Did a federal judge named Howard Gates have a verbal battles with U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2025, culminating in his dramatic courtroom arrest at her behest? No, that's not true: the video, and others like it, were no more than fan fiction and did not describe real events. Lead Stories found no record of a federal judge named Howard Gates, as of March 25, 2025.
The stories were presented in the form of videos, often around 20 minutes long, which consisted of a voiceover narrator and subtitles telling the made-up story, against a visual backdrop of what appeared to be AI-generated images of real figures -- such as Bondi, Vice President JD Vance, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt -- and several non-existent judges, including "Howard Gates".
One prominent example was found in a March 12, 2025, video (archived here) on Facebook which bore the title:
Judge Clashes with Pam Bondi in Court - Minutes Later, He Faces the Unexpected!
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Mar 25 11:33:58 2025 UTC)
The video describes an escalating verbal battle between Gates and Bondi, which culminates in the arrest of Gates -- events which did not actually take place.
A March 22, 2025, video (archived here) on YouTube told a similar story, using a different AI-generated image to depict the fictional "Judge Howard Gates":
"Elite Vault," the YouTube account (archived here) that posted that second Gates/Bondi video featured a disclaimer which made it clear that none of its content should be mistaken for authentic:
All content on this channel is purely fictional and created for entertainment purposes only.
Elite Vault has a history of posting similar videos which describe other dramatic, and entirely fictional, encounters between Trump administration officials and various judges. For example, a March 17, 2025, video (archived here) which purports to describe another shouting match, this time between "Judge Robert Calloway" and U.S. Vice-President JD Vance. In that instance, the fictional Calloway is depicted using the same AI-generated image as Elite Vault used to depict the equally fictional Howard Gates:
On March 25, 2025, Lead Stories conducted a search of federal government websites for the names "Howard Gates" (archived here) and "Robert Calloway" (archived here) using the "site:.gov" operator on Google. Those searches yielded no relevant results, meaning there were no federal judges by those names at that time.
