Category: Michael Novakhov – SharedNewsLinks℠

Kash Patel ’s early requests as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s new director indicate that he does not trust the agency he was named to lead.

Soon after being confirmed by the Senate in February, Patel, whose critics have branded him a conspiracy theorist, inquired about hiring his own private security detail, people with knowledge of the matter told The Wall Street Journal .

As director, Patel is automatically assigned a team of FBI agents charged with ensuring his safety, so the request indicates that he is not willing to place his life in the hands of his own agents.

In another unusual ask, Patel inquired about how to get a secure phone line directly to the Oval Office from both his FBI office and his home, according to the Journal . He did not wish to go through the FBI landline in his office.

Under the usual chain of command, the FBI director would typically get in contact with the president through the attorney general. All FBI directors since J. Edgar Hoover have sought to maintain distance from the White House as a show of independence.

Patel, however, is a loyal ally of President Donald Trump .

“Director Patel is aggressively working to deliver on removing criminals from our streets, restoring law and order, and ensuring agents have the resources they need to perform their duties effectively,” FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson told the Journal . “We have absolutely zero interest in engaging with false leaks or distractions that undermine that mission.”

The FBI did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment on Patel’s reported requests.

Patel was among Trump’s most controversial administration picks. Every single Democratic senator, as well as two Republicans, voted against his confirmation, but Patel still made it through .

The reservation wasn’t just that Patel, who was a national security adviser in Trump’s first administration, had a complete lack of experience at the FBI. His critics have also labeled him an unbridled conspiracy theorist.

Patel authored a children’s picture book that pushed the claim that former President Joe Biden rigged the 2020 election against Trump. As a commentator at The Epoch Times , Patel often labeled his political opposition and even the FBI as part of “the deep state.” He has also expressed a sympathetic attitude toward the QAnon movement, which posits that the Democratic Party is a pedophilic cabal.

In February, Patel was accused of spearheading the purge of senior FBI officials, even though he had not yet been confirmed. The Justice Department has also been trying to fire FBI agents who investigated Trump but has faced legal pushback.

Last week, Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi enraged Trump’s supporters with a release of “Epstein files” that offered no new information on the disgraced sex-offender financier.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

With federal investigators looking into Sean “Diddy” Combs in a sex trafficking investigation after multiple women and at least one man accused him of bad behavior, the hip-hop mogul is drawing comparisons to Jeffrey Epstein.

Like Epstein, a financier who had his own private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Combs has been accused of luring victims with his luxurious lifestyle and – in some cases – assaulting them aboard a yacht he rented for trips to the Virgin Islands and Saint Barthelemy. 

Some of the most explosive allegations have come from a February lawsuit producer Lil Rod, whose real name is Rodney Jones, filed against Combs, alleging a pattern of sexual assaults and sex trafficking he claims are recorded on hidden cameras throughout the mogul’s homes.

Combs’ mansions in Los Angeles and Miami were raided earlier this week in connection with a federal human trafficking investigation, months after similar accusations emerged in a series of lawsuits.

The lawsuit also alleges Combs had an aide who played a role similar to Ghislaine Maxwell’s, Epstein’s madame who is now a convicted trafficker.

Just a few weeks ago, Combs, 54, was riding high, receiving the ceremonial key to New York City and celebrating the release of his first album in years on the same day.

“The bad boy of entertainment is getting the key to the city from the bad boy of politics,” Mayor Eric Adams said as he presented a giant key to Combs in Times Square, according to FOX 5 New York.

“He escaped a lot because of who he was,” said Derrick Parker, a former member of the NYPD’s rap intelligence unit who investigated the 1999 nightclub shooting that landed Combs and Jennifer Lopez in handcuffs. “Now, a lot of stuff is just coming back to him.”

From a deadly stampede early in his career, to a nightclub shooting where a protégé took the fall and recent sex trafficking allegations, Bad Boy Records founder Combs has largely prevailed in his legal battles. 

Combs has been acquitted of gun and bribery charges and been mentioned in connection with hip-hop feuds that led to real-life violence without being implicated in any crimes.

But the recent lawsuits kicked off a federal investigation that resulted in raids on his mansions in Los Angeles and Miami last week. Combs and his lawyers denied any misconduct.

The hip-hop icon and founder of Bad Boy Records rose to prominence in the music industry in the early 1990s, then branched out into clothing design, liquor and other businesses, making himself a billionaire.

He came from humble beginnings. His early rise to prominence involved a feud between emerging hip-hop stars on the country’s East and West coasts. 

In 1991, Combs promoted a benefit event at the City College of New York that turned deadly when an altercation in the crowd led to a stampede of fans that crushed eight people to death.

Combs and girlfriend Jennifer Lopez were arrested in New York City in 1999 on weapons and bribery charges after an altercation with another man led to a gunfight at Club New York that injured three people.

The couple left, but after blowing a red light, police found a gun in their car.

Paul Mauro, a retired NYPD inspector and now a Fox News contributor, happened to be working in the same precinct the following morning but was not involved in the investigation.

“Diddy was not there, I remember that,” he recalled. “She was all distraught. I just remember she had her head down, and I have this recollection of her looking very small and very, very diminutive and kind of shellshocked.”

Police held Lopez for about 14 hours before releasing her without charges. Combs was later indicted and then acquitted of gun charges and of bribing his bodyguard to take the fall.

His friend, rapper Shyne, wound up in prison for assault in connection with the bar brawl and recorded part of his next album behind bars.

One of the three people wounded in the Club New York shooting, Natania Reuben, told NewsNation Thursday that it was Combs’ bullet that struck her, not Shyne’s, whose real name is Jamal Barrow.

“I literally watched them pull out the guns,” she told the station. “I had a clear point of view. I mean, for God’s sake, I got shot in my nose.”

Even after becoming a well-established leader in the music industry, allegations of violence continued to follow Combs. Police in Los Angeles arrested Diddy in 2015 after he allegedly attacked an assistant coach at the University of California’s LA campus with a kettlebell. He claimed self-defense, and the district attorney declined to prosecute.

Jones, in his lawsuit, alleges Combs continued exhibiting violent tendencies in 2022 and 2023.

Last year, his ex-girlfriend, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, filed an explosive federal lawsuit alleging rape, forced prostitution and physical abuse. They settled the lawsuit a day later — without Combs admitting wrongdoing.

But more allegations emerged of abuse spanning decades.

Joi Dickerson-Neal filed another lawsuit, alleging Diddy drugged, raped and abused her on tape while she was a college student at Syracuse University in 1991.

Another woman, Liza Gardner, also filed a lawsuit, claiming Combs allegedly coerced her into having sex at a party and that his friend also raped her. Days later, according to the civil complaint, Combs allegedly beat her up.

He was also named in a third lawsuit from a Jane Doe who was underage at the time of her alleged sexual assault. In 2017, a former personal chef sued him, claiming he made her work during sex parties. They settled the case two years later.

Filings in the Jones case are so alarming that his lawyers included a “trigger warning” at the top of the civil complaint.

Jones alleges that there are “HUNDREDS of hours of footage and audio recordings of Mr. Combs, his staff, and his guests engaging in serious illegal activity” at mansions in multiple states and on a yacht that traveled to the U.S. Virgin Islands and Saint Barthelemy. 

Jones, whose lawyers describe him as a musical prodigy, spent a year living with Combs and producing nine songs for Diddy’s new album, “The Love Album: Off the Grid,” the record released the same day he received his key to the city.

During that time, he claims to have witnessed Combs “providing laced alcoholic beverages to minors” and prostitutes and committing other crimes.

The lawsuit also alleges two unnamed individuals, one a rapper and the other an R&B singer, were “consorting with underaged girls” on Combs’ yacht and at his Los Angeles mansion. Jones also claims actor Cuba Gooding Jr. assaulted him in a studio onboard the yacht.

Gooding did not immediately respond to a request for a response to the allegations.

“It is like Epstein,” Parker told Fox News Digital. “It borders on that … and the reason being is that these video tapes are going to be very interesting.”

An expert on the intersection of crime and the hip-hop industry who has written a book on the issue, Parker said he expects HSI investigators to be pouring through any footage seized in the raids to determine if any crimes were committed and if any other high-profile people were present. 

The more lawsuits that emerge, the more accusers Parker said he expects to come forward.

And the evidence in the lawsuits, even those that were settled, will likely play a role in the ongoing federal investigation, Mauro said.

“That stuff is very penetrative,” he said. “[Federal prosecutors] are going to subpoena all of that stuff.”

Diddy has denied wrongdoing. In a statement pinned to his X profile, the mogul said accusers have been trying to “assassinate” his character.

“Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday,” he wrote. “Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name. my family and for the truth.”

Russia is willing to discuss a temporary truce in Ukraine provided there is progress toward a final peace settlement, according to people familiar with the matter in Moscow.

In the first signal of a positive response from President Vladimir Putin to US counterpart Donald Trump’s call for a ceasefire, the offer was conveyed at last month’s talks in Saudi Arabia between top Russian and American officials, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing internal policy.

In order to agree to a cessation of hostilities, there would have to be a clear understanding about the framework principles of the final peace accord, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Russia will insist in particular on establishing the parameters of an eventual peacekeeping mission, including agreement on which countries would take part, said another person familiar with the issue.

The details emerged as the US and Ukraine plan to meet in Saudi Arabia next week for their first direct talks since Trump’s Oval Office bust-up with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last week. US special envoy Steve Witkoff said the meeting aims to reach “a framework for a peace agreement and an initial ceasefire.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t immediately respond to a request to comment.

Russia has said it won’t accept the presence of NATO troops on Ukrainian soil, rejecting a proposal by European countries to put together a “coalition of the willing” to help monitor any peace accord. It doesn’t object to countries such as China that have been neutral in the conflict deploying forces to Ukraine, the two people said.

Since his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump has overturned US policy on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to try to bring a rapid end to the three-year-long war that’s Europe’s worst conflict in 80 years.

He held phone talks with Putin last month and the pair agreed to hold a summit, though no date has been set yet. Trump abandoned US support for Ukraine’s eventual entry into NATO, and his top officials said it was unrealistic to expect a return of all Ukrainian territory seized by Russia since 2014.

After the confrontation with Zelenskiy at the White House, Trump paused military aid to Ukraine and has suspended some intelligence-sharing with Kyiv, shocking European allies who say the US risks rewarding Russia’s aggression in starting the February 2022 invasion.

Putin has repeatedly brushed aside Trump’s bid for a quick halt to the war. During his annual news conference in December, he said: “We don’t need a truce — we need peace: long-term, durable, with guarantees for the Russian Federation and its citizens.”

Russia on Thursday rejected a Franco-British plan for a partial one-month truce covering air and maritime operations including a halt to strikes targeting energy infrastructure.

Israel has escalated both its military operations and diplomatic messaging in Syria over the past two weeks, threatening a collision with Turkey – the patron of the new regime in Damascus – and giving Azerbaijan a chance to mediate.

Tensions rose late last month when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would not allow forces from the new Syrian regime to enter territory south of Damascus. This comes on top of Israeli attacks that led to fatalities and ignited anti-Israel demonstrations in Syria.

Then came an extraordinary threat against the regime by Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz: Israel would defend Syria’s Druze minority. Also, Reuters has reported that Israel is lobbying Washington to keep Syria weak, including by letting Russia keep its bases there to counter Turkey’s influence.

Israeli news site Ynet’s reports on meetings between Netanyahu’s military secretary and officials in Moscow on that issue confirmed that Jerusalem is trying to keep Russia in Syria to balance Turkey’s influence there.

In the background, Azerbaijan – which has close ties to both Israel and Turkey – has been striving to reconcile the two countries and avoid a clash.

• Why Israel must stop occupying Syria right now
• Israel’s overbearing embrace threatens Syria’s Druze at a critical juncture
• Following Assad’s fall, do Syria’s Druze even want the IDF coming to their aid?

But people familiar with the Azerbaijani government’s thinking say Israel’s goal of limiting Turkey’s influence in Syria, after the Assad regime fell in December, are unrealistic, despite Jerusalem’s support for Syria’s Kurds. Since the regime’s fall, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has reiterated that the international community must protect the Kurdish minority.

The Azerbaijanis, meanwhile, are calling Israel’s alleged attempts to maintain a Russian presence in Syria a lost cause. They say that Russia will not stay, and that if it aims to maintain a foothold, its only negotiating partner will be Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Russians, for their part, are admitting that their chances of keeping their military bases in Syria aren’t encouraging.

“If we can reduce the misunderstandings between our strategic ally Turkey and our strategic partner Israel, we will strive to do so,” Rasim Musabeyov, an Azerbaijani lawmaker and a member of the Israel-Azerbaijan Parliamentary Friendship Group, told Haaretz.

But when it comes to supporting the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis’ tone is different. “I’d like to mention that back in the day, Israel helped Turkey arrest Abdullah Ocalan,” Musabeyov says, referring to the leader of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK. Ocalan was abducted in Kenya in 1999, was convicted and is serving a life sentence.

Netanyahu, who was serving his first term as prime minister in 1999, strongly denied reports that Israel helped in the arrest.

“Now it’s known in Turkey that Israel is actively helping the PKK in its terrorist struggle against the state. This is something that Turkey definitely won’t forgive,” Musabeyov says.

“And if Israel is interested in normalizing relations with Turkey and avoiding a clash, it should forget about the establishment of a Kurdish state that would be a counterweight to Turkey and Iran. This isn’t going to happen, even if the Americans stand behind the initiative. Iran and Turkey will suppress it.”

Russia on the way out

Hikmat Hajiyev, Azebaijan’s foreign policy chief and an assistant to the country’s president, has visited Israel twice in recent months, the first time when Bashar Assad’s regime fell. He met with Sa’ar and President Isaac Herzog.

The second time, about two weeks ago, Hajiyev met with Netanyahu, and a few days later he traveled to Larnaca, Cyprus, where he met with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.

“Azerbaijan aspires to see relations between Israel and Turkey become systematic,” says Farhad Mammadov, head of the Center for Studies of the South Caucasus and formerly the director of the Center for Strategic Studies under Azerbaijan’s president. “It’s our interest that there not be hostility between our ally and our closest partner.”

Mammadov says the attempt to keep the Russian bases in Syria is a waste of time. “Turkey is limiting Russia’s presence in Syria, and to maintain some sort of presence in the eastern Mediterranean, Moscow has to negotiate with Ankara,” he says.

After President Assad’s fall, Russia reportedly transferred air-defense systems and other weapons from Syria to Libya, but Mammadov believes that Russia’s entire presence in Syria is in danger.

“Russia doesn’t have other bases in the region, and it will have great difficulties maintaining its assets in northern and central Africa without a presence in the Mediterranean,” he says. “I think Turkey will take advantage of the situation to take control of those assets gradually and curb Russia there.

“The Russian bases in Syria are no longer bases but basically hostages. [The Russians] have no escape route to Russia. They used to be able to fly via Syria and Iraq. … Now they’re blocked, and Turkey isn’t allowing the passage of ships and warplanes. They don’t have any options. They’re sitting there and don’t know how to get out.”

The Russians agree with the Azerbaijanis’ assessment. Mikhail Margelov, vice president of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research institute close to the regime, says Moscow’s bases in Syria “won’t last over time, certainly not forever. It’s clear that if Russia wants to develop its presence, including its security presence, in Africa, it has to find alternatives. But I doubt that Russia will be able to keep the bases, or more precisely, to use them effectively.”

The Azerbaijanis say Turkish control in Syria will maintain unity and stability and ultimately be in Israel’s interest, as opposed to strengthening separatism and stoking the civil war that Israeli policy is promoting.

But Israel isn’t relying on Turkey or the new regime. Sa’ar has said Ankara is collaborating with Iran in Tehran’s attempts to smuggle money to revive Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Israelis say they received some proof of this last week: the $2.5 million allegedly earmarked for Hezbollah that was seized from an airline passenger arriving in Beirut from Turkey.
Israeli officials are also harshly criticizing Erdogan’s open support of Hamas, and refuse to see him as a moderating influence in the region.

Hysteria and panic

“These are jihadi guys with a fanatical ideology,” an Israeli source says about the new Syrian regime. “Their actions are extreme, their past is black and their present is black. Look at what they’re doing to the Kurds, ” he says, referring to the fighting between Kurdish and pro-Turkish forces in northern Syria. “Now they’re saying they’re wearing suits? Naivete has its limits.”

But Tsameret Levy-Daphny, a Turkey expert at Shalem College in Jerusalem, says “the Israeli understanding of Turkey is flawed. With Syria, it’s acting out of hysteria and panic.”

She says Turkey’s influence in Syria is something too broad for Israel to significantly curtail, and talk of imperialist Turkish tendencies is exaggerated. Israel’s view of Turkey is influenced by Ankara’s “uncompromising position” under Erdogan on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Levy-Daphny says.

But she notes Turkey’s consistent position: recognition of Israel alongside the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Most people would agree that, if waste could reasonably be reduced within the US federal government, the reduction would ultimately be beneficial to US taxpayers. Unfortunately, the tactics by which Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—which has a stated aim of cutting $2 trillion of government waste—is pursuing its work are far from reasonable. In fact, those efforts create major threats to US national security. Some of its activities constitute a counterintelligence disaster in the making.

There are at least two ways in which Musk’s efficiency entity threatens US national security. First, it does not appear that requisite security standards are being employed by Musk’s entity engineers when accessing sensitive US databases. Second, the manner in which US federal civil servants are being abruptly laid off, with reportedly hundreds of thousands potentially facing unemployment, are guaranteed to be fertile hunting grounds for hostile foreign intelligence services. Both of these areas constitute major threats to US national security.

Efforts to streamline the US federal workforce and bureaucracy are not new. Almost every US president rides into the White House claiming that he will reduce waste in the massive federal government. The US national security establishment has indeed previously been on the receiving end of major cuts. In 1977, CIA director Stansfield Turner, a distinguished US Navy admiral, fired about 800 CIA officials in what was known as the “Halloween massacre” on account of the date on which it happened. The context for Turner doing so was severe criticism of the CIA following revelations of its abuses in Church Committee hearings in 1975 that detailed CIA coups, assassinations, and illegal interception of domestic communications. And in the 1990s President Bill Clinton took an even bigger axe to the US federal workforce, managing to eliminate about 377,000 jobs.

Tough audits of government also took place on the other side of the Atlantic. Back in 1957, Britain’s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, famously called for an audit of the British empire. The context for Macmillan’s “profit and loss account” of empire was a dire financial situation facing Britain’s exchequer. The resulting audit revealed the drain of Britain’s far-flung outposts of empire on the British economy. The audit accelerated the process—through defense reviews and white papers and parliamentary debates—of articulating Britain’s withdrawal from its empire east of the Suez Canal. This sequence of events is essential for understanding how a reasonable and secure government audit can occur: a financial line-by-line reckoning, reports, and analysis delivered to decision makers, and then a policy agenda pursued. President Clinton wound down jobs in the US federal workforce in just such a disciplined and judicious process that incorporated bipartisan congressional feedback and leveraged individuals with extensive civil service experience.

There is no parallel in modern history for the position of Musk in the Trump administration: Musk is himself a major government contractor—from SpaceX to Tesla, Starlink, and Neuralink—who is now responsible for finding efficiencies within the government departments with which he is contracting. A Trump supporter might well say this is fair enough: The president was given a mandate in the general election to take drastic action. The problem is, in its effort to take quick, and drastic, action, there is growing evidence that the Trump administration and Musk’s efficiency entity are riding roughshod over security standards needed to safeguard sensitive US data and national interests.

The data security problem. Musk’s engineers have been given access to US federal databases, but their activities in those systems are far from transparent or accountable to the US public. According to public reporting, on February 11 Musk’s efficiency engineers were “being vetted” at the time they were given access to US federal databases that, in some cases, contain highly sensitive information on the US government and citizens. At the time of writing, it appears that such engineers have accessed about 15 government agency databases, including the US Treasury and its payment system, by which the federal government pays out trillions of dollars.

The process of vetting of Musk’s engineers is clearly inadequate, akin to putting the cart before the horse. Any reasonable person would expect that such workers should have been already vetted before being given access to such databases. The US public has little information about what security procedures or background checks have been employed for Musk’s workers. It is known that on Trump’s first day in office, they were given the requisite security clearance for accessing the Treasury database. But such background checks are usually extremely lengthy, taking months to complete. What little information can be pulled together about Musk’s engineers does not inspire confidence. Some have been associated with racist and eugenicist posts on social media, which have led to at least one such engineer being dismissed. One of Musk’s workers went by the online handle “Big Balls.”

Simply put, we do not know what vetting standards were applied to “Big Balls.”

It has frequently been suggested that Musk’s computing engineers were given only “read access” to US databases. The suggestion is now known to be incorrect. In at least one instance, an engineer was given both read and write access to the data, meaning that he could alter code and therefore data if he chose to do so.

Many questions remain unanswered about the activities of Musk’s efficiency entity. What we can say for certain, however, is that the data it collects will be a prime target for hostile foreign intelligence services—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. We can hope that Musk’s engineers are taking reasonable requisite security standards to safeguard the data they collect. Hope, however, is not a strategy, and initial indications are not encouraging. In what can only be described as an egregious move, the Trump administration published a letter containing the names of CIA officials. This will be an intelligence bonanza for any hostile state regime seeking to uncover the activities of the CIA.

Fired workers are targets for foreign spies. Musk’s efficiency entity poses a second threat to US national security by the manner in which it is firing large numbers of US civil servants. Abruptly dismissed US workers are guaranteed to be prime targets for foreign intelligence services. History shows that grievances and money are significant motivating factors for espionage.

In the early Cold War, the Soviet Union achieved some of its most important espionage achievements through ideologically committed agents—think of the Five Cambridge Spies or the atom spies like Klaus Fuchs inside the Manhattan Project. Late in the Cold War, Western services, like Britain’s MI6, were likewise able to recruit ideologically committed agents behind the Iron Curtain, one of the most successful of whom was Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB bureau chief in London who passed secrets to British intelligence.

Some of the most damaging spies during the Cold War were, however, motivated less by ideology and more by a sense of grievance against their employer and the desire for flamboyant lifestyles. This was the case with Aldrich Ames inside the CIA and Robert Hansen within the FBI. Neither Ames nor Hansen was the “secret agent” they wanted to be. Their senses of insecurity and desire for money were skillfully exploited by Soviet and then Russian intelligence services.

The manner in which dedicated civil servants are being dismissed out of hand effectively constitutes a ticking time bomb for US counterintelligence. Gone are the days of having to recruit spies in-person; China’s intelligence services are known to have recently recruited US sources with security clearances simply by using LinkedIn. And it is not difficult to imagine a foreign intelligence service preying on a sense of grievance among those abruptly dismissed from the US federal civil service, as well as offering handsome payments for any US state secrets they may hold in their heads. With the rising cost of living and mortgage payments to meet, US federal workers—whether newly laid off or merely uncertain about their job prospects—may unfortunately be tempted to look elsewhere to keep their families solvent.

Evidence that the Trump administration is not following a well-thought-through plan when it comes to dismissing US workers has been demonstrated in public: More than 300 employees at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, whose jobs include safeguarding US nuclear secrets, were abruptly let go on February 13^th—but then were equally abruptly rehired when it became apparent their jobs were essential for US national security. The same has reportedly occurred to experts in avian flu at the Department of Agriculture, dismissed as the US faces an outbreak of avian flu.

The overarching danger to US national security. Musk’s unfettered access to sensitive US federal databases will almost certainly cause a chill among America’s closest intelligence allies. The US government is hard-wired with the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in an intelligence-sharing alliance known as the Five Eyes. Musk’s intrusions into databases will doubtless cause alarm among those Five Eye partners.

Musk has not yet taken his chainsaw to the CIA, NSA, or the FBI, but when he inevitably does so, the results are likely to be even worse from a counterintelligence perspective than his intrusions hitherto into other government agencies. Such three-letter agencies hold the crown jewels of US state secrets. The FBI’s new director, Kash Patel, has stated that he would turn the FBI headquarters into a museum in honor of the “deep state.” Along with the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as the US Director of National Intelligence, Patel’s installation to the head of the FBI must be causing allies to wonder what is going on in the United States and whether Donald Trump’s administration really can safeguard national secrets.

It seems unlikely the activities of Musk’s efficiency entity will be subject to oversight from the Republican-controlled Congress. Will that entity be publishing a report of its audit of the US federal government? Will Musk recuse himself, as he claims he will do, when it comes to his own conflicts of interest? As dozens of lawsuits over Musk’s activities play out, we should all hope that the US courts will eventually answer some of these questions and provide a check on any illegalities conducted by Musk’s efficiency entity. A truly worrying development will occur, however, if the Trump administration refuses to comply with court orders in this regard. Vice President JD Vance—a graduate of Yale Law School—has insinuated that such defiance of the courts could happen. If this does transpire, the US government will be not only in a constitutional but a true national security crisis.

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