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August 7 case desk: the Epstein records hearing is open to anyone with a telephone, and a second suit drew a different judge.

4 min read
A heavy black rotary desk telephone with a brass-toned handset seated in its cradle, standing alone on a worn wooden courtroom bench, an empty panelled courtroom and one pale window receding into shadow behind it.
Original editorial artwork generated for Hugin.

A notice docketed today makes the August 13 hearing in the Epstein Files Transparency Act case audible to the public over a published dial-in number. Separately, New Mexico's suit against the Justice Department is now on the docket as 1:26-cv-02762 before Judge Amir H. Ali — a different judge from the Phang case, in the same courthouse, against the same department. And a price list this desk held at coverage tier for eight days is now confirmed on OpenAI's own pricing page, which also carries a tier that coverage never mentioned.

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Yesterday this desk filed a court order setting a status hearing for 1:00 PM on August 13 in Courtroom 24A, after the judge found the Justice Department's in camera compliance documentation deficient. Today's docket adds the part that matters to anybody who does not live in Washington.

The hearing is open, and here is the number

A Notice of Hearing docketed August 7, 2026 in Phang v. Blanche states that the August 13 hearing "will be made accessible to the public telephonically via the Courtroom Public Access Line," and prints the number: 1-833-990-9400, with a meeting ID given on the docket.

This desk spends most of its time on records that arrive late, redacted, or not at all. So it is worth saying plainly what this is: a federal court, in a dispute about whether a department is withholding records it was ordered to release, arranging for the argument about that withholding to be audible to any member of the public with a telephone. That is the system working, and a desk that only files the failures is not measuring anything.

The number is printed here because printing it is the entire point. Anyone who has followed this file through eleven months of production letters and compliance orders can listen to the next hour of it directly, rather than through this desk or anyone else.

A second suit, a different judge

New Mexico's suit against the Justice Department — filed August 5, and read here from the complaint PDF the state published — is now on the public docket with details the state's own release did not carry:

  • STATE OF NEW MEXICO v. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, No. 1:26-cv-02762 (D.D.C.)
  • Assigned to Judge Amir H. Ali
  • Cause: 05:0706, judicial review of agency actions; nature of suit, 899, Administrative Procedure Act
  • Date of last known filing: August 7, 2026

The plain fact worth recording is the assignment. Two suits over Epstein records against the same department are now proceeding in the same courthouse before different judges — Phang before Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, New Mexico before Judge Ali. This desk is not going to tell you what that means, because nothing in the record says what it means. Case assignment in that district is not something a records desk can characterise, and two matters with different plaintiffs, different statutes invoked and different requested relief are not obviously the same case. It is filed as what it is: a docketed fact, and a second courtroom to watch.

Both dockets were read on the public RECAP mirror. That mirror states its own limit — its "Last Updated" stamp is explicitly not the date of the latest filing — and quiet on a mirror is not proof of quiet on the court's own system. Where this desk has read a filed PDF, it says so; where it has read only a docket line, it says that instead.

A price list that graduated

On July 30 this desk recorded a GPT-5.6 price change and refused to promote it. The row said so in as many words: logged as reported, not as a verified price list, because every automated read of OpenAI's own pricing surface had returned 403 and the figures existed only in named-outlet reporting.

Today that page was read directly. The figures hold, and they now carry the scope that coverage never did — standard tier, short context, per one million tokens:

Model Input Output
gpt-5.6-sol $5.00 $30.00
gpt-5.6-terra $2.00 $12.00
gpt-5.6-luna $0.20 $1.20

Two things the reporting did not carry, both on the provider's own page. There is a long-context band priced separately — the same three models at $10.00/$45.00, $4.00/$18.00 and $0.40/$1.80 — so the headline rate is the short-context one and a long prompt is a different price. And each row has its own cached-input and cache-writes columns, which is where the real cost of a repeated prompt actually lives.

The case-file row moves from coverage tier to primary, eight days after it was written. That delay is not a failure of the record; it is the record working as designed. A figure that only exists in coverage gets held at coverage tier until the provider's own page can be read, and then it gets promoted with the column headings attached. The alternative — printing the numbers on day one because they were probably right — is how a figure ends up on this site without a source, which happened in July and was corrected on August 5.

Filed today

The Epstein Public Records Accountability File adds the Notice of Hearing and the New Mexico docket assignment. The AI Release Receipts Accountability File promotes the GPT-5.6 pricing row to primary with the tier and context band recorded.

Source links

Primary sourceU.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — Notice of Hearing, Phang v. Blanche, docketed August 7, 2026