A Writ of Habeas Corpus for Lord and Lady Laser
The case is resolved. The Laser family will be set free presently.
Good Evening:
It is important when you have your first court date as a potential criminal defendant and you’re on a mission to get back two lasers, some valued camera equipment, a variety of tripods, and some other such stuff . . . that you make an appropriate #GetReadyWithMe video. I think I have fulfilled that obligation, thanks to the estimable Katherine Pompillio:
A few serious notes: First, here is the footage from the evening of July 5, 2025, when the incident in question took place. I have not released this material, though it was streamed live at the time, as a precaution. It was not clear until today that the case would not be charged, and I had good reasons not to want to the antagonize the U.S. attorney’s office. There were other people involved in the incident whom I did not want to see wrapped up in a criminal investigation, particularly as not everyone present was a permanent resident or citizen of this country. So I kept the footage for the day the case was done. That turns out to be today. You can decide what you think of it:
Second, here is the terms of the case’s resolution:
I agreed to pay a $100 civil fine, in addition to $30 in court costs.
The U.S. attorney’s office agreed to drop a similar action taken against a gentleman who happened to be with me that evening but who didn’t operate the projectors and couldn’t reasonably be said to have projected on the monuments.
My property will be returned—including both #LordLaser and #LadyLaser—in a couple of weeks.
I pled guilty to no crime and will have none on my record. My escutcheon remains spotless.
Third, the estimable Anna Bower came to court to cover the hearing. She will be joining my on #DogShirtTV tomorrow morning to give a full report on the very strange proceedings. I would like to thank my attorney, the estimable Mark Goldstone, for representing me on this matter.
Thanks also to everyone who has reached out and offered help and kind words. It’s a lot of people. I have appreciated it.
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Tyler McBrien came on the show to talk about his latest project, an investigative podcast on the Georgia Guidestones:
The Situation
The Situation on Sunday commented on the shocking paucity of detail or evidence in the government’s effort to issue subpoenas to the Federal Reserve Board—a paucity that grew more dramatic when the government filed a five-page motion for reconsideration in Chief Judge James Boasberg’s court.
Meanwhile, the United States proceeded with its war against Iran. And the president threatened European countries that they’d better join in or NATO was in trouble. And yet the European countries in question seemed oddly unmoved.
And so the president cast his wandering eye on Cuba. It’s close by, after all, and Iran turns out to be complicated. And Cuba is more like Venezuela—being close by and Spanish speaking—than is Iran. Iran, as we have all learned, is far far away and Farsi-speaking.
And meanwhile, while nobody was looking, Pakistan conducted airstrikes on Kabul and seems to have killed a lot of people.
And meanwhile, while everyone was looking, the Israelis claimed they killed the de facto Iranian leader, Ali Larijani—a claim the Iranian government has now confirmed.
And, as you know, the Oscars were awarded, and a lot of people got dressed up in formal wear and made speeches.
And there were storms in Washington, D.C. that fell somewhat short of catastrophic, as weather in Washington tends to do.
And Ric Grenell lost his job running the Kennedy Center into the ground.
And Peter Thiel gave lectures about the Antichrist near the Vatican.
And Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, became the first administration official to resign in protest over the Iran war.
And a meteor exploded over Cleveland—because it was the time in this particular drama when a meteor should for some reason explode over Cleveland.
And the Supreme Court agreed to hear cases on whether the president can terminate temporary protective status for Syrians and Haitians.
And a federal judge in Boston blocked the administration’s changes to the country’s immunization schedule for children.
And meanwhile, the president outed a member of Congress for having a terminal illness. And the president’s chief of staff outed herself for having breast cancer.
And the guy charged with planting bombs at the DNC and RNC headquarters back in January of 2021 claimed that he is covered by the president’s Jan. 6 pardon.
And the Department of Homeland Security remains unfunded. And nobody seems to care except for the many employees of the Department of Homeland Security who are not getting paid.
And, as I write this column, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth finds the shutdown of the Voice of America unlawful and orders 1,000 of its employees reinstated.
And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: What does any of this have to do with Judge Boasberg, or Jeanine Pirro, or the subpoenas to the Fed?
And you’re thinking: Hold on hoss. You can’t make a column out of a series of events bound together by nothing more than their having appeared prominently in major newspapers in close proximity in time to the Boasberg-Pirro spat, when some of those events have nothing to do with The Situation or the rule of law at all but involve third party wars, the weather, or even random astronomical events.
And if that’s what you’re thinking, you are very much wrong. Because I can make a column out of such a list.
The very essence of The Situation is a bewildering, disorienting blizzard of stuff being thrown at you all at once. Yes, it’s flooding the zone with shit, but it’s not all shit. Some of it is war and death and some of it is illegal stuff, and some of it is policy craziness, and some of it you can’t even tell if it’s related to The Situation at all. And some of it is other actors doing other-actor things. And some of it is the weather. And some of it is a meteor blowing up over Cleveland. And it all happens at the same time.
And so you experience the news as a kind of panic attack, a breathless list of things that are happening that may or may not be connected, but they—individually and collectively—make you breathe faster, make your pulse race. And critically, they make you angry.
And depending on who you are, they may make you angry at different people. You might be angry at the president. You might be angry at the Israelis. You might be angry at the president’s enemies or those Europeans who seem strangely unmoved by the president’s demands that they get involved in his war. Or you might be mad at the media, for hyping the storm that fell somewhat short of apocalyptic. But you’re mad at somebody about something. Because in The Situation, you’re always mad at somebody about something. Because that is part of the experience of The Situation.
And part of the reason you’re angry is that you know it will continue tomorrow—because knowing that The Situation continues tomorrow is also part of the essence of The Situation. It doesn’t stop. The torrent, the blizzard, the unending stream of bullshit—some of it trivial (who cares if Grenell lost his job?), some of it deadly serious—didn’t start yesterday or the day before or the day before that, and it won’t end today or tomorrow or the day after that.
The list of meanwhiles has no beginning and no end.
The Situation continues tomorrow—because of course it does.
Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang
Iran Will Retaliate in the U.S. We May Not See It in Time.
Troy Edwards, Bruria Haya Friedman-Feldman, and Vishnu Kannan warn that, because the Trump administration has deteriorated the government’s national security apparatus, the U.S. is more vulnerable to an Iranian attack, whether through acts of terrorism, cyberattacks, or election interference.
Reducing our capacity to monitor, prevent, and respond to Iranian attacks at home at a time of heightened risk—brought on by U.S. international conflict with a foreign state sponsor of terror—poses a serious national security concern. The recent history of Iranian operations on U.S. soil shows how our agencies and procedures can effectively thwart such attempts when they are at full capacity. In contrast, a survey of how this administration has dramatically weakened those agencies and procedures shows how vulnerable the U.S. and its citizens may be to Iranian attacks now.
Canadian Courts Are Holding the Line on National Emergency Powers
Anvesh Jain examines how a recent Canadian court decision that limits the government’s use of emergency powers demonstrates strong judicial enforcement of statutory limits on executive authority, which differs from the more lenient approaches observed in other countries’ courts in the Western hemisphere.
The Federal Court’s decision in Canadian Frontline Nurses and the FCA’s subsequent appellate ruling in Canadian Civil Liberties Association confirm that in Canada, the existence of an emergency remains a question of law and fact subject to judicial determination. These rulings vindicate the promise of the post-1982 constitutional project, underscoring a legal culture where “necessity [remains] a high bar” and in which “the exercise of all public power must find its ultimate source in a legal rule.” By anchoring emergency powers within this rights-based framework, Canada has charted a course distinct from the more permissive approaches seen elsewhere in the hemisphere, undergirding a system that expects its executive to rigorously defend the necessity of its actions.
Documents
Tyler McBrien shared the U.S.’s letter to the UN Security Council laying out its justification for the attacks on Iran as a matter of self defense and collective defense of Israel.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, Hanna Notte joins Anastasiia Lapatina to discuss Iranian-Russian cooperation in the context of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, Russia’s role in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal, challenges to Iran and Russia’s relationship, and more.
On Scaling Laws, Alan Z. Rozenshtein sits down with Jessica Silbey and Woody Hartzog to discuss the pair’s paper, “How AI Destroys Institutions,” which examines the threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI) systems democratic society and civic institutions.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the eel, which earns the title today for having been used as a form of currency in medieval England, a piece of information I (EJ Wittes) discovered via the absolutely delightful Eel-Rents Mapping Project. Here are all the places in England where people paid their rents in eels in the 10th and 11th centuries:
One of the peculiar aspects of the Domesday register of 1086 are the range of taxes that the English paid in-kind. Domesday records payments in pigs, in fish, in ale, and in many other types of food. Of these in-kind payments, the one that stands out most to modern viewers is likely the eel-rents. This is in part because, in Europe and the Americas, we have generally moved away from eating eel on anything like a regular basis. Consequently, the idea of eels having any type of social or economic value appears less normal to us the thought of other animals or commodities having negotiable value. We still eat pigs and drink ale. But the eel-rents also stand out for the sometimes excessive numbers of animals at play — the village of Harmston, for example, owed the Earl Hugh 75,000 eels per year, and fishermen in Wisbech needed to pay various local monasteries a combined total of almost 35,000 per year.
Eel-rents usually only find passing mention in history books, and when they do it is these types of rents, with their eye-popping numbers, that dominate. It is worth noting, though, that these numbers, while high, are not out of the range of normal. Domesday and subsequent documents show that rents of multiple thousands of eels a year were common for single fisheries or mills. All told, at the time of the Great Survey in 1086 people living in England owed more than 500,000 eels in taxes each year to their landlords.
The purpose of this project is to map and present the role of eel-rents in the medieval and early modern English economy. From at least the tenth century onward, the English all across the island paid some taxes in eel (live and dead). English eel-rents have long been understudies and misunderstood, and this project demonstrates both the breadth, and the depth, of the rents in English history.
In honor of today’s Beast, please enjoy this dissertation on the cultural role of eels in medieval and early modern Britain. Or don’t, if you’re boring and don’t care to read 300 pages on eel economics. That’s fine. You’re allowed to be wrong.
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