Provenance · the receipts behind the receipts
How the Briefs Were Made
Two briefs anchor this site: the Hyde Brief and the Fund Brief. Both argue, on behalf of nobody but the public record, that the Broadview Six have a case for recovering what this prosecution cost them. You should not take that on faith. This page is the provenance record: who made the briefs, how every citation was checked before it was used, what failed the check and got flagged instead of polished, and where you can read the receipts yourself.
Who made this — and what it is not
The briefs were built by Danny Aguilar with Claude, as advocacy and citizen-journalism legal research. They argue the Broadview Six's side from public documents, with Kat Abughazaleh as the worked example because she is the most publicly documented of the six.
They are not a filed pleading — nothing here was submitted to any court. They are not legal advice. And they are not authorized by or attributed to Ms. Abughazaleh, her co-defendants, their campaigns, or their counsel. Whether to file anything, and what to file, is their call and their lawyers' call. See the standing disclaimer.
The check
What you can check — and how it was checked
The rule for both briefs was simple: no case citation appears anywhere in this project unless it was verified against the text of the actual opinion first. Verification ran through Midpage AI, a legal-research tool that returns verbatim passages from court opinions, with CourtListener as the live backup. Every quote carries a pin cite. Every factual claim about the prosecution traces to the public dismissal-hearing transcript of May 21, 2026, or to named reporting.
The verbatim extracts were not thrown away after checking. They are preserved in the public project repository under docs/factcheck/midpage-raw/ — thirty files, one per authority, recording what each opinion actually says next to what the project claims it says. One of those files records a failure: the Six's own docket, USA v. Rabbitt et al., No. 25 CR 693 (N.D. Ill.), never resolved in the research tool at all, so the project cites the court transcript for it instead of pretending otherwise.
The archive earned its keep. The research tool's subscription expired in the middle of the final June 5 verification pass — so that pass ran against the preserved verbatim extracts, with CourtListener as the live check for the handful of items not already in the archive. The numbers below are that pass's tally.
256
Claims checked
Every checkable legal claim across 14 surfaces — the public pages, the data layer, and both briefs — in the June 5, 2026 comprehensive pass.
193
Held up as written
Verified solid against the opinion text or the transcript record. No edit needed.
0
Fabricated citations or invented quotes
No citation pointed to a case that does not exist. No quote was invented. Every verbatim case-law quote that was checked is accurate.
19 + 36
Flagged, not shipped
19 claims flagged as overstated or inaccurate and 36 flagged for sharpening — written up as a public correction list, not quietly smoothed over. Another 16 claims sit outside the opinion record (settlement text, press, docket) and are tracked for primary-source confirmation.
The honest part
What happened when verification cut against the argument
A verification process only means something if it is allowed to lose. Cases that did not survive checking, or that came back with caveats, are flagged in the briefs rather than overstated. Three real examples, each with its verified case file on this site:
Keepseagle v. Perdue
The best quote is a dissent — so it's labeled one.
The Fund Brief leans on a passage from Keepseagle v. Perdueabout the government's duty to pay settled claims promptly. Verification confirmed the quote is letter-perfect — and flagged that it comes from Judge Brown's dissent. The majority went the other way: it upheld the cy-pres distribution and held the court had no jurisdiction to redirect leftover funds to claimants. Instead of dropping the flag, the brief and the site carry it: the quote is attributed as a dissent, and the majority's contrary holding is stated next to it.
Bank of Nova Scotia v. United States
The anchor case cuts both ways — so the briefs say so.
Bank of Nova Scotia is the grand-jury misconduct anchor. But its default rule requires a showing of prejudice, and the Supreme Court reverseda misconduct dismissal in that very case. Its presumed-prejudice carve-out is narrow — the named examples are racial discrimination in grand-juror selection and the exclusion of women. Verification flagged every passage that treated the Broadview record as falling inside that class as if it were settled law. The briefs now frame that reading as the defense's contested argument, and lean instead on the concrete fact that the first grand jury declined to indict.
Chapman v. United States
The most dangerous case leads the brief instead of disappearing.
Verification surfaced Chapman v. United States, 524 F.3d 1073 (9th Cir. 2008) — a holding that a dismissal entered purely to sanction prosecutorial misconduct may not make the defendants “prevailing parties,” which would let a court deny Hyde Amendment fees without ever reaching the three-prong standard. It is directly adverse to the Six's posture, and it was missing from the project entirely. The fix was not to bury it: the Hyde Brief now opens with the prevailing-party threshold, answers it on this record, and notes that Chapman is Ninth Circuit authority — persuasive, not binding, in the Seventh.
The method
Two checkers who can't see each other's work
For the highest-stakes sections, the project uses an independent double-check: two separate agents are given the same material and verify it in parallel, without seeing each other's work. Each writes its own report. A third pass then reconciles the two reports line by line — agreements count as doubly-corroborated, and disagreements get adjudicated with the stricter correction applied.
The worked example is the Hyde Amendment section, checked this way on May 24, 2026. Both agents independently confirmed that every verbatim case-law quote was letter-perfect against the controlling opinions and that all five appellate cases were good law. Where they disagreed — down to which line numbers a transcript quote sits on — the synthesis took the tighter reading. One agent caught a case name pinned to the wrong transcript page that the other had missed; the fix went in. All three files are in the public repository: docs/factcheck/hyde-agent-a.md, hyde-agent-b.md, and hyde-synthesis-2026-05-24.md.
The Hyde Brief
The Hyde Amendment brief
The Hyde Brief argues the durable route: the 1997 federal fee-shifting statute that lets a prevailing defendant recover fees when the government's position was vexatious, frivolous, or in bad faith. The same May 28 verification pass ran its doctrine through verbatim opinion analysis: sixteen cases verified across the Hyde fee-shifting line, the civil-tort line, and the grand-jury misconduct anchor. Every verbatim quote checked clean against the opinion text; no case is bad law. The one item that would not verify is the Six's own docket, which the research tool does not carry — so the brief cites the dismissal-hearing transcript for the record of the case itself.
The brief's shape comes from its adverse findings. It opens with the Chapman prevailing-party threshold — the single most dangerous authority against the fee claim — rather than leading with the friendly cases. It keeps prosecutorial immunity (Imbler) distinct from the Hyde claim instead of blurring them. And it treats Bank of Nova Scotia's narrow carve-out as the contested argument it is. The June 5 re-check scored it 27 claims, 24 solid, and found it carries its own warnings against overstating the record.
The re-check also caught two errors, both corrected in the current draft: a page pin on a correctly attributed quote was off by four pages, and the statement of facts overcounted grand-jury no-bills relative to the verified opinion it cited.
One label is worth naming here, because it is the opposite of marketing: nothing on this site calls the Hyde route “strong.” The verified, honest label is contested — a real route with a demanding standard, obstacles named in the brief itself, and no guarantee a court agrees.
The Fund Brief
The Anti-Weaponization Fund brief
The Fund Brief argues that the Broadview Six would be eligible under the Anti-Weaponization Fund's own text. Its status note matters: a federal court froze the Fund on May 29, 2026, and the administration withdrew it on June 2. The brief therefore reads as a conditional argument — as long as the Fund exists in any form, here is the eligibility case — and its current draft carries that status on its face.
On May 28, 2026, every statutory-interpretation and precedent authority in the brief ran through verbatim opinion analysis: twelve authorities across five buckets — the grammar canons (Barnhart, Lockhart, Facebook v. Duguid), constitutional avoidance, the absurdity doctrine, the Keepseagle / Pigford / Cobell settlement-fund analogy, and the Fund's own court docket. The verdicts: five verified-as-used, seven verified-with-caveat, zero miscited. Every cited proposition is genuinely held by the case it is pinned to; the weaknesses found were about completeness, not accuracy.
“Verified-with-caveat” means the brief has to own a weakness, and it does, in its own text: Barnhart itself calls the last-antecedent rule “not an absolute”; the Brown passage from Keepseagle is labeled a dissent; the strongest settlement analogs (Pigford, Cobell) each needed an Act of Congress, while the Fund rests on a contract; and because Trump v. IRS produced no settlement of record, nothing in the brief implies a court ever blessed the Fund.
The June 5 comprehensive pass re-checked the brief end to end: 28 claims, 24 solid, zero fabricated. It flagged two gaps — the Chapmanprevailing-party threshold was missing from the brief's Hyde-alternative section, and the bridge from Thompson v. Clark to the federal tort claim needed a qualifier. Both are answered in the current draft.
Check the work
How to read the receipts
Every case row on this site carries a free, non-paywalled link, because poor and working class people should not need a Westlaw login to check whether a citation is real.
Case law
The verified case files →
Every case the briefs cite: the verified holding, what it actually supports, the caveats, and a free link to the opinion.
Sources
The source registry →
Every source used anywhere on the site — primary records, verified case law, and named reporting — in one registry.
The Hyde Brief
Read it in full →
The Hyde Amendment brief, full text, opening with the strongest case against itself.
The Fund Brief
Read it in full →
The Anti-Weaponization Fund brief, full text, with the obstacles stated candidly.
The limits
What this verification does not cover
Verification covered the case law and the transcript record. The statutory citations for the original charges trace to the transcript and to named reporting; the briefs flag them for confirmation against the court docket itself, which the project has not independently pulled.
Sixteen claims could not be verified against opinions at all — settlement text, press statements, and docket items that live outside the opinion record. They are tracked and labeled for primary-source confirmation, not certified.
The briefs are one-sided by design, and they say so. They make the strongest good-faith case for the Broadview Six and name the obstacles in their own text. Verification proves the citations are real, the quotes are accurate, and the propositions are genuinely held by the cases they are pinned to. It cannot prove the argument wins. A court can read every receipt on this page and still say no.