The funniest thing about James Uthmeier’s war on the WNBA isn’t that Florida’s attorney general watched a foul get called and decided it was also a felony. It’s that his first shot at the threat didn’t actually name a crime, and by the next day, he’d gone back and found one.

What actually happened, before the state’s top prosecutor got involved: on Aug. 8, Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham was ahead on a fast break when Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington chased her down and swiped an arm across her face and neck, knocking her out of the air. Cunningham made the layup anyway; referees called it flagrant 1 on the floor, upgraded it to flagrant 2 on review, and ejected Carrington, the league’s own disciplinary process working exactly as designed, in real time, without anybody needing to call a lawyer. That should have been the whole story. Instead, the overnight rewrite of a vague threat into a specific one is the actual story here, and it didn’t come from a police report.

Uthmeier’s first post arrived Aug. 8: “The WNBA knows better than to play games down here in Florida, because I’ll be charging people with assault.” Set aside, for a moment, that Florida does not have a WNBA franchise, which means the attorney general threatened to prosecute people over games that do not exist in a state where none of this occurred; set aside, too, that “assault” isn’t usually something the state’s top lawyer freelances live on social media instead of, say, having his office review the game film.

By Aug. 9, after Fox News had shared the original post and it started doing real numbers, Uthmeier was back with an addendum: “I should probably clarify … assault and battery.”

That is not a clarification.

A clarification explains what you already meant. This is a man watching his own tweet perform well and deciding it needed a sharper charge to keep pace with the attention, legal reasoning by engagement metrics, workshopped in the replies instead of a courtroom.

Here’s the post that started it:

https://x.com/JamesUthmeierFL/status/2086221359554695421

There’s a version of this that plays out quietly in every prosecutor’s office in the country: someone says something loose in a hallway, and a colleague with better judgment tells them to tighten the language before it goes anywhere official. Uthmeier skipped the hallway. He did his revisions in public, a day apart, in front of an audience that was already watching, which meant everyone got to see the exact moment a vague threat became a specific accusation, unsupported by so much as a follow-up phone call to the league.

The people actually paid to adjudicate the play, for what it’s worth, didn’t reach for a statute. Referees said postgame that Cunningham’s reaction to the contact was acceptable, and Fever coach Stephanie White called the ejection the right call while noting she didn’t think Carrington intentionally targeted the neck area, as CBS Sports reported. That’s the entire range of informed opinion on this: a hard, ejection-worthy foul, reviewed and punished by the system built to review and punish it. Nobody with actual jurisdiction over the play thought it needed James Uthmeier’s help.

Which is the part that turns this from noise into actual bullshit: the WNBA already has a disciplinary apparatus, and it worked before Uthmeier ever opened the app. His assault charges threat isn’t a legal opinion so much as a state official appointing himself to a job that already had an occupant, then upgrading his own credentials overnight once the first version took off.

Florida’s attorney general spent two days publicly drafting criminal charges he has no jurisdiction to bring, against a team that doesn’t play in his state, for a foul the league had already handled by the time he opened his phone; by day two he’d landed on assault and battery, a more precise phrase than assault, and also exactly as unenforceable. Somewhere in Tallahassee, someone on his staff is hoping this doesn’t become a habit.