also ignored. (Again, seems like an easy way for the Judge to block appeals, NO?)

After all this ignoring, the sixth month time limit to “perfect” my appeal was running out. So I petitioned the Court to extend the time, noting all the ignoring that had occurred. They granted my request on October 17, 2024 giving me until December 16, 2024 to perfect my appeal. And surprise surprise, with a copy of their order enclosed, the MCDA agreed to stipulate to the RECORD ON APPEAL.

Now, I wait to see if the Clerk, will finally accept my appeal. Like I’ve posted before, it shouldn’t be this hard to appeal decisions.

Update 11-21-2024: Got a letter from the Clerk yesterday, my appeal has been perfected. And has been schedule to be heard for the “session” beginning March 31, 2025.

Update 4-29-2025: Got a terse decision from the 4th District yesterday, it stated the lower courts ruling was affirmed. I’ll be appealing to the Court of Appeals (NY’s highest Court) tomorrow.

In May (and then again in August) I sent AUSA Cerrone a missive asking about the status of processing my request (there are about 1500 responsive docs, I’m supposed to get 150 a month – so far I’ve gotten zilch) and both requests were ignored.

I guess I cannot expect anything until they’re required to give me the Vaughn index sometime in 2025. <huge sigh>