Everyone Thinks DOJ "Weaponization" Started Recently. A Dead Software Company Says Otherwise.

Who investigates the Justice Department? In the INSLAW affair, the answer was always: the Justice Department. That problem never went away.

Jun 17, 2026

Everyone Thinks DOJ "Weaponization" Started Recently. A Dead Software Company Says Otherwise.

Who investigates the Justice Department? In the INSLAW affair, the answer was always: the Justice Department. That problem never went away.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #934: Wednesday, June 17th, 2026.

If you’ve just finished American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders on Netflix, you probably surfaced with the same two reactions almost everyone does.

The first: How have I never heard of this?

The second, harder to shake: How much of it is actually true?

That second question is the trap. The Octopus story is built to swallow you. It reaches for the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, BCCI, arms running on an Indian reservation, foreign spy agencies, a backdoor hidden inside software, and at least half a dozen suspicious deaths.

Pull any single thread…and you can spend a year arguing about it. Pull all of them at once…and you end up exactly where the documentary’s subject ended up…drowning.

So…let’s not do that.

Let’s separate what is documented…from what is alleged…and look hard at the part that survives the scrutiny.

Because once you strip away the espionage romance…what’s left is not a fairy tale. It’s a federal court ruling, two congressional reports, a dead judge’s career, a dead journalist, and a Department of Justice that…by the findings of actual judges…lied… stole…and stonewalled the people trying to hold it accountable.

That part isn’t a conspiracy theory. That part is the record.

Part One: The Software

In the early 1980s, a small Washington firm called INSLAW built something genuinely ahead of its time.

The software was named PROMIS…the Prosecutors’ Management Information System…and…it did something databases of that era struggled with: it pulled scattered records together and let prosecutors track enormous caseloads as a single, searchable whole.

INSLAW began as a nonprofit funded by federal law-enforcement grants, which would later matter enormously…because…it meant an early public-domain version of PROMIS existed.

But INSLAW’s founders, William and Nancy Hamilton…had since gone private and poured their own money into a vastly improved version…“Enhanced PROMIS”…that was theirs.

In 1982 the Justice Department awarded INSLAW a contract worth roughly $9.6 million to install PROMIS across U.S. Attorneys’ offices. On paper, a success story.

Then it went wrong…with suspicious speed.

The DOJ official assigned to manage the contract was C. Madison Brewer… INSLAW’s former general counsel…a man the company said it had fired for cause.

Sitting on the project’s oversight committee was D. Lowell Jensen…a senior Justice official who had earlier helped develop a competing case-management system.

INSLAW would argue that the project was handed to two men with personal reasons to want the company to fail.

Within months, the relationship collapsed.

The DOJ began withholding payments. By one account…the withholding began roughly a month after the Hamiltons refused to sell the company to a man connected to the Attorney General’s circle.

Starved of revenue it was owed…INSLAW was forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And here the story stops being a contract dispute…and starts being something uglier.

Part Two: The Treachery That’s Actually on the Record

This is the section most retellings skip past on their way to the spies. They shouldn’t.

The institutional misconduct is the most thoroughly proven part of the entire affair.

The attempt to force liquidation. While INSLAW was in Chapter 11…trying to reorganize and survive…the Hamiltons learned that an official inside the Executive Office for U.S. Trustees…a DOJ component…had allegedly been pressured to convert the case to Chapter 7.

Chapter 7 doesn’t mean reorganize. It means liquidate.

It means the company dies and its assets…including PROMIS…get sold off. A bankruptcy judge later found that the Department had tried, “unlawfully, intentionally and willfully,” to push INSLAW into liquidation by improper means.

The ruling. That judge was George F. Bason.

In 1987–88, after a trial in which he described the testimony of DOJ witnesses as “evasive,” “unbelievable,” and “biased,” Bason ruled that the Justice Department had “took, converted, stole” INSLAW’s enhanced software through “trickery, fraud and deceit.”

He awarded INSLAW roughly $6.8 million. Read that finding again. A federal judge concluded…on the evidence…that the Department of Justice stole…and did it by lying.

What happened to the judge.

Here is the detail that turns a contract case into something that should make your skin prickle.

Shortly after ruling against the government…Bason sought routine reappointment to the bankruptcy bench. He was denied…the only D.C. bankruptcy judge not reappointed that cycle.

His replacement was Martin Teel Jr., a Justice Department attorney who had argued against INSLAW in the very litigation Bason had just decided.

Bason said it plainly in a clip the documentary uses: it appeared a federal judge could lose his job for ruling against the government. He believed the Department had engineered his removal. (Later official reviews disputed this; we’ll get there.)

The appeal…and its timing.

Bason’s ruling was eventually overturned…but not because a higher court found the DOJ innocent.

The appeals court reversed on a narrow…technical ground: that the bankruptcy court lacked jurisdiction to hear the claims. It did not dispute the underlying finding of theft.

One FBI file noted that the reversal landed essentially the day before a deadline for the DOJ to hand over its software for independent comparison; the comparison that might have shown whether the government was running pirated copies of PROMIS.

Make of the timing what you will; the congressional investigators found it worth noting.

The stonewall.

When Congress came looking, the Department did not cooperate.

Attorney General Richard Thornburgh repeatedly refused to turn over INSLAW documents. When the House subcommittee subpoenaed several hundred pages that had reportedly gone missing from the files of the DOJ’s own lead litigation counsel… the documents were never produced.

Witnesses described being pressured. Files were “lost.”

A chief investigator for the Senate Judiciary Committee reportedly relayed that a trusted Justice source had called INSLAW dirtier for the Department than Watergate …in both breadth and depth.

The congressional verdict.

In September 1992, after a three-year investigation…the House Judiciary Committee …chaired by Texas Democrat Jack Brooks… issued its report, The INSLAW Affair.

Its conclusion was not mealy-mouthed. It found that high-level DOJ officials had deliberately ignored INSLAW’s property rights and misappropriated the software, and that Attorneys General Edwin Meese and Richard Thornburgh had blocked or restricted inquiries, ignored two courts, and refused to seek an independent counsel…all “in the face of a growing body of evidence that serious wrongdoing had occurred which reached to the highest levels of the Department.”

None of that requires an octopus. None of it requires a single spy.

It is simply a record of an institution behaving as though the law did not apply to it, and using its structural advantages…money…time…control of the documents…even influence over who sits on the bench…to outlast a company that had the audacity to be right.

Part Three: The Journalist

This is where the story acquires its body in a bathtub, and where caution becomes essential.

Joseph Daniel “Danny” Casolaro was a 44-year-old freelance writer, a man who ran small computer-trade publications and fancied himself an investigator.

Around 1990, drawn in partly through contacts connected to the INSLAW case…he became convinced that PROMIS was a single tentacle of something vast.

He gave the something a name: the Octopus.

In his telling it linked INSLAW to Iran-Contra…to the October Surprise…to the collapse of the criminal bank BCCI…to arms and drug running, to intelligence services foreign and domestic.

Was he onto a real conspiracy…or…was he a sincere man pattern-matching disparate scandals into a shape that wasn’t there? Honestly…probably some of both. That ambiguity is the entire point of the documentary.

What is not ambiguous is how frightened he became near the end.

He told his brother that if he were found dead…and it looked like an accident..no one should believe it.

His longtime housekeeper later told The Village Voice she fielded threatening calls at his home…one man saying he’d cut up the body and feed it to the sharks; another simply telling her boss to drop dead.

In August 1991, Casolaro drove to Martinsburg, West Virginia (not Virginia, as it’s sometimes misreported), to meet a source who’d promised the missing piece.

He checked into the Sheraton. On the morning of August 10, a housekeeper found him dead in the bathtub…his wrists slashed somewhere between ten and twelve times …one cut deep enough to sever a tendon.

A short note read like an apology to his loved ones.

There was alcohol in the room…razor blades in a package…no sign of forced entry..no sign of struggle.

Local police called it a suicide. A medical examiner agreed. A later federal review agreed again. Twice ruled suicide.

And yet the surrounding facts refuse to lie flat:

His research files were gone. The briefcase of documents he’d reportedly brought was not recovered.
His body was embalmed quickly…before his family was notified and before an independent autopsy could be arranged. Embalming destroys toxicological evidence. For a death already drawing suspicion…it was…at minimum…a catastrophic mishandling.
His family found it grotesque to believe that a man with a famous squeamishness about blood would choose to kill himself by sawing at his own wrists a dozen times.
Elliot Richardson…the former Attorney General who had resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre…a man whose credibility was not in question…represented INSLAW and said publicly that he believed Casolaro had been murdered. Even if it was only a possibility, he argued…the implications were sinister enough to demand a real investigation.

The House report itself, while not declaring murder…conceded something striking: that the path Casolaro followed had brought him into contact with dangerous people tied to organized crime and covert intelligence…and that his death deserved far more scrutiny than the quick suicide ruling gave it.

Part Four: The Ring of Deaths

Here is where I have to be most disciplined with you, because this is where the story is most seductive and least proven.

Casolaro was not the only person orbiting the Octopus who died strangely. Among the deaths that conspiracy researchers string together:

Alan Standorf, an Army signals-intelligence employee who had worked at a military security installation and was…allegedly…one of Casolaro’s sources.
He was found dead…killed by a blunt blow to the back of the head…his body left under luggage in the back of his own car at Washington National Airport…weeks before Casolaro’s own death. The killing was officially treated as a robbery unrelated to his work.
Anson Ng, a Financial Times journalist reportedly trying to interview figures connected to BCCI…shot dead in Guatemala.
A string of deaths around the Cabazon reservation in California…the alleged site of a joint venture involving the Wackenhut security firm and figures who claimed CIA ties…including killings that conspiracy chroniclers attribute to the same web.
Associates of Michael Riconosciuto…the programmer who claimed under oath that he had personally installed a “back door” into the version of PROMIS the government distributed abroad.

I want to be straight with you about all of this: none of these deaths has been proven to be connected to INSLAW, and several almost certainly are not.

Cluster enough people around a sprawling story over a decade…and some of them will die badly; that is how large numbers work…and conspiracy narratives feed on exactly that statistical inevitability. A robbery… is sometimes just a robbery.

But “unproven” is not the same as “explained.”

Standorf’s bludgeoning…the missing files…the embalming…the threatening calls… these are not inventions of the documentary.

They are loose ends that no official inquiry ever satisfyingly tied off. And an institution that had already been caught lying by a federal judge…is not an institution whose “nothing to see here” deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Part Five: The Case for Skepticism (Taken Seriously)

A responsible version of this story has to give the debunking its full weight, because the official side is not nothing.

The Justice Department investigated itself…repeatedly…and cleared itself every time.

Attorney General William Barr appointed a retired federal judge…Nicholas Bua…as special counsel. Bua’s 1993 report rejected the conspiracy wholesale. He found no credible evidence that anyone at DOJ stole PROMIS or conspired to injure INSLAW.

He was scathing about INSLAW’s star witnesses: he compared Riconosciuto’s account to “a historical novel” … accurate background…fictional plot.

He found the affidavits of Ari Ben-Menashe…the other key source…inconsistent and unreliable; two separate congressional probes into the October Surprise had already deemed Ben-Menashe untrustworthy.

Then, under Clinton…Attorney General Janet Reno‘s team reviewed Bua’s work and added 187 pages affirming it.

They commissioned an MIT computer scientist…Randall Davis…to compare INSLAW’s PROMIS against the FBI’s case-management software; the system INSLAW claimed was pirated.

His verdict: no relationship between the two.

The review found no credible evidence PROMIS had been distributed to foreign governments…no evidence documents were destroyed…no evidence the DOJ had sabotaged Bason’s reappointment.

The anonymous sources INSLAW relied on…Reno’s team noted…never came forward even when offered protection…and people named as sources…denied saying what was attributed to them.

And…the appeals court reversal…however suspicious its timing…was a real legal ruling. A separate contract-appeals board independently called Bason’s findings a “nullity.”

A fair reader cannot wave all of that away.

The honest position is uncomfortable: the grand Octopus…the global PROMIS backdoor…the assassination ring…has never been substantiated…and its loudest witnesses were demonstrably unreliable.

The narrow INSLAW scandal…the theft…the lying…the stonewalling…the suspicious treatment of a judge and a journalist…has never been satisfactorily explained away.

Both of those things are true at once. Anyone selling you only one of them is selling you something.

Part Six: Why the Boring Version Is the Scary One

Strip the story to its proven core and you are left with a question that has nothing to do with spies:

Who investigates the Department of Justice?

The answer, in the INSLAW affair, was: the Department of Justice. Its own Office of Professional Responsibility. Its own Public Integrity Section.

A special counsel appointed by its own Attorney General…who then disbanded a grand jury that some felt was taking the allegations too seriously.

When Congress pushed…documents vanished…and an Attorney General refused subpoenas.

The only actor who ruled cleanly against the Department…Judge Bason…lost his job and was replaced by one of the Department’s own lawyers.

That is the real lesson, and it is far more durable than any claim about a backdoor.

A sufficiently powerful institution can delay…outspend…outlast..and exhaust almost anyone who challenges it…and when the institution in question is the one that decides whom to prosecute, the normal remedies start to fail.

You cannot reliably sue the people who control the courthouse. You cannot easily subpoena the people who answer subpoenas. You cannot count on the watchmen to indict the watchmen.

Part Seven: This Was Never the First Time

The reason INSLAW matters now is that Americans keep discussing federal abuse as though it were a recent invention…as though the machinery of justice ran clean until whichever administration they happen to distrust.

History says otherwise, and it says it loudly.

The Palmer Raids rounded up and deported thousands on the thinnest of pretexts.

The internment of Japanese Americans was carried out with the full cooperation of the legal institutions meant to prevent exactly that.

The FBI’s COINTELPRO spent years infiltrating…harassing…and attempting to discredit activists…journalists…and dissidents…including a notorious effort to push Martin Luther King Jr. toward suicide.

The Nixon administration turned federal agencies into instruments against an “enemies list.”

Each of these was exposed only after the damage was done…usually by accident… usually over the fierce resistance of the institutions involved.

Different decades. Different parties. Different justifications. The same gravitational pull: power accumulates… institutions protect themselves...and accountability…if it arrives at all…arrives late.

INSLAW belongs on that list…not because every allegation was proven…but…because the proven part fits the pattern exactly: a federal institution caught behaving lawlessly, and a system that proved structurally incapable of holding it to account.

Part Eight: Why This Lands Differently in 2026

We are, right now, in the middle of another national argument about whether the Justice Department has become a political weapon.

What’s revealing…and what INSLAW should teach us…is that everyone is making the argument…and each side is sure it’s the victim.

The current administration…came to office on the premise that the previous DOJ had been weaponized.

President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi stood up a “Weaponization Working Group” on her first day to review prosecutions brought under Biden…the special-counsel cases against Trump…the New York state cases…the January 6 investigations.

To that camp…the weaponization was real and ran in the other direction.

Critics see the mirror image.

They point to indictments of the president’s named adversaries…among them former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James…both since dismissed…and to opened investigations into figures like the Federal Reserve chair and others the president has publicly attacked.

They note that the president has said openly he could involve himself in prosecutions if he wished…and has pressured his own Attorney General to move faster against his enemies.

Federal judges have started using unusually sharp language about the Department’s candor…in at least one case stripping the government of the ordinary presumption that it’s acting in good faith.

To this camp, “ending weaponization” is itself the weapon.

You do not have to resolve that fight to see the through-line.

Both sides are describing the same fear: that the institution which decides whom to charge can be aimed at people for who they are rather than what they did…and that, once aimed…it is almost impossible to stop from the outside.

That is precisely the fear the Hamiltons lived for twelve years. It is the fear Danny Casolaro died inside of…whatever actually happened in that bathroom.

The names change. Meese, Thornburgh, Reno, Barr…then Garland, Bondi, Blanche now. The partisan valence flips depending on who holds the gavel. The structural problem does not move an inch.

The Question Worth Keeping

The wrong question to carry out of The Octopus Murders is “was every allegation true?” Most weren’t. Some were nonsense. A few of the witnesses were con men.

The right question is colder:

If a Department of Justice decided…today…to crush a citizen or a company that had embarrassed it…to slow-walk the documents…lean on the witnesses…outlast the litigation…and investigate the matter to death within its own walls…would we ever actually find out?

INSLAW suggests the honest answer is: maybe not.

It took a stubborn married couple…a furious federal judge…a former Attorney General with nothing left to prove…a dogged congressional chairman…and a journalist who may have paid with his life…and even then, the Department’s official position remains… to this day…that nothing improper occurred.

The Constitution was not built on the hope that power would behave. It was built on the assumption that power will be abused…not might be, will be…which is why it bothered with separated branches…independent courts…and oversight in the first place. The founders were not paranoid. They were experienced.

The greatest danger has never been the abuse itself. It’s the amnesia that follows…the forgetting that makes each new abuse look unprecedented…each warning sound hysterical…each call for scrutiny seem like a conspiracy theory.

INSLAW is the cure for that amnesia. Not because of the octopus.

Because of the part that was real.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. I went into this expecting to debunk a Netflix conspiracy and came out more disturbed by the parts that were true than by the parts that weren't.

If you've read the actual 1992 House report or have a take on where the line between "proven" and "paranoid" really falls here, I want to hear it…the comments on this one are going to be better than the post.

And…if you know someone who watched the documentary and couldn't stop thinking about it, send this their way.

Sources

Primary documents & official findings

The INSLAW case & PROMIS

Danny Casolaro’s death

The documentary

“’Octopus Murders’ Premiere Review: A Conspiracy Through New Eyes” — The Harvard Crimson

The contemporary DOJ “weaponization” debate (2026)

Discussion about this post

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