Last month I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how Republicans had hijacked the Biden-era infrastructure bill to redirect billions of dollars away from next-generation fiber, and instead funnel it into the pockets of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — in exchange for congested, expensive, satellite broadband service they’d already planned to deploy.
The piece explored in detail how some communities, like several low-income areas of Louisiana, were all set to receive next-generation affordable fiber, before Republicans hijacked the program, redirected those funds to their top donors, then proudly declared “mission accomplished.”
While Republicans like NTIA boss Arielle Roth have tried to claim this hijacking has been a net improvement, the adjustments not only showered billionaire Trump allies with unneeded subsidies, it eliminated all the provisions in the program ensuring the resulting broadband was affordable or deployed equitably. Affordable fiber evenly deployed to everyone was, the public was informed, “woke.”
I’m going to be writing about the impact and reverberations for years.
Dems have, as per brand tradition, mostly flubbed the opportunity to highlight and message around this obvious corruption. There were a few good questions flung at Roth during a recent House telecom hearing (Rep. Troy Carter of Louisiana did a particularly good job pressing Roth), but by and large Dems haven’t capitalized on the opportunity to shame Republicans for their grift parade.
“I am not declaring that corruption was at work in this instance. I am saying that it sure looks like it,” Johnson said in an interview. “Public confidence in the bidding process has been undermined.”
His plan comes after Starlink received 99% of the state grants in a government program designed to improve rural broadband access. Johnson said the company received an estimated $110 million.
It’s not clear how far he’ll get, since the roots of the corruption extend federally to Howard Lutnick, Arielle Roth, and the NTIA. But state broadband offices also had to sign off on the grift and were tasked with doling out grant awards, so we’ll see what paper trails disclose.
Keep in mind: the money Musk and Bezos have received from this $42.5 billion grant program pales to what they could ultimately receive. As unnecessary wars, tariffs, inflation, and additional economic chaos unfolds, a lot of providers and states that planned to deploy multi-gigabit affordable fiber are expected to balk and default on their bids, opening the doors for billions more for Musk and Bezos to fill the gaps with “good enough” satellite service.
It’s worth noting that after redirecting billions to satellite, Republicans proclaimed that they’d “saved” $21 billion or so. There’s now an ongoing battle over what happens to these “non-deployment funds” Congress specifically earmarked for broadband access. There are some clear hints that Trump and friends are eager to pocket it for themselves if they think they can get away with it. Great stuff. Very populist.
As I’ve noted previously, while low-Earth orbit services like Starlink are great for folks completely off the grid (who can afford it), congestion and physics make it ill-suited to meaningfully address the lack of internet-access at scale in denser urban, suburban, or even some rural environments. It’s generally designed to be a niche gap-filling option you use after pushing fiber, cellular, and fixed wireless everywhere; Republicans are treating it like a magic bullet simply because Musk is involved.
As a flood of government-subsidized users jump on the Starlink network, existing congestion problems (see this recent study out of Penn State) are going to get worse, resulting in all sorts of annoying network management approaches (throttling of 4K video) you don’t see on higher-capacity fiber. The company has also been charging users fees of up to $1500 in high-capacity areas.
The problems with this approach will become more and more apparent to taxpayers over the next few years, at which point all the folks responsible will have moved on to other opportunistic grifts. It might be nice if Democrats aspiring for higher office kept corruption in the spotlight and remained laser-focused on accountability. It’s not like there’s a shortage of very clear targets of opportunity.
Over the last few months especially, there has been renewed attention to the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s ability to profit off the presidency. The efforts to do so only become more brazen every week. Leaving aside the crypto business that he got a ton of people to fund, the free airplane from a foreign government, the “donations” for things like the east wing “renovation” (which is still somehow supposed to be funded by taxpayers), and the attempt to sue his own government for $10 billion, it feels like there is no end to the grifting.
Just recently there were reports of an insane level of market manipulation, in which Trump would buy certain stocks and then pump them up on Truth Social. That alone feels like an impeachable offense, but why stop at merely one layer of corruption when you can profit off of others getting in on the corrupt bargain? Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), the company that runs Truth Social, is now going to start selling “early access” to Trump’s posts via an API.
The product, called ‘Truth API’, will deliver posts from the 10 most influential accounts to customers at a significantly faster pace than a regular push notification on the Truth Social platform, a spokesperson said.
The feed is designed for organizations “most impacted by the cost of a delay in information”, such as algorithmic trading firms, the company said in a statement. “Until now… firms that prioritize tracking influential Truth posts have relied on manual monitoring. Truth API closes the gap.”
The move is TMTG’s first step into data licensing, and opens up a new revenue stream for the company, which has faced challenges in scaling its media business amid stiff competition from larger social media firms.
I can pretty much guarantee that delivering such posts from the “10 most influential accounts” is nine accounts too many. This offering is entirely about giving high frequency trading firms that millisecond advantage to front run the market and execute trades based on Trump’s posts to try to get ahead of the chump trades from retail investors swayed by Trump.
TMTG’s CEO doesn’t even try to claim it’s anything else:
“Markets already move on Truth Social posts … As adoption grows, we expect Truth API to become a meaningful, ongoing source of revenue for the company,” TMTG’s interim CEO Kevin McGurn said.
And, yes, lots of other internet companies offer licensed API access to content, but for other reasons. The only reason anyone could possibly want this is to get a split second advantage to trade on pronouncements the President of the United States makes. The value of this offering does not grow over time. It has a clear limit: the day Trump is no longer president, the value drops back down close to nothing at all.
If there were an actual legitimate reason to offer such a service, then McGurn could have expressed it, but he just out and out admits that it’s because markets move based on Truth Social posts (he conveniently leaves out that those posts all come from a single user: the president himself, who just happens to own the platform and directly profits off of any of its success).
Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm before taking office to avoid even any whiff of potential conflict. Donald Trump is leaning into the conflict and putting a price tag on it. He’s announcing to the world that they can get early access to pronouncements from the President of the United States… for a price. There is no world in which that should be allowed.
Brendan Carr and the Trump FCC are finalizing plans to illegally eliminate what’s left of the country’s already barely functional media consolidation limits; a specific gift to Trump-friendly right wing broadcasters that are hoping to monopolize what’s left of local U.S. broadcast news so they can more efficiently spread propaganda and kiss the president’s ass.
Current laws (remember those?) prohibit any single local broadcast news company from serving more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The original (good) idea was that this helped protect opinion diversity and competition in the local broadcast news space. Republicans don’t like that, because they want to replace all journalism with right-wing and oligarch friendly propaganda.
Brendan Carr last March had already made it clear he viewed the law as optional when he granted Nexstar Media Group a waiver for its $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna. That deal would let the company reach more than half of all U.S. households with what passes as “local news.” Now he’s trying to replace a congressionally-approved law with a “case by case review” dictated by Republican whims:
“Carr now plans to repeal the 39 percent limit and replace it with a “case-by-case review” of each proposed merger, the chairman announced today in an op-ed published on Breitbart. The change would make it easier for the FCC to pick and choose which station groups get to surpass the limit. Under Carr, this would likely benefit news companies that provide favorable coverage for President Trump.”
This is, to be clear, illegal. Something the FCC’s lone Democrat, Anna Gomez, made clear in her own statement:
“This unlawful effort to hand control of the public airwaves to billionaire buddies of this administration will destroy local newsrooms, silence community reporting, and drive-up costs for the American families who depend on local stations for news and emergency alerts. A free and diverse media landscape depends on real limits on how much of the public airwaves any one company can control, and this FCC is now poised to allow local broadcasters to sell those airwaves off to the highest bidder. Congress set the 39 percent national ownership cap in federal law, and only Congress has the authority to raise or eliminate it. The Commission cannot waive away that limit simply because these corporate behemoths want to get out from under it.”
Clearly there will be lawsuits, though they’re likely to drag on until long after Nexstar and Tegna have merged, with future regulators being very unlikely to unwind the transaction. I’d then expect to see Sinclair Broadcasting to merge with the remaining company, creating a monopoly over local broadcast TV.
While people are quick to insist that “who cares, nobody watches this stuff,” they don’t seem to realize that somewhere around 80 million households still watch local broadcast TV channels via antenna, cable TV, streaming providers, or satellite.
As I’ve frequently discussed, most of these local broadcasters deliver a sloppy combination of lazy infotainment and right-wing agitprop, as that viral video about Sinclair Broadcasting made clear a few years back:
Carr’s very unsubtle goal here is to turn the entirety of U.S. local broadcast television into propaganda arms of the U.S. right wing. That’s not an opinion or hyperbole, and he’s well on his way already. It might help if there was a functional opposition party that had made meaningful media reforms a centerpiece of their political platform anytime in the last quarter century.
And this is, of course, just local broadcast TV. We’ve also got Carr’s FCC helping Larry Ellison do the same thing to CBS and CNN. Ellison’s also steadily doing the same thing to TikTok while Elon Musk does the same thing to what used to be Twitter. If you stand back, tilt you head, and squint just right, you might begin to notice a consistent theme.
Donald Trump believes that being elected president means he should never be challenged, never be asked to justify his actions, and never be given less than absolute loyalty and deference. He also clearly believes the office is there to serve him, rather than there for him to serve the public. He’s going to make bank from his position of power and anyone who doesn’t like it can keep their feelings to themselves.
Kash Patel — Trump’s appointee to head the FBI — seems to feel the same way about his job. It’s not exactly the same as Trump. He might get richer due to this position, but he clearly believes it’s there to help him pursue his dreams — dreams that appear to be the equivalent of those of a B-list celebrity. He wants backstage access, bottle service, a jet-setting lifestyle, and absolute loyalty. And, like Trump, for everyone to just shut up about it.
FBI Director Kash Patel has been demanding special perks from bureau employees during his taxpayer-funded travels throughout the country, including helicopter tours and jet ski excursions, according to whistleblower accounts given to Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary committees and obtained exclusively by MS NOW.
[…]
But the Democrats are not alone in their concerns about Patel’s use of public resources; MS NOW has also viewed a letter to Patel from Republican Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley written in May demanding that Patel turn over information about his flights on FBI aircraft and about the FBI’s purchase of BMW vehicles, which was first reported in December by MS NOW.
“For each trip where you used an FBI aircraft for personal travel, have you reimbursed the FBI as required by law? If yes, please provide the records,” the Grassley letter says.
Of course, the FBI PR office denies any of this is true, despite all the documentation indicating otherwise. While there may actually be a cost savings (believe it or not) by switching to BMWs, the rest of this can’t be explained away as something that saves taxpayers money or makes Patel a better FBI director.
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson claims this is all above board, saying Patel has reimbursed the government for all personal expenses. But if that’s true, it seems unlikely congressional oversight would be asking questions about it.
As for the Republicans upset about Patel’s behavior and tendency to treat the FBI director position as a lifestyle accessory, they simply can’t seem to engage in oversight without taking swipes at Democratic leadership for [re-reads reports] raising the same goddamn questions.
In a post on X after this story was published, Sen. Grassley said, “I see Dems r riding my coattails & suddenly showing interest in doing oversight of FBI aircraft. Where was that energy w Wray&other directors???” he wrote, referring to former FBI director Christopher Wray, who served under both President Trump during his first term and President Biden.
“My oversight is the same no matter the admin UNLIKE Dems who only seem interested in oversight when it benefits them politically,” he added.
lolwut?
I’m no fan of Christopher Wray, but no one ever suggested he was blowing taxpayer cash on personal trips to exotic locations. And no one ever even hinted that he might be the wrong person for the job due to an inability to remain reliably sober, much less ever caught on camera chugging booze with sports teams in their lockers after a victory.
And there certainly was nothing that sounded like this when Wray was running the FBI’s anti-encryption efforts:
The Democrats said they have been told that Patel “demoted personnel in Brussels because they failed to ensure you were adequately entertained, stoking fear among rank-and-file agents that they must provide your demanded perks or face termination. Concerns and strains prompted by the prioritization of your personal entertainment on international trips may have led to the resignation of the head of the FBI’s international operations this year.”
Not that anyone is going to get Patel to admit to any of these things. He may have to attend congressional hearings in the future, but everything we’ve seen so far from this administration strongly suggests tough questions will be met with open hostility, flat-out refusals to provide answers, and plenty of stupid assertions from the person under the congressional microscope.
That’s not to say this is a completely futile effort. It calls more attention to Patel’s antics and apparent disregard for his position and his duties. It keeps his carelessness in the public eye. Thanks to the source of the criticism, it makes it far more difficult for the FBI to pretend none of this is happening. Hopefully, there will be a reckoning. And hopefully this will happen long before Donald Trump leaves office.
Less than a month ago, Trump secured himself a $400 million plane for free — something he certainly couldn’t have accomplished if he weren’t the president of the United States. It’s no longer a mere appearance of corruption: it’s a 250-foot long luxury plane with 2,500 square feet of tangible corruption. Here are some details on the gift/graft, along with a few choice quotes from its recipient:
“This plane was transformed into a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before, probably even almost outside of an airplane,” Trump said.
[…]
“It was time for a change. … Everything was designed good. It was my taste,” Trump said saying that he approved the new color scheme, which reflects the American flag.
Obviously, Trump is a fan. But the problem with this particular “free” Qatari-made Air Force One — well, one of several problems — is that is isn’t as secure as the original Air Force One, which was acquired a bit more honestly using only US tax dollars and perhaps a handful of no-bid contracts. The New York Times noted this in its report, after Trump flew the Qatar version to Turkey, but had to exit the country aboard the old Air Force One.
The new Air Force One, which President Trump flew on earlier this week to Turkey, lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities, according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted.
Experts say the absence of those capabilities on the Boeing 747-8 aircraft, which was donated by Qatar, creates potential risk in using the jet abroad, a dynamic underscored by the abrupt decision on Wednesday for Mr. Trump to leave Turkey on the old Air Force One at the urging of the Secret Service.
There’s a metaphor in here somewhere, one that might point out that the corruption-adjacent Air Force One is as unfit for its job as the man who took possession of it on behalf of a nation that never asked for it.
While that reporting was definitely going to generate some Truth Social rants and official statements containing phrases like “fake news” or “failing New York Times,” pretty much no one expected it to generate subpoenas. But that’s the reality we now live in as the Trump administration lurches through the second year of its second term.
The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.
The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.
In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.
This isn’t America, I hear you say. But it kind of is, isn’t it? This is Trump’s version of America and the only thing that separates it from actions taken by other autocracies is that these reporters were only accosted by armed officers, rather than directly disappeared. Baby steps. Give Trump another year or so and maybe we can eliminate the relative niceties of merely threatening and intimidating journalists who publish articles the administration doesn’t like.
This follows other actions taken by this administration, like the search of Washington Post reporter’s house earlier this year as the FBI (allegedly) engaged in what what presumably an internal leak investigation. This looks like more of the same — the administration trying to force journalists to give up their sources so they can punish whistleblowers and leakers.
The White House directed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by The New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One, leading to a flurry of subpoenas to several Times reporters Friday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters — a major departure from historical practice.
This is also extremely unusual. As it appears everyone in the White House has forgotten, the FBI and DOJ are not weapons to be used for politically motivated revenge. They are not foot-soldiers that serve the president. Both are supposed to maintain a certain level of independence, which makes it easy to avoid any appearances of impropriety. But those firewalls have been deliberately destroyed by an administration that not only doesn’t care if this looks shady as shit, but wants to make sure everyone in America — especially the administration’s many enemies — knows this is exactly as shady as it appears.
Things are only going to get worse from here. I can say that with confidence because nothing at all has gotten any better since Trump retook the White House. This administration won’t be happy until it has destroyed all the ideals the United States once stood for. The millions of MAGA faithful who spent Biden’s four years complaining they were being censored are now watching actual censorship being put into action. And, of course, they’re unwilling to speak up because… well, you know: “they came for the fake news and I said nothing, because I was an election denier, etc. etc.”
In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful families in the world stood face-to-face. On one side was 30-year-old Anant Ambani, son of one of the richest men in Asia. On the other was Donald Trump Jr. For months, the Trump administration had been on the offensive against the sprawling Ambani energy empire, placing it at the center of an escalating tariff campaign against India. But after Trump Jr. touched down, the two men toured the Ambanis’ private zoo, and at night they performed a Gujarati folk dance, grinning as they moved together to the music.
Four months later, an obscure Texas startup called America First Refining announced that it had received a nine-figure investment from the Ambanis’ company. The deal puzzled numerous energy investors familiar with the project, which aims to build the first major new oil refinery in the U.S. in about 50 years. The company is run by a serial entrepreneur with a history of bankruptcy and lawsuits alleging fraud. After more than a decade of failed attempts to raise money, blown deadlines and rebrands, it had been floundering.
America First Refining’s unexpected breakthrough came after it forged a previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr., who secretly acquired a stake in the startup, according to records and seven people familiar with the company. The new details reveal the role the president’s son has played in a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.
Over the past year and a half, Trump Jr. has amassed a fortune from stakes in companies ranging from crypto startups to a drone business to a firearms retailer. Some firms tied to the president’s son have received contracts or other support from the federal government, part of what critics describe as a run of Trump family self-dealing. In December, Forbes estimated that Trump Jr.’s net worth had rocketed from roughly $50 million to $300 million since the election. But the Forbes figures were based on the investments that have been publicly disclosed. The America First Refining episode suggests there is much about the family business that remains secret.
The size of Trump Jr.’s stake in America First Refining and what he paid for it remain unclear. Top executives at the startup have also said that they speak regularly with Trump Jr., according to a person close to the company. And after the Ambani investment was announced, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer took credit on social media for playing a part in the deal.
America First Refining has flexed its Trump Jr. connections during pitch meetings with foreign officials. Early last year, Trump Jr. joined the company’s leadership for a meeting in South Florida with potential investors from Saudi Arabia, according to two people familiar with the matter. Another foreign government official pitched on the project told ProPublica that the company’s team emphasized they had backing from the Trump family and suggested that an investment would help with White House access.
The Ambanis’ investment coincided with the family’s securing major U.S. policy wins that their company, Reliance Industries, had been lobbying for. “Reliance Goes From Trump Foe to Friend With Refinery Pledge,” ran the Bloomberg headline after the deal was announced. Reliance’s intent with the deal was to “smooth out” tensions between the U.S. and India, the outlet reported.
A Trump Jr. spokesperson said that Trump Jr. “has no operational involvement in AFR and is simply a passive minority investor in an American company that aligns with his worldview.”
“The entire premise of this story relating to Don is false,” the spokesperson said, adding, “Don does not interface with the Federal Government on behalf of any company that he invests in or advises.” ProPublica did not find evidence Trump Jr. was aware of refinery executives’ suggesting that an investment would help with White House access.
In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for America First Refining said, “The claims in this story are false,” but declined to specify what they were referring to. The company’s CEO previously denied wrongdoing in the lawsuits against him reviewed by ProPublica, and the suits were either settled or dropped.
The Ambani family had long been cultivating its relationship with the Trumps. Reliance paid $10 million to the Trump Organization in 2024 as a “development fee” for a project in Mumbai, according to the president’s financial disclosure. (Despite the payment, Reliance has not yet announced a Trump project. Reliance told ProPublica that “the real estate project is real” and “remains under development.”) Ivanka Trump attended Anant Ambani’s wedding party in India that year, where guests were treated to a Rihanna concert. Anant’s father, Mukesh — who is worth an estimated $90 billion and lives in a 27-story home — came to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s second inauguration, posing with the president at a private reception.
But by the summer of 2025, the family was under attack from the White House. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Reliance had reportedly made billions in profits by purchasing vast quantities of Russian oil at a discount. In August, as Trump grew frustrated with his administration’s struggles to bring the war to an end, the president doubled his tariffs on India to 50%. The move was explicitly designed to force companies like Reliance to stop buying Russian oil. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro publicly assailed “India’s politically connected energy titans” for “funding Putin’s war machine,” widely read as a reference to the Ambanis.
Amid this tension, Trump Jr. visited Anant Ambani on his November trip to India. At the end of the trip, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer commented at a business conference in Miami: “I had a nice closing this morning with Don Trump Jr., who’s flying back from India today.” (The following week, the Texas startup — then called Element Fuels — filed paperwork to create America First Refining LLC. In an email, the attorney, John Willding, told ProPublica that there was “no transaction in India or with an Indian company that I was ever involved with.”)
Anant Ambani, who helps run Reliance’s energy business, personally worked on the Texas refinery deal for months before it was announced, a major Indian newspaper later reported.
As the Ambanis quietly finalized their deal with America First Refining, U.S.-Indian relations appeared to warm. In February, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with India, dramatically lowering tariffs, and also reportedly gave Reliance a license to buy Venezuelan oil. When the Iran war broke out and rocked global energy markets, the U.S. gave India a sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude. (The waiver was later expanded to all countries.)
In response to ProPublica’s questions, the White House said that “there are no conflicts of interest.” Reliance did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Trump Jr.’s and Anant Ambani’s roles in the investment deal, but said in a statement that the company did not receive “any unique or preferential treatment” from the U.S. government.
“There is no connection between Reliance’s investment in AFR and any unique measures associated with general U.S. trade, tariff, sanctions or licensing outcomes,” Reliance said. “The investment was evaluated and approved on its commercial merits, strategic fit and long-term value creation potential.”
In March, President Trump personally announced Reliance’s deal with the Texas startup on Truth Social, thanking the Ambani company for its “tremendous Investment.”
After the announcement, Willding, the Trump Jr. lawyer, shared the news on LinkedIn: “Just so proud to have been part of this one.”
Willding rowed back his claim in an email to ProPublica. “I have never worked for or advised AFR and had zero involvement in their deal with Reliance Energy,” he said. “I simply saw the press release and was excited for them.” America First Refining’s spokesperson called Willding’s comment “moronic and false.”
In June 2025, Willding registered a new entity in Wyoming called TX Fuels, LLC, listing the company’s address as Trump Jr.’s mansion in Jupiter, Florida. In his email, Willding said his “only involvement in AFR was handling the legal paperwork” for the Trump Jr. LLC’s investment in the startup.
Trump Jr. first hired Willding in May 2021, according tointerviews the lawyer has given. A corporate deal lawyer in Dallas, Willding has referred to himself as “outside business counsel to the Trump family” and has said he talks to Trump Jr. or Eric Trump almost daily. A former Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voter who fell hard for MAGA, the attorney has installed a portrait of President Trump over the mantel in his living room.
Willding’s practice has boomed during the second Trump administration, bringing the lawyer to Argentina, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. “Everybody in the world wants to do business with the United States right now,” Willding said at a conference in June 2025. “Every company wants to do business with the Trump family.”
There are other fingerprints of the Trump world on the refinery deal.
Howard Lutnick’s firm Cantor Fitzgerald — which his sons took over when Lutnick became Trump’s commerce secretary — is working as the financial adviser to America First Refining, including on the Ambani investment deal, Cantor Fitzgerald announced. (Cantor Fitzgerald declined to comment.)
And the Trump administration played a direct role helping America First Refining find potential foreign investors, according to public comments from the company’s CEO, John Calce. “We have received support from the White House,” he told a local news outlet. The National Energy Dominance Council, led by the interior and energy secretaries, has “helped us with, candidly, introducing us and helping us meet some of these people overseas,” Calce said on an industry podcast.
America First Refining has recently explored going public, according to three people close to the company. That could allow its current investors to start cashing out even if the refinery never gets built — a milestone many energy industry insiders still view as a long shot. Reliance made its investment in the startup at a valuation of at least $1 billion, according to America First Refining’s announcement.
Building a refinery at the Port of Brownsville on the Gulf Coast has been Calce’s mission for a decade. A former Yale offensive lineman, he started his career as a high school football coach after an unsuccessful attempt to make the NFL and now describes himself as a “lifelong entrepreneur.”
The project has been serially delayed, out of money, rebranded and trailed by angry former business partners. At one point, Calce’s companies were being sued simultaneously by eight other firms. In 2022, during bankruptcy proceedings for an earlier iteration of the project, the trustee appointed to impartially oversee the case sued Calce too. The trustee alleged that Calce and other insiders had improperly siphoned away cash and other assets. (Calce denied wrongdoing. The case was ultimately settled.)
During the Biden administration, as the company sought financial support from the Department of Energy, it pitched itself as a climate-friendly green project that would also help “people of underrepresented social demographics” in Brownsville, according to records from that period. The company failed to get enough money from outside investors, and the planned construction was delayed.
By the company’s own estimate, building the refinery will take years and cost $3 billion to $4 billion. Even if it’s built, profitability could be hard to achieve. Many energy investors told ProPublica there’s a reason the U.S. hasn’t seen a major new refinery in decades. “Refineries cost a lot of money and essentially make pennies on the dollar,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist in Houston. “Wall Street is not going to finance a new refinery.”
Even after the start of the second Trump administration, the company was in jeopardy, according to interviews and documents. It laid off workers last year, and, by late 2025, with delays continuing to plague the refinery, officials at the Port of Brownsville believed the project looked to be dead, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.
That has not stopped Calce and his team from making grandiose claims to the public. Earlier this year,a website went live for another Calce company called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals. It claims to have a far-flung network of oil storage terminals in places like the Netherlands and Singapore, more than 850 employees and a C-suite of experienced energy executives. But ProPublica could find no evidence that the executives are real people or that the storage terminals actually exist. The phone numbers on the website are also currently listed online as the contacts for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office. The numbers are dead.
America First Refining’s political ties, though, may have boosted its standing with Texas state regulators. In February, shortly before the Ambani investment became public, the company sought an extension on its permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Inside the state agency, emails obtained by ProPublica show, officials scrambled to approve the request.
“Need to get this one logged and processed asap,” wrote one official.
“You are going to have to do this one. I will explain why in person in a few,” wrote another. “You can guess if you check out the name.”
America First Refining got its approval the next day. A spokesperson for the Texas agency did not address questions about the emails. “This request was processed quickly due to the quality of information provided,” the spokesperson said.
DOGE was always designed to provide flimsy pseudo-efficiency cover for wholesale corruption. It was designed to pretend that the government was “cutting waste and fraud” while a bunch of velour tracksuit wearing con men stripped the country for parts and sold what was left off the back loading dock.
As we’ve since explored, DOGE also burned through billions of dollars, exposed the sensitive data of untold Americans, killed untold millions of people worldwide, and generally distracted dim and misinformed Americans from the fact their government is too corrupt to function in the public interest and is no longer capable of consistently standing up to corporate power.
Enter Brendan Carr, who appears to be under fire for the FCC’s efforts to hide his agency’s correspondence with DOGE bros. Last year, journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward sued the FCC, alleging that the agency violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records.
In a new filing (via Ars Technica) in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Burleigh and Frequency Forward say Carr also hid his use of Signal as a communications tool, which they apparently believe he used to communicate with DOGE:
“The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request. The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business.”
While Carr’s obnoxious censorship efforts get all the policy and media attention, he’s also been at work destroying the FCC’s consumer protection authority, eliminating media consolidation limits, and dismantling what little corporate oversight we had left at the agency. This was “cleverly” dubbed Carr’s “delete, delete, delete” agenda. Telecom monopolies and robocallers love the plan.
It’s not clear what a bunch of 20-something Elon Musk cult members could have contributed to Carr’s mindless demolition of public interest governance, but it sure would be nice to take a transparent look, given the vast financial conflicts of interest between Musk’s fake government agency and the multiple Musk-owned companies looking (and getting) giant financial favors from the FCC.
“The evidence strongly suggests that Musk bought his way into the White House and to obtain his position as the de-facto head of DOGE, and that he had used his government authority and access to information to earn huge profits for himself and his companies,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Plaintiffs’ FoIA request seeks documents that shed light on the relationship between the FCC, Musk as regulator and Musk and his companies as regulated entities.”
Meanwhile, I still think it’s embarrassing that the press, and some Dem politicians, initially treated DOGE as if it was a good faith effort they could work with. As opposed to what it clearly was all along: corruption and grift under the flimsy veneer of improved government efficiency.
Back in July of 2024, when two of the biggest big shots in venture capital, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, explained why they had decided to go all in to back Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election, they talked up a good game about how they would support any candidate who supported their “little tech” agenda. This always rang hollow — Andreessen has been on the board of Meta for years, which is the most anti-little tech company around. They also whined about the Biden administration tech policies, in particular around AI, cryptocurrency, and antitrust. But the most telling part of the full podcast had nothing to do with tech policy at all. Marc and Ben spent a bunch of time positively offended that Joe Biden and some (only some) of his agency heads wouldn’t meet with them:
We have been spending a tremendous amount of time with Senators, Congress people on both sides of the aisle. Mark mentioned we met with President Trump. We did meet with White House officials, including Jeff Zients the chief of staff, and Jake Sullivan the National Security advisor, Gina Raimondo the Commerce Secretary and so forth. We have not met with President Biden. We attempted and failed.
….
We tried to meet with Gary Gensler — he’s the chair of the SEC, he’s running this campaign against crypto. We’re the largest crypto investors or largest blockchain investors in the world, and we’ve requested meetings with him at least a half a dozen times. I even was able to get in contact with his office mate at MIT, who said ‘surely Gary will meet with you, it’s so important that he meets with you’… and he couldn’t get us the meeting.
Meanwhile, they seemed to love the fact that Donald Trump would have dinner with them, and Trump family members would vacation with them. Here’s Marc:
Ben and I had dinner with the former president 10 days ago at Bedminster, his golf club in New Jersey, and had a three-hour dinner. And so, you know, we were quite literally just with him… you know, he’s a very complicated guy, people have a lot of opinions, but when you know somebody like that — you know the family — it really hits hard
And here’s Ben:
Marc and I have both gotten to know the family, particularly Jared and Ivanka and their kids — Arabella, Joseph and Theo. And in fact, like, Ivanka and the kids were just at my house. We went to see David Copperfield, all that.
The real complaint was never about policy. It was always about embracing the fascism of it all, in which they (Marc & Ben, not the wider tech industry) would get to write the rules in a way that helped them personally, even if it fucked over actual innovation. Indeed, they seemed tickled that after they had dinner with Donald Trump, he rewrote part of his campaign policy platform. These total political novices were so overwhelmed that they could get one side to listen at all that they figured it was obviously the side to back. They seem positively giddy that Trump was willing to make changes to his platform based on their conversations.
There was also a longer discussion regarding how Marc and Ben contrast what they think (misleadingly) was Biden’s policy on AI vs. what Trump’s policy would be. My favorite bit is where Marc says they “confirmed” with Trump what his AI policy would be, as if the guy doesn’t have a decades-long history of promising one thing to whoever is in front of him and then doing something entirely different.
Ben: Let’s talk about Trump’s proposal. We actually discussed this with him when we had dinner
Marc: Yeah, we discussed all these topics and confirmed all this. So: Chapter Three, “Build the Greatest Economy in History.” Bullet five, “Champion Innovation.” Item two, “Artificial Intelligence”:
“We will repeal the dangerous executive order that hinders AI innovation and imposes radical ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, we will support AI development rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”
Ben: That sounds like a good plan to me!
When we met with him, I thought his comment was really insightful and good. It’s funny — I would contrast the Biden administration’s approach, particularly in the inner core of the White House, with Trump’s approach. The White House has a very complicated model of things. They think they know a lot — they know that startups aren’t going to be important, that only a few companies will be able to field big models. They know all these things that we don’t know, and we don’t. They’ve never heard of distillation, apparently, or how AI is actually working in practice. It’s a very complex view of the world.
Trump’s view was very simple. What he said to us is, “Look, AI is very scary, but we absolutely have to win — because if we don’t win and China wins, that’s a very bad world.” And I think that’s actually a more correct view. That’s basically true. When things start happening that do need regulation, then we should regulate them. But to anticipate it would be kind of like saying, “Oh, the automobile is coming out, and we think somebody’s going to make an automobile that drives 500 miles an hour nobody can control, so we’re going to just outlaw cars now.” That’s a little bit this approach to AI — “Well, we think in the future there’s going to be a sentient model.” Now, nobody has built anything anywhere that’s on the way to sentience. And so doing that — what we have are these great things that can tutor kids, so “No, you can’t tutor kids, because maybe somebody will come up with an idea that will make AGI, and so we have to cut off the tutors.” It’s that kind of thinking, which is quite scary, I would say.
That final bit is quite telling as well. Biden’s plan was too complex. Trump’s plan was simple. Perhaps that’s because he’s a simpleton who has no understanding of actual policy tradeoffs. Biden’s team definitely made some decisions I strongly disagreed with regarding tech policy, but the “complexity” they whine about is because the issues here are, legitimately, complex.
So, um, given that the Trump administration has basically put in place a much dumber and much worse version of what Marc & Ben said Biden was doing… clearly they’re out there admitting they were wrong, right?
In just the last few weeks we not only had the US government force Anthropic to turn off Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models (even as the NSA itself was finding them useful!), it also made OpenAI limit the release of GPT 5.6. Meanwhile there are reports that the Trump administration is furious that Meta has been the one US frontier model provider that won’t let them pre-vet its AI models and decide which ones can and can’t be released.
So, two years ago Marc & Ben were yucking it up about how the Trump admin would stop trying to hold back and regulate big models, which they (falsely) claimed the Biden admin was doing. And now that the Trump admin is doing exactly that… it’s crickets from Marc and Ben.
Apparently their real concerns had nothing to do with such policies after all. Marc and Ben won’t tell you that directly, of course. But someone in their general orbit already has.
A little while ago the Bulwark’s Tim Miller did an interview with Jason Calacanis, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor/gadfly, discussing a variety of issues regarding the tech industry. I only came across this because Karl Bode’s discussion regarding the SpaceX IPO mentioned it, to point out some delusional thinking about how Starlink works. But the rest of the interview is actually a lot of Calacanis saying the quiet part out loud regarding how Silicon Valley bros view all this fascism and corruption: positively, because they think they can handle fascism and corruption.
Miller pushes Calacanis on some points regarding why the Silicon Valley VC bros still support Trump’s fascism when it’s so obviously against things like open innovation and the free market, and Jason (almost gleefully) mocks Tim for just not getting it. He happily admits that the tech bros don’t have any actual principles at all. They just understand transactions, and Trump remains transactional.
Jason lays it all out as Tim points out that if a President Kamala Harris did a tiny bit of what President Trump is doing right now, the VC bros would be losing their minds, and Jason says none of that matters, because the VC bros understand that as long as everything is corrupt and “coin-operated” then they understand the game. Their biggest fear is that they’re just not that important, and policy might get made with no one caring what they thought:
Tim Miller: I want to give you a counterfactual. Kamala Harris did win. Okay. She gets in there and she puts an illegal tax on the Silicon Valley companies unilaterally. It doesn’t go through Congress. Puts a tax on them. It’s not legal, but she just does it. She says, “It’s an emergency. I’ve decided I have the right to do a, you know, whatever — windfall profits tax on all these companies. I’m going to do that.” And then she garnishes money from the CEOs. She makes them come to her and beg her for absolution to get around it. Sometimes she grants it, sometimes she doesn’t — kind of based on whim, kind of based on whether Doug is friends with the person, kind of based on whether they’ve given money to her. And then the Supreme Court comes back and says, “No, actually you’ve got to give the money back to the companies.” And she says, “No, actually I don’t want to. I’m not going to do that. In fact, I’m going to threaten them, and maybe I might actually take a percentage.” Donald Trump just suggested he might take a percentage of the company for the government. If Kamala Harris had said that, you and all your Silicon Valley buddies and the Wall Street Journal would be losing their minds, and it would [be] communism.
Jason Calacanis: So you’re making this analogy to tariffs?
Tim: This is what Trump is doing — with tariffs, and with taking a percentage of Intel, and he’s suggesting he’s going to take a percentage of AI companies. He tariffed them illegally. He made them come in and beg for their lunch. That’s left-wing autocratic politics is what he’s doing.
Jason: Yeah. I can educate you as to why they don’t have a problem with it and why you do. You are looking at it from a moral perspective, and from a logic perspective of like, “Well, if you were okay with one side doing it and not okay with the other side doing it, this doesn’t make intellectual sense to you.” Totally understand where Tim Miller is coming from. This intellectually does not make sense. Let me tell you on a business level what this means.
The tariffs, when they’re under 15%, when they actually hit, are easily absorbed on one side or the other — the folks who are selling items, or the folks who are providing those. They each make a bit of a concession, and maybe you raise the cost of something a little bit, but it’s not as dramatic as the left feels it is. It was chaotic, but when it actually hit the ground, it made no difference to these businesses. So, a lot of hand-wringing for not a lot of impact.
And you find it offensive, reasonably so, that people have to go bend the knee and bring a gold bar and wait in line. And South Park did a whole sendup of it — that you have to bend the knee and make your donation. That’s what business people like. They like transactions. You may not like it. You may think it’s crummy. Business people love to have a coin-operating situation.
Tim: I guess. But this whole Biden thing is crazy. It’s like — he didn’t even raise taxes on them. Trump has raised tax. You can tell me that fine, the tariff thing is inconsequential. Okay, fine. But the last federal corporate tax hike was in ’93. Like, they haven’t — they’ve only gotten cuts, from Obama, from Biden. They haven’t faced a corporate tax hike in 30 years or more. So who — why, who cares? Why are they so upset about the Biden situation?
Jason: Because Biden didn’t return their calls.
Tim: So the tariff isn’t a big deal. The phone call is. That’s fine. All right.
Jason: No, it actually is. You’re brushing that off. And this is where you have a blind spot, Tim. Respectfully, you have a blind spot. If you can get in the room with the person, if you can get in the room with the administration, and then you can shape policy and you can say, “Hey, here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and hey, can you help us with this, and this regulation doesn’t make sense?” — that actually is a preferable situation to not getting your phone call returned. And if [that’s] what you have to pay for it — I’m not saying this is my belief; you have me on here to explain Silicon Valley and the business side, I’m explaining it to you — they much prefer bending the knee, having to show up for the Melania documentary. Tim Cook’s like, “I gotta show up for a documentary. That sucks. I gotta bring a gold bar. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep selling iPhones.”
It’s possible this is correct, but that’s basically the definition of Mussolini’s brand of corporate fascism, when the business elites team up with an autocratic ruler to better control the entirety of society, not for the benefit of society or the public good, but for their own.
Early on in the second Trump administration, I wrote an article titled Fascism for First Time Founders, about how this tends to end very badly for the business leaders who embrace it. I stand by that article, and think it’s even more relevant today than it was then. Fascist regimes don’t tend to last long, and the business leaders who embrace fascism in pursuit of becoming all-powerful oligarchs tend not to come to happy endings, no matter how wealthy it makes them for a short period of time, or which leaders are willing to return their calls.
You’d think that some of these “visionary” business leaders could look beyond the current administration and get a sense of where this story is heading. Apparently, that’s too much to ask.
Dean Ball, a policy analyst on AI who was placed in the White House by Silicon Valley folks to write Trump’s original AI policy (which was published to great fanfare and then totally ignored) has written an article about how the Trump AI policy is a total mess right now, where it’s based on whims where literally no one knows what’s allowed (the situation Marc & Ben falsely claimed would happen under Biden).
When President Trump signed it earlier this month, I argued that the Executive Order on Cyber and AI, which claimed to establish a voluntary testing program for frontier AI models, was really establishing a de facto involuntary licensing/preapproval regime for frontier models. This analysis has proven correct. First the administration revoked public access to Fable, Anthropic’s latest frontier model, because of security fears. Now, it appears that OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 is being limited to only a small set of US companies at the request of the US government.
One major problem with this, as implemented, is that nobody knows what the requirements are to get licensed.
When I say “nobody” I mean it literally: the administration itself does not seem to know what safety standards or best practices a company would have to observe for them to be comfortable with the broad release of a model that matches or exceeds Mythos in capability.
This means that, every time a lab asks if they can release their model to the general public, the answer from the government will be “no.” This will be true until there is some sort of safety standard or specification that gives the government a sense that the models are safe.
Ball doesn’t attribute any of this to a deliberate authoritarian agenda, but rather argues that the AI has just gotten so good that the doomers’ fears are finally coming true. That’s the charitable read. The simpler explanation is right there in the Calacanis interview: these VC bros thought they could control Trump and are still over the moon he returns their calls, even as he does all the things they claimed would destroy the industry.
But he returns their calls. For now, at least.
The main issue is that we have a power mad president, surrounded by yes-men and sycophants pushing him to grab more power. And you have the Silicon Valley elites who have the president’s ear egging him on… because he’ll return their calls and because, as Jason said, they understand a coin-operated president.
Even if it’s worse for innovation. Even if it’s worse for society. But it might be better for their bank accounts (for a while) and their egos to be a part of making the AI trains run on time. Until they don’t. Because situations like this are woefully unstable, and at some point, Trump and the MAGA crew won’t actually be in charge any more.
Marc and Ben claimed what they feared most in 2024 was a presidential administration that would shut down the most powerful AI models, regulating math, and hand-picking a few winners and losers. And that’s why they supported Trump. Now that Trump has gone way further than Biden even suggested he’d go in limiting powerful AI models, there’s been no public indication I can find that Marc and Ben regret their choice as president. After all, he’s still coin-operated and he still returns their calls.
Jason explained it perfectly. They bend the knee, they get in the room, they bring the gold bar. That it doesn’t lead to innovation policy that helps tech (little or big) doesn’t really matter. Trump returns their phone calls. They get to feel big. They still get richer. The point was always about access. They got it.
That’s the corporatist fascism they always wanted anyway. Business elites teaming up with an autocratic ruler not to figure out what’s best for the public or for innovation. But for power and control. They get to decide who gets what innovation. What models are allowed. Who can innovate.
The problem with Biden, apparently, wasn’t so much that he wanted to put some safety guardrails on AI. It was that he wouldn’t let the VC bros sit with him while deciding who the winners and losers would be. But here we have it. Business elites and an autocratic ruler picking winners and losers. History is pretty consistent about where this all ends up.
The VC bros said it was about policy. It wasn’t. But no one should ever accept Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pretending they speak for “little tech” or innovation ever again. Not after this.
It just wasn’t enough to pardon hundreds of people who raided the Capitol building to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss — people who assaulted police officers, smashed windows to gain entrance, shut down election proceedings for several hours, stole stuff from federal offices, and generally acted liked they intended to kill Vice President Mike Pence to prevent him from certifying election results.
No, Trump had to go further. He sued the IRS (as a non-president) because a government contractor leaked his IRS filings to the media. It didn’t matter that the leaker had already been convicted and served time for his criminal act. That wasn’t enough. Trump claimed he was owed $10 billion in damages for someone leaking documents every other presidential candidate has released voluntarily.
He didn’t get the $10 billion. But he did get a whole lot of money. Trump was back in the White House and had stocked both the IRS and DOJ with loyalists. The end result was never going to be any but this: Trump’s IRS and DOJ agreed to give Trump a $1.776 billion fund, presumably for the sole purpose of rewarding MAGA insurrectionists for their loyalty.
Less than two weeks later, the federal court system froze the fund and demanded the government explain how this wasn’t anything more than Trump utilizing two agencies he controlled to give himself a bunch of money he could spend at his discretion. It was yet another crossing of the Rubicon by the Trump administration, but at least this time there was some pushback.
Trump’s “anti-weaponization” fund isn’t even popular within his own party. It’s not that the MAGA-cooked GOP isn’t up for some corruption, it’s that there are still a few Trump supporters within the party that believe what his supporters did on January 6, 2021 was inexcusable.
With the fund blocked by a federal court and very few GOP leaders willing to defend it, the administration has seemingly abandoned the prospect of forcing US taxpayers to hand out paychecks to convicted criminals.
The defendants are pursuing their claims using the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which allows individuals wronged by the government to file claims for monetary damages. The justice department has complete and unchecked discretion over whether to settle the claims, giving the Trump administration a powerful vehicle to reward those responsible for violence on January 6. The claims would be paid out from the judgment fund, a perpetual appropriation allowed for by Congress and the same pot of money Trump’s $1.8bn slush fund was going to draw from. All of the defendants seeking compensation received a pardon from Trump.
The Supreme Court has been steadily shrinking the coverage provided by the Federal Tort Claims Act for years now, making it all but impossible to successfully sue the federal government or its employees for violating constitutional rights.
And one would think (if they didn’t think too long or too hard about it) that this would mean these pardoned insurrectionists and other MAGA loyalists would be shit out of luck. But two plaintiffs closely tied to Trump have already converted the FTCA into an ATM:
The justice department agreed to settle FTCA claims filed by Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser, and Carter Page, Trump’s foreign policy adviser, for $1.25m each earlier this year.
The FTCA is only nigh-impermeable if the government decides to defend itself. These plaintiffs — and the opportunists representing them — are hoping the administration will just give them paychecks, rather than force them to actually engage in honest litigation.
And it’s a lot tougher for courts to deter voluntary settlements paid out by the federal government in cases where the DOJ does nothing more than ask plaintiffs how much money they’d like to have. That means that the existence/non-existence of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” hardly matters. Criminal loyalists like the ones listed below are more than likely going to be stuffing some taxpayer cash in their pockets in the near future.
Among those seeking money are Kenneth Joseph Thomas, an Ohio man who was sentenced to nearly five years in prison after being found guilty for assaulting several police officers. Video showed him shoving multiple police officers and throwing himself into a line of officers as he shouted for other rioters to “hold the fucking line”. Also seeking compensation is John George Todd III, a Missouri man sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty on several charges, including injuring a Capitol police officer.
This is an inevitable reality. The administration definitely wants to pay these people for breaking laws on Trump’s behalf. And the DOJ isn’t going to do anything more than write checks because filing anything other than short statements announcing the impending settlement might give legitimate plaintiffs something to work with in FTCA lawsuits brought by people who didn’t break a bunch of federal laws in hopes of undermining democracy itself.
The FTCA can be beat. You just need to be the right kind of shitheel to take advantage of the thoroughly corrupt government you’ve chosen to support. So, it hardly matters whether or not Trump’s ill-gotten IRS settlement will ever be disbursed to his favorite criminals. The DOJ has an unlimited fund to use for FTCA lawsuit settlements that will be almost impossible for courts to block.
This is not the only administration to engage in corruption. Most administrations have to some extent. It’s that corruption is the everyday, front-page business of this administration. It’s so brazen, it’s insulting. It demands Americans pretend nothing matters but what Trump wants and, to a lesser extent, whatever his current roster of obliging subservients want.
Even MAGA should be angry. But this political movement is as bereft of intellectual honesty as it is bereft of anything approaching normal human intelligence. It’s millions of people willing to be peasants just because the king has promised to make things even worse for their fellow human beings.
Then there’s Kash Patel — a guy who would have been derided as a diversity hire by the MAGA crowd if he hadn’t been given the top spot in the FBI by Donald Trump. Less than 18 months into his tenure, Patel is best known for partying with sports teams, abusing government airplane privileges, spending more time in nightclubs than in his office (ALLEGEDLY), and performing loyalty tests of FBI agents and officials, most often in the form of polygraph tests.
“We have been receiving troubling reports that you may be using part of the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a personal slush fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful ‘bonus’ payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen who have engaged in misconduct,” says a letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to Patel, obtained exclusively by MS NOW.
Committee Democrats have information that Patel has issued more than $1 million in awards, the letter says. The letter says the money went to special agents serving on his Director’s Advisory Team, which Raskin’s letter describes as “a curated group of agents who are willing to carry out your unlawful partisan and personal orders.” It also went to agents on Patel’s security detail, “circumventing the mandatory maximum pay caps established by statute,” the letter says.
I’ve got to hand it to Raskin. While some will (dishonestly) object to the tone of this official letter, it’s written in a form MAGA understands: direct accusations, delivered with contempt. Most official letters/queries sent by legislators are a bit more polite and tend to treat accusations as unconfirmed suspicions, even when the accusers have the facts in hand to deliver unqualified accusations.
This letter forgoes those niceties. That makes it much more difficult for the FBI and/or Kash Patel himself to dispute the accusations. When punches aren’t pulled, the administration has to defend itself in kind. Since it far prefers to bully people who aren’t willing to deliver the first blow, it seems unsure of how to handle this:
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment by MS NOW.
The FBI has maintained its silence even after Sen. Raskin made the letter public by publishing it to the Judiciary Committee’s website. And what’s detailed there definitely looks like the actions of a binge drinker — you know, the magical moment in a bar evening when the contents of your wallet suddenly turn into Monopoly money and you don’t realize just how much damage you’ve done to your bank account until the NSF push notifications start rolling in:
In some cases, nearly $8,000 payments have been made to multiple individuals every two-week pay period despite many of the beneficiaries of your selective generosity already maxing out on a federal employee’s salary. While it is unclear at this time exactly how much each of the agents has received, we can confirm that numerous loyalist employees have received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods, amounting to nearly $40,000 per agent. We can also confirm you have depleted the FBI reserve accounts for bonus payments at such a frenzied rate that some of the payments have bounced back from exhausted accounts.
That’s insane. On one hand, you have the drunk-on-a-spending-spree indicators: a guy who doesn’t know how much money he’s spent or from what account until someone else notifies him of his overdrafts.
On the other hand, you have the ugly reality of the situation: this is what it takes to keep FBI employees “bought.” The payments are large and happen frequently, strongly suggesting loyalty to his MAGA twist on FBI day-to-day operations lasts — at most — up until the next paycheck hits the bank. If you’re buying loyalty two weeks at a time, you’re not a benefactor. You’re a blackmail victim.
Either Kash Patel thinks he can throw money at any problem that can’t be solved with a lie detector test and a swift dismissal or agents have figured out they can make bank by pretending to be on board with whatever vengeful kick the director happens to be on that particular week. And I’ll be honest: I prefer a yes man who’s in it for personal profit to a yes man that’s in it because toadying is the only life-hack they know.
Whatever the equation, it all comes down to Patel being an absolute chump. Every negative headline increases the chance of him being tossed aside by the man whose boots he’s been licking for most of the last decade. And I can bet that most of these people walking away with inflated paychecks can easily see the buttons they need to push to ensure they get their loyalty bonuses, week in and week out.
