An Indiana man has allegedly threatened to “gut” billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk and parade his “corpse through the streets.”

David Allen June Cherry, 28, is facing a count of intimidation, a felony, the Indiana State Police said in a Facebook post. As Law&Crime previously reported, the investigation began Feb. 18 when authorities in Texas contacted their counterparts in the Hoosier State about an X account tied to Cherry that allegedly made threats toward Musk earlier this month.

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Cops identified a series of posts on X earlier over the last few months under the account @effective_pawn. The posts were mostly replying to Musk’s tweets and are as follows (all times Central Standard Time):

Dec. 6 at 5:21 p.m.: We’re gunning you down, Muskrat.

Jan. 22 at 11:30 p.m.: I’ve got enough bullets for his b—- a– and all the rest of you manchildren [in a reply to Andrew Tate]

Feb. 3 at 3:01 p.m.: You’ve broken the law. You’re on the hit list.

Feb. 3 at 3:22 p.m.: You’re robbing the American people. We will gut you and parade your corpse through the streets.

Feb. 26 at 3:47 p.m.: I am going to plant a bomb in Elon Musk’s house

After receiving the X posts, troopers obtained an search warrant to “ping” Cherry’s phone. It showed he was located in the area of Veterans Parkway and Sam Gwin Boulevard in Clarksville, a town along the Indiana-Kentucky border. They found Cherry at his workplace and he agreed to go to the state police Sellersburg Post for further questioning.

After receiving his Miranda warning, he confirmed he posted under the account in question. He said he made the post to be “edgy” and receive reactions online, and that he never intended to do Musk harm.

Cherry stands accused of level five intimidation. According to an Indiana defense attorney, it carries up to a six-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine.

Florida prosecutors dropped a felony charge against a woman who allegedly threatened her health insurance company after being denied a claim and invoked the now-infamous phrase “Delay, Deny, Depose.”

Records show that prosecutors dropped the threats to conduct a mass shooting or an act of terrorism earlier this month against 42-year-old Briana Boston. Prosecutors did not say why they dropped the case but it likely was tied at least in part to Boston’s lack of criminal history and her that she had no desire to actually carry out the alleged threat.

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“My client is 42, married mother of three,” her attorney Jim Headley said during her first appearance, according to NewsNation. “Never had any criminal charges or convictions.”

Boston had been out on bond since mid-December and was allowed to go to her children’s medical appointments and school, per an order filed with the court.

As Law&Crime previously reported, Boston’s comments came on the heels of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

The FBI notified the Lakeland Police Department on Dec. 10 about a local woman who threatened an employee of BlueCross BlueShield during a recorded phone call. A probable cause arrest affidavit said Boston had called about a recent medical insurance claim that was denied. At the end of the call, Boston allegedly said “Deny, Delay, Depose. You people are next.”

Investigators reportedly found the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” handwritten on the shell casings from the bullets that killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City. Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter who was arrested after a massive manhunt, wrote a manifesto railing against health care companies.

Lakeland cops went to Boston’s home to interview her. She reportedly admitted to threatening the person on the other line. Boston said she was sorry, doesn’t have any firearms and is not a danger to anyone.

“Boston further stated the healthcare companies played games and deserved karma from the world because they are evil,” cops wrote.

Following Thompson’s killing insurance companies have taken safety measures such as taking down online biographies about executives and hiring personal security.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Jan. 17 upholding the federal law banning TikTok continues a long history of judicial deference to claims of national security. The ruling upholds a federal statute that bans a medium of communication that is used by more than 170 million people in the United States. The speech of all who generate content for it and all who receive it is restricted by this law. It is difficult to think of any law in American history that restricted so much speech for so many people.

TikTok stopped operating in the United States for a brief time after the court’s decision. Upon taking office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order delaying the TikTok ban from going into effect for 75 days. It is questionable whether he has the authority to do this under the federal statute. But if no court enjoins his order, TikTok at least has a temporary reprieve. The ultimate fate of TikTok in this United States remains uncertain.

Factual background

On April 24, 2024, President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act into law. The act identifies the People’s Republic of China and three other countries as foreign adversaries of the United States and prohibits the distribution or maintenance of “foreign adversary controlled applications.” The law prohibited TikTok in the United States as of Jan. 19, unless its owner, ByteDance, had sold it by then.

Under the law, the president may grant a 90-day extension if there is significant progress being made toward a sale of TikTok. ByteDance has given no indication that it is interested in a sale, so it is difficult to see President Trump’s action fitting within this statutory authority.

On Dec. 6, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the federal law outlawing TikTok. The judges acknowledged the impact of the law on freedom of speech, but they accepted the government’s argument that national security concerns justified the ban.

First, the court said China, through TikTok, could gather information about those in the United States. Second, the court said China could attempt to use TikTok to influence attitudes, including about politics, in this country.

Supreme Court decision

The Supreme Court granted certiorari and scheduled oral argument for Jan. 10. A week later, the court unanimously affirmed the D.C. Circuit in a per curiam opinion.

At the outset, the court said there was the question of whether “heightened review” was appropriate when there was a regulation of nonexpressive activity (ownership of a platform) that disproportionately burdens those engaged in expressive activity (those who post on TikTok and receive information there). The court did not resolve that issue, instead declaring, “We assume without deciding that the challenged provisions fall within this category and are subject to First Amendment scrutiny.”

The court began by reciting the familiar principle that content-based regulations must meet strict scrutiny, while content neutral laws only need meet intermediate scrutiny. Under strict scrutiny, a law must be necessary to achieve a compelling purpose, while under intermediate scrutiny, a law only need be substantially related to an important purpose. A law is deemed content-based if either it restricts speech based on its topic or its viewpoint.

The court said that “As applied to petitioners, the challenged provisions are facially content neutral and are justified by a content-neutral rationale.” The court explained that the federal statute was content- neutral because it prohibited all speech over TikTok in the United States, whatever its topic and whatever its viewpoint.

The court identified the government’s purpose as preventing China, a foreign adversary, from gathering large amounts of information on Americans using the platform. And it expressly declared that this was a sufficiently important interest to meet intermediate scrutiny: “The act’s prohibitions and divestiture requirement are designed to prevent China—a designated foreign adversary—from leveraging its control over ByteDance Ltd. to capture the personal data of U. S. TikTok users. This objective qualifies as an important Government interest under intermediate scrutiny.”

The court said China could gather vast amounts of information about users of TikTok that could include enabling “China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” The court stressed that the case arose in the context of “national security and foreign policy,” and therefore concluded that “we must accord substantial deference to the predictive judgments of Congress.”

Notably, the court did not echo the D.C. Circuit’s conclusion that the TikTok ban was justified because China might use it to influence attitudes in the United States. The premise of the First Amendment is that more speech is inherently better, regardless of its source. Restricting speech because it might change minds is antithetical to the First Amendment. Even during the height of the Cold War, the United States allowed the Russian newspaper Pravda to be sold in this country.

The challengers argued that the purpose of the federal law was to prevent TikTok to be used to convey particular views. The court acknowledged that no prior cases had determined “the appropriate level of First Amendment scrutiny for an act of Congress justified on both content-neutral and content-based grounds.”

The court said it did not need to decide that issue, but then effectively did by declaring: “The record before us adequately supports the conclusion that Congress would have passed the challenged provisions based on the data collection justification alone.” This is an important clarification of First Amendment law: If a government action is justified by both content-based and content-neutral rationales, it will be treated as content-neutral so long as the court is convinced that the law would have been adopted anyway based on the content-neutral rationale.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor concurred in part and concurred in the judgment. She agreed with the decision but said the court should have held, not just assumed, that the ban on TikTok is expressive activity. She said, “TikTok engages in expressive activity by ‘compiling and curating’ material on its platform.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred in the judgment. He questioned whether the law was actually content-neutral but said it was constitutional under any level of scrutiny. He wrote: “I am persuaded that the law before us seeks to serve a compelling interest: preventing a foreign country, designated by Congress and the president as an adversary of our oation, from harvesting vast troves of personal information about tens of millions of Americans.”

Analysis

No one in the litigation disputes that TikTok can gain a great deal of information about users of its platform. Nor was it disputed that this information potentially could be obtained by China.

What is missing in the court’s analysis is a discussion of what information China can obtain and how that information can be used to damage national security. It is certainly true that every app allows those administering it to gather information about users. But knowing how many people are watching a dance video hardly seems a basis for endangering the country. Because the federal law is a very significant restriction on speech there must be a real, proven danger, not conjecture.

None of the briefs elaborates this, either. Nor is it the case that the court relied on secret information provided by the government to justify the law. Justice Gorsuch observed: “I am pleased that the court declines to consider the classified evidence the government has submitted to us but shielded from petitioners and their counsel.”

The court should have explained in much greater detail what information China could gain from TikTok users and how China possessing this information could harm the United States.

Ultimately then, what explains the court’s conclusion is not a proven likely harm to national security from TikTok. Rather, it is the court giving deference to the government’s claim that TikTok is a threat to national security. There have been many cases throughout American history where the court has professed such deference. But the crucial question is whether such deference is appropriate when it involves a major restriction on the exercise of a fundamental right.

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Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. He is an expert in constitutional law, federal practice, civil rights and civil liberties, and appellate litigation. He’s also the author of many books, including No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States and A Court Divided: October Term 2023 (2024).

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This column reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily the views of the ABA Journal—or the American Bar Association.

Hunter Biden’s legal team released a report over the weekend that included a “stark warning” that the first son may face retribution at the hands of incoming President-elect Donald Trump. With the election of the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president, the “threat against Hunter is real,” his lawyers claim. The report was released on Saturday ahead of President Joe Biden issuing a full federal pardon for his son on Sunday night.

The 52-page report, obtained by the Washington Post and Washington Examiner, laid out the criminal prosecutions that led to convictions for Hunter Biden.

“Here, in one place, is the complete and reprehensible history of the political persecution of Hunter Biden,” one of Biden’s lawyers, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement. “This is a seven-year saga propelled by an unrelenting political desire to use a son to hurt his father.”

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With Trump coming to power in January, things could have become dicey for the president’s son if he weren’t pardoned. Per the Post, the report contains a timeline of the allegations against Hunter Biden.

“It is a wild and terrifying story that serves as a stark warning of what is to come as some of the same Republicans who targeted Hunter prepare to resume power and have stated their intention to use the government’s vast power to pursue their perceived enemies,” Lowell said.

Hunter Biden could have faced serious jail time for crimes ordinary citizens would not be prosecuted, his lawyers argue.

A Kentucky man is behind bars after threatening to kill a local judge and prosecutor, authorities in the Bluegrass State say.

Brian Tucker, 48, stands accused of retaliating against participants in a legal process, according to Boone County court records.

The arrest occurred on Nov. 27. The criminal case stems from a long-ago fire at the home of one of the defendant’s friends. The knock-on effects of that blaze have plagued Tucker’s life for several years.

A 44-year-old Texas woman admitted on Wednesday to threatening a federal judge and U.S. Congresswoman in a racist voice message, according to authorities.

On Aug. 5, 2023, Abigail Jo Shry called the chambers of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was in charge of former President Donald Trump’s case, accusing him of trying to overturn the 2020 election, and left a message on the voicemail, according to a complaint. Per the feds, Shry started out, “Hey you stupid slave n—-” and proceeded to threaten anyone who went after Trump along with all Democrats in Washington D.C. and all LGBTQ people. She also threatened Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died earlier this year.

On May 28, months before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution, she handed Jack Smith a loss, denying the special counsel’s request for a gag order on the former president. That same day, an unsealed federal indictment reveals, an Illinois man with a history of violent offenses allegedly threatened to murder an unnamed federal judge in St. Lucie County, Florida, a county that contains the relatively “small” Fort Pierce courthouse where Cannon and a magistrate judge sit.

Bloomberg got the scoop on the case against Eric James Rennert on Friday and reported that the victim in the case could very well be Cannon, considering she is “the only district judge” in St. Lucie County.

A former candidate for Congress in Florida has been charged with threatening to kill his opponent — and eventual winner — U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna in the 2021 Republican primary, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

William Robert Braddock III, 41, faces up to five years in prison if convicted, according to the feds. Although prosecutors don’t name Luna in the press release, she has previously filed for a protection order against Braddock. The defendant on June 8, 2021, allegedly threatened to injure and kill Luna and an associate during a phone call. Prosecutors say he said he was going to “call up my Russian-Ukrainian hit squad” and make her disappear.

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After making the threats Braddock allegedly fled to the Philippines where he was arrested and recently deported back to the United States.

Luna and Braddock were running for Florida’s 13th Congressional District to replace then-U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist after he vacated his seat for his unsuccessful bid for governor. Luna won the primary and then the general election. She filed an injunction against Braddock in June 2021 after he made the alleged threatening call and had been stalking her, the Associated Press reported.

“I do not feel safe and I am currently in fear for my life from Mr. Braddock,” Luna reportedly said in her petition.