Trump Officials Identify Criminal Attacking U.S. Government
The perpetrator behind the federal crime spree has an extensive rap sheet and came here illegally
Feb. 5: Trump officials warned of DOGE crime spree … Judge blocks transgender-prisoner cruelty … Trump offers entire CIA buyouts in effort to make it more like bad movies … EXCLUSIVE: Another Democratic member of Congress aiding the religious right …
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Leaders in the administration of Pres. Donald Trump have determined that in just a couple of weeks, a criminal infiltrator managed to get inside the halls of multiple agencies, disrupting government work and threatening federal employees who have served their country for years.
The suspect heads a criminal organization known by its acronym, DOGE, or Dicking Over Government Employees.
The Washington Post reports that the perpetrator’s crimes have been flagged internally by officials at the Trump White House budget office, the Trump Treasury Department, the Trump General Services Administration, the Trump Office of (Remaining) Personnel (Mis)Management, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the still-here as of this morning Trump Education Department, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Officials at all those agencies have flagged criminal actions destabilizing the government from within, the Post reports. The suspect has been identified as Elon Reeve Musk, whose middle name is included here because that’s how we know when people are criminals, and who came from a South African crime family, eventually staying in the United States illegally.
Musk already has a long and disgraceful record of crimes and contempt for the law. Now he’s suspected of committing and/or planning a number of crimes after infiltrating the federal government with the aid of accomplices including the president of the United States and congressional Republicans. Among the crimes in which Musk is a suspect:
Offering employees buyouts in violation of federal spending laws.
Accessing sensitive Treasury Department records in violation of privacy laws.
Violating transparency laws by failing to use government email accounts and not disclosing identities in meetings.
An administrative judge at the EEOC wrote to Acting Chair Andrea Lucas about Musk illegally rolling back protections for transgender people: “If you want to continue following the illegal and unethical orders of our president and the unelected leader of ‘doge’ that’s on you.”
USAID Director of Employee and Labor Relations Nicholas Gottlieb reported some of Musk’s crimes in a call to 911 an internal email that the Post obtained. “DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices to a group of employees without due process,” Gottlieb said. He said that he helpfully sent Trump’s new USAID administrator a list of handy suggestions such as this DIY tip: “desist from further illegal activity.”
The White House told the Post that everything Musk and his team are doing is legal. On the other hand, the White House lies like an evil fucking scheming four-year-old. And history shows us that past Republican White Houses have declared as legal such illegal things as kidnaping and torture, which trivia fans know are crimes.
Despite the this White House lie, the capos in Musk’s crime organization have been told by Trump officials that they’re breaking the law and to please stop doing that.
For instance, one Musk soldier ordered a Treasury Department official to halt foreign aid payments.
Acting Treasury Secretary David A. Lebryk told Musk’s team that they had no legal authority to stop legally authorized federal payments. In other words: Crime.
Historians note that federal spending authority was a subject of heated debate among the founding fathers.
One faction apparently believed that spending authority, the power of the purse, should reside solely with Elon Musk, while others believed that such decisions should be made by whoever is the richest person in the world, no matter which country they illegally immigrated from.
As written, the Constitution ultimately gave Congress spending authority, at least until the corporatist, Christian-right Supreme Court decides that the founders meant to write “Elon Musk.”
Anyhoo, after telling Musk’s team they were law-breaking, Lebryk was soon whacked, leading observers to suspect that Musk has an accomplice somewhere inside the Oval Office.
A judge has already ordered the White House to stop — or at least pause — its illegal attempt to end the flow of legally authorized grant money.
The warnings of rampant criminal activity came from so many agencies that one of the main perpetrators, the Office of Personnel Management, put out an eight-page memo filled with “Honest, we’re totes not criming.”
One Office of Management and Budget veteran, Charles Kieffer, said of the buyout offer, “They’re promising to pay people through Sept. 30, when they only have authority to spend through March 15 — it’s clearly a violation of the law.”
A former Tesla employee who now somehow works for the General Services Administration (GSA) confessed to some of the crimes but explained they had a good reason for criming.
Thomas Shedd, who now inexplicably runs the GSA’s tech arm, said Musk team members intentionally concealed their names during interactions with other employees — in ways that violated the law — because they were afraid of getting caught.
“[W]e’re afraid of those folks’ names getting out and their personal lives being disrupted, which is exactly what happened last week, which is really unfortunate for them,” said Shedd, giving Musk’s team rather than veteran government employees or the American people the last shredd of his compassion.
OTHER TRUMP CRIMES RUN INTO JUDGE-SHAPED WALLS Federal Judge Royce Lamberth, an appointee of Pres. Ronald Reagan, yesterday issued a temporary restraining order blocking a shitty Trump executive order.
Trump had ordered a stop to gender-affirming care for prisoners and ordered transgender women prisoners transferred to prisons for men. The Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual treatment, however, requires the government to actually take care of the many many many people it keeps in cages.
Three transgender inmates sued, and Lamberth ruled that they had “straightforwardly demonstrated that irreparable harm” would result from Trump’s order, which was intended to result in irreparable harm. The three plaintiffs are currently incarcerated in women’s facilities and receiving hormone treatments for gender dysphoria.
The Trump administration has also been sued over his illegal executive order shutting down applications for asylum, which he also can’t do.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on Monday, arguing that federal law granted asylum-seekers rights and created a process through which to seek asylum. Trump would be violating that law if he ends those things.
Hilariously, Trump’s executive order also conflicts with … a Trump executive order. One purported to shut down the asylum process. Another reinstated his Remain in Mexico program, which provides for people to wait in Mexico…while they seek asylum.
Basically, as surveillance video shows, the Trump administration is about as effective as the Tasmanian Devil. Moving too fast, lots of spinning, making a mess, alarming passersby, but producing virtually nothing other than performative aggression and sprayed drool.
CIA Attacked By Enemy It Failed to Warn Us About
Everyone in the CIA got a buyout offer yesterday. That includes everyone from the most performatively aggressive, fast-walking officials to the most socially awkward intelligence analyst who tenuously introduces that one piece of information that changes the movie’s entire plot instantly.
But it also includes the field agents who keep America safe:
Jack Ryan
Jason Bourne
Chuck, and
Sterling Archer
Last month’s federal buyout offer actually excluded national-intelligence employees. But now it’s the CIA’s turn to come under attack from yet another enemy about which it gave us no advance intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reports (gift link, because intelligence should be decentralized) that the buyout offers are meant not to gut the Central Intelligence Agency, but to remove one third of it. Specifically, the middle. The Intelligence part.
Pres. Donald Trump’s vision for the CIA is apparently one he saw on TV. He wants the CIA doing more covert operations. Y’know, the kind that gave us a radicalized Iran. Among other places.
The Journal reports that in his confirmation hearing, Trump’s new CIA Director John Ratcliffe previewed what the Trump CIA will be about, identifying China and drug cartels as prime targets and promising more cool field operations with guns and Paris car chases and pew pew shit.
“To the brave CIA officers listening around the world, if all of that sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference,” Ratcliffe said in the movie playing in his mind. “If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work.”
In other words, the buyout offers are for grown-up CIA employees.
That’s because Trump wants only cartoon CIA agents sticking around so he can expand the CIA’s portfolio to include spying on allies and ferreting out information about their nuclear military corporate trade secrets. To be sure, the CIA already spies on U.S. allies. And already helps out U.S. corporations by seeking information related to trade talks. He just wants more.
For instance, a Ratcliffe aide actually told the Journal, Trump would have liked to have had CIA spies helping out during his Mexico tariff talks. Which, in fairness, maybe they could have explained to Trump that he was getting played.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) warned that the buyout offer is a trap. There’s been no money allocated for all these buyouts, so Trump may not be able to make good on them — but he will have a massive list of government employees who wanted to jump ship on him.
“The administration immediately knows, you don’t want to work for me,” Kaine said. “They’ll find some other way to get rid of you. You should not raise your hand.”
The new, Trump-ified CIA may have a tougher time executing this new vision, however, because, well, they just told everyone about it.
Gutting USAID and/or eviler-izing the CIA will dramatically reduce America’s ability to engage with the rest of the world. In a broad sense this is good (although China’s growing influence isn’t a super alternative). But it also means shutting down desperately needed financial resources in impoverished areas around the world, throwing the starving baby out with the polluted bathwater.
Another Dem Pitches in with Far-Right Christian Theocracy
The National Prayer Breakfast is tomorrow. It’s being co-chaired by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH). You wouldn’t know that unless you read my exclusive reporting last month or if you read her press release which you can’t because it doesn’t exist.
The NPB Gathering, not to be confused with the National Prayer Breakfast, starts today. And as I revealed exclusively last night, the top Dem there is Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY). In fact, he’s been helping out for years.
Even after the National Prayer Breakfast split away from what’s now called the NPB Gathering, because the scandalous anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion networking became too much even for praying Christian Democrats.
Anyway, you can read my exclusive report on Suozzi’s involvement and how it facilitates far-right political aims, and I also did a sidebar profiling just some of his guests — and how the confusion between the two events serves the allies of the breakfast organizers (aka the Fellowship Foundation) around the world.
Be prepared today and tomorrow to see a lot of fundamentally untrue reporting about the two events. If you want to support my continuing monitoring of these efforts, and acccountability journalism exposing what they’re doing, please consider making a donation or upgrading to a paid subscription. Amen.
NOTE I do my original reporting over on the Jonathan Larsen Substack, which you can subscribe to for free. And with all the misreporting coming our way about tomorrow’s National Prayer Breakfast, I hope that you Newsfuckers who are invested in all of this will share my reporting about it. Thank you. And amen.
Letitia James Takes the Field
New York Attorney General Letitia James is signing up to fight back against Pres. Donald Trump’s latest crime wave.
Not only is she leading a lawsuit challenging his widespread freeze on grants and funding, Politico reports that James has signed on to the existing lawsuit to block Trump’s unconstitutional executive order to undo the constitutional right of birthright citizenship.
And she’ll slap Trump with another suit if he seeks to force New York officials to join in with his immigrant hunting.
James, of course, already has a Trump-shaped trophy on her wall, after successfully filing a civil fraud suit against him and his crime-family cartel. According to James, she won 80% of her dozens of lawsuits against the first Trump administration — and that one was less obviously criminal.
So expect to see her on the front lines going forward.
Trump’s Already Failing at De-Immigration
Pres. Donald Trump became president the same way he became famous: He’s a con man.
And in less than three weeks he’s already conned his dupes marks voters on all three of the big promises he used to reel them in.
Eggs are at record-high prices and inflation generally isn’t showing current signs of improvement. That’s one.
He promised tariffs so beautiful that he would want to sexually assault them. Those, too, didn’t happen, with the exception of an additional 10% levy on Chinese-made products, which, whoo-hoo, I guess?
And then there were the mass deportations. The Trump fraud public-relations team has blitzed social media and anti-social media with images of his alleged mass deportations of dangerous criminal immigrants. They are, however, images, not actual mass deportations. And hardly all criminal.
No more catch-and-release, Trump told us.
Well, here’s what Trump’s suckers patsies voters aren’t seeing, courtesy of Politico:
That’s right, for all of Trump’s hand-waving and performative militarism, and even with more immigrants here now to deport, Trump hasn’t managed to do any better than Pres. Barack Obama did without being a performative asshole.
But wait, it gets better/worse. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) revealed last week that in Trump’s first week back in office, he deported 7,300 people. That’s less than half an average week of deportations under Pres. Joe Biden. (h/t)
And because Biden focused on actual criminals, 72% of the folks that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested had criminal records or outstanding charges. That’s true of only 50% of those swept up in exciting TV footage by Trump’s League of Macho He-Men.
As Murphy said, “Trump is removing less [sic] people and less [sic] criminals. These guys are terrible at everything [correct].”
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids. We’re just getting started.
What a total shit show. OMG. I'm exhausted and yet plan to put my shoulder to whatever wheel suggests that it needs turning. A sincere wish/plea: that all you truth tellers also report more about people who are pushing back, as well as organizations that could use citizen support.
You had me at "DOGE, or Dicking Over Government Employees." That's what I'll be correcting everyone with now. Thank you for your daily news.