United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 21-1279 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v. ALEXANDER KAWLESKI, Defendant-Appellant. ____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin. No. 19-cr-25 — James D. Peterson, Chief Judge. ____________________

ARGUED FEBRUARY 8, 2022 — DECIDED JULY 19, 2024 ____________________

Before SYKES, Chief Judge, and SCUDDER and JACKSON- AKIWUMI, Circuit Judges. SYKES, Chief Judge. Alexander Kawleski sexually assaulted the adolescent daughter of his then-girlfriend and recorded his crime as he committed it. He stored the video on a flash drive along with more than a dozen other videos he had sur- reptitiously recorded of the girl undressing and taking a shower. A few years later, Kawleski’s new girlfriend 2 No. 21-1279 discovered the videos on the flash drive and contacted law enforcement. Kawleski faced state charges for the assault; a federal grand jury also indicted him for producing and possessing child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251(a), 2252(a)(4). His use of the flash drive—a storage device that had traveled in interstate commerce—supplied the jurisdic- tional element of the federal offenses. Key evidence at trial in- cluded testimony from Tracy Brown, the girlfriend who entered the picture later and discovered the videos on the flash drive. Brown testified that in January 2019, she found the flash drive next to Kawleski’s computer, plugged it in, saw the videos, and immediately turned the device over to the police. The jury found Kawleski guilty. Before sentencing Kawleski moved for a new trial. See FED. R. CRIM. P. 33. He cited newly discovered evidence—namely, posttrial statements from an ex-boyfriend of Brown’s who questioned her credibility. Based on two conversations with Brown, the ex-boyfriend theorized that she, not Kawleski, might have transferred the videos to the flash drive. The dis- trict judge denied the motion, explaining that the ex-boy- friend’s statements would be admissible, if at all, only for impeachment and were not likely to lead to an acquittal. Kawleski challenges that ruling. He argues that the judge mischaracterized the ex-boyfriend’s statements as “impeach- ment only” evidence; alternatively, he claims that the posttrial statements are important enough to warrant a new trial even if admissible only for impeachment. In a cursory fallback ar- gument, Kawleski asks us to remand for an evidentiary hear- ing. We reject these arguments and affirm. No. 21-1279 3

I. Background On the morning of January 24, 2019, Tracy Brown went to the police department in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, and asked to speak to a detective. She was distraught and ap- peared to have been crying. Detective David Bailey met with her, and she gave him a flash drive that she had discovered that morning at the home of Alexander Kawleski, her off-and- on boyfriend. The flash drive contained sexually explicit vid- eos of adolescent girls. As Brown later testified at trial, she had spent the night before at Kawleski’s home. On the morning of January 24, af- ter he left for work, she began looking for evidence that he might be cheating on her. In a cup near his computer, she found several flash drives. Some of them looked familiar, but one did not, so she took it to her house to examine it. When she got home, she called a friend on FaceTime and they viewed the contents of the flash drive together. It contained a video of Kawleski sexually assaulting an unconscious adoles- cent g