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Andrew Egger at The Bulwark:

MEDIA MATTERS, THE LEFT-LEANING WATCHDOG of right-wing media that has been a staple of blue Twitter for nearly two decades, will cease posting on the site starting tonight—a direct result of their lengthy legal fight with the company now known as X and its owner, Elon Musk. Their reason for going dark, according to staff: changes to X’s terms of service, scheduled to go into effect at midnight tonight, that seem specifically designed to hurt Media Matters’ chances in their legal battle—and highlight the lengths to which Musk will sometimes go to punish his critics. “Some of the changes to X’s terms of service underscore Elon Musk’s ability and seeming willingness to change the rules of the platform to punish speech,” said Angelo Carusone, chairman and president of Media Matters, in a statement on Wednesday evening. “There’s little reason to believe similar tactics wouldn’t be used again at crucial moments, like in the runup to elections. Having so much power to control the flow of information should concern everyone invested in democracy.”

The two companies have been fighting in court since 2023. That November, Media Matters published a report criticizing Musk’s anything-goes moderation policies and demonstrating that advertisers’ content was sometimes showing up next to hate speech and neo-Nazi posts. X—which was then suffering through a damaging exodus of advertisers due to exactly these concerns—quickly filed what Musk described as a “thermonuclear lawsuit” accusing Media Matters of gaming X’s algorithm in a way that “misrepresented the real user experience.” Media Matters called the lawsuit “frivolous,” accused Musk of trying to weaponize the law to silence critics, and vowed to fight it out in court.

Much of the recent court wrangling, however, hasn’t concerned the merits of Musk’s accusation but a preliminary procedural matter: Which court or courts provide the proper venue for trying the case? X didn’t file its lawsuit in San Francisco, where X was then based, or in Washington, D.C., home of Media Matters. Instead, it brought the case in the Northern District of Texas—a frequent court-shopping destination for conservatives looking for legal advantage—where it landed on the desk of Chief Judge Reed O’Connor. In addition to a lengthy track record of pro-conservative rulings, O’Connor has faced criticism for presiding over Musk-related lawsuits while personally owning Tesla stock. While O’Connor recused himself from a different 2024 case brought by X—Musk’s attempt to punish businesses for no longer buying ads on his platform—he declined to do so in the Media Matters case. The new X terms of service specifically require that all cases involving the company be filed in the Fort Worth division of the Northern District of Texas. There are just three judges assigned to that division, including O’Connor. Because one is a senior-status judge with a reduced caseload, the odds of any case filed in that division being assigned to O’Connor are greater than one in three.

Media Matters has been fighting Musk’s maneuver to get the suit in front of O’Connor. In response to X’s lawsuit, they argued that, by suing in Texas, X had violated its own terms of service—which stipulated at the time that all disputes involving X be brought “solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County” and under California law. Media Matters made the same claim in a countersuit filed against X in California. (In October 2024, Musk belatedly updated X’s terms of service to require all future litigation involving the company to be brought in North Texas.) But a new change in X’s terms of service, announced last month and effective as of tomorrow, seems designed specifically to undercut Media Matters’ venue argument. Now, in addition to insisting that all new federal disputes be held in Judge O’Connor’s district, X is also attempting to bind its users to an agreement that all pre-existing U.S. disputes be litigated there as well.

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

In a brazen act of forum shopping, the Trump administration has filed a petition in the Northern District of Texas—the most notoriously conservative federal court in the country—to compel Rhode Island Hospital, 1,800 miles away, to hand over patient records from its transgender youth care program. The petition seeks to enforce an administrative subpoena served on the hospital last July under HIPAA authority, as part of an investigation into alleged violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The subpoena includes level clinical records and private patient and doctor information. The hospital has refused to comply for ten months. It is easy to see why the DOJ chose Texas: it has lost every single subpoena fight it has brought against hospitals providing gender-affirming care—in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. Now, rather than accept those rulings, the administration is exploiting a HIPAA provision that allows subpoena enforcement wherever "the investigation is being carried out"—a location the DOJ selected itself.

The filing reveals the scope of what the administration is after. The DOJ served the subpoena on August 7, 2025, claiming authority to “investigate violations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.” The legal theory is that because the FDA has not specifically approved puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria, any hospital prescribing them for that purpose is engaged in “misbranding”—distributing drugs without adequate labeling for their intended use. The filing states that the FDA “has determined neither their safety nor effectiveness” for gender dysphoria treatment. This framing ignores the fact that off-label prescribing is legal, routine, and up to 25% of all prescriptions written in the United States—from aspirin for heart disease to gabapentin for anxiety. No court has ever held that a doctor commits a federal drug crime by prescribing medication off-label. But the most alarming part of the filing is what the DOJ intends to do with the information. The subpoena seeks to identify the doctors involved in patient care, obtain billing and coding records, and acquire the private medical records of the transgender patients themselves. The filing makes explicit that the DOJ wants to go directly after patients: “Providing patient records including patient identities can also provide essential investigative leads,” it states. “Parents may be witnesses about what disclosures were made. Patients (depending on age and circumstances) may provide information about the informed consent process, side effects, or other false or misleading information about the drugs conveyed during treatment.” The filing goes further, arguing that “without this information, the Government cannot fully determine the scope of the violations, identify patterns of misbranding or fraudulent billing, or assess whether the conduct was undertaken with intent to defraud or mislead, as required for felony liability.”

Similar subpoenas have been quashed by federal courts across the country—and the language those judges used was scathing.

[...] Instead of accepting these rulings, the DOJ moved its fight to Texas. The HIPAA statute allows enforcement of administrative subpoenas in the district where the hospital is located or where "the investigation is being carried out." Ordinarily, these investigations are based in Washington, D.C. or at nearby DOJ field offices—the Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch that signed this petition is headquartered in D.C., and the subpoena was signed by its Acting Director, Lisa K. Hsiao, the same official whose subpoenas were quashed in Massachusetts, Washington, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. Instead, the administration chose to base this investigation in the Northern District of Texas—a court that has become the go-to destination for conservative litigants seeking friendly judges, that refused to adopt the Judicial Conference's anti-judge-shopping reforms, and where every case filed in certain divisions is guaranteed to land before a single Trump-appointed judge.

S. Baum at Erin In The Morning:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas has issued the first known criminal subpoena directed at a health care institution for offering gender-affirming care to transgender youth—at NYU Langone, a hospital situated almost 2,000 miles away in the greater New York City area. The notification was sent to patients (and/or parents) via their online portal just after 7pm on May 11, as per screenshots obtained by Erin in the Morning. In a public statement, Langone indicated there were other health care institutions that received this kind of subpoena, too. “We are writing to inform you that on May 7, 2026, NYU Langone Hospitals (”NYULH”) was one of several institutions that received a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas,” the notification reads. “Among other requests, the subpoena directs NYULH to provide information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care at NYULH between 2020-2026, as well as the names of NYULH providers and others who were involved in offering such care at NYULH in that timeframe.”

It continues: “Pursuant to the New York State Shield Law, any entity in New York State that receives a request for information regarding legally protected health activity, such as the provision of reproductive health care or gender-affirming care, must make a reasonable attempt to notify the individuals to whom that request pertains at least 30 days before complying with or providing information in response to the request.” “We understand that these developments may be concerning to our patients, providers, and others,” it concluded. “Please know that NYU Langone takes the privacy of your protected health information very seriously and we are evaluating our response to the subpoena.” Almost two dozen hospitals or clinics have received subpoenas from the Department of Justice under the Trump Administration targeting young trans patients. But this is a dire escalation. Those were administrative subpoenas—meaning the cases were civil in nature. But this round of subpoenas entails a criminal case, meaning providers or hospital officials face risk of arrest and jail time. It does not appear to target parents of trans kids or trans patients.

News of the subpoena also means the federal government has assembled a grand jury, an important step towards criminal proceedings. At the same time, New York has strong Shield Laws to protect providers from out-of-state prosecution. That same policy is what mandated the notification sent to patients and/or parents. It is unclear what information, exactly, the DOJ requested; whether this includes personally identifiable data on patients, such as names, or whether the requested information can be anonymized; nor does the statement indicate what crime the federal government alleges Langone committed. The hospital may try to fight the subpoena, in whole or in part, in court—but because the federal government is strategically pursuing the case in one of the most conservative courts in the country, Langone faces an uphill battle. This round of litigation could also put the efficacy of Shield Laws to the test. “This is a blatant unlawful effort by the [Department of Justice] to intimidate providers of gender affirming care to trans youth by engaging in judge and forum shopping,” Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard Law instructor and legal scholar told Erin in the Morning.

[...]

Gender-affirming care remains legal in New York; in fact, it benefits from robust protections against federal encroachment. Attorney General Letitia James condemned hospitals that caved over the last year for rolling back gender-affirming care over Trumpian threats, on the grounds that in doing so they were discriminating against transgender New Yorkers.

This is government overreach by the Trump Regime’s Department of Injustice.

See Also:

HuffPost: DOJ Launches Criminal Probe Into Blue State Hospital

Them: NYU Langone Criminally Subpoenaed by Federal Court for Trans Youth Care Records

The Advocate: Trump administration seeks transgender patient records from NYU Langone

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