Trump Press Secretary Crashes and Burns When Trying to Prove Fraud

After allowing Elon Musk and his college-aged Department of Government Efficiency groupies to root around federal agencies for weeks, the Trump administration apparently still hasn’t uncovered any fraud or abuse.

During a press hearing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt waved around screenshots of “contracts upon contracts” that she claimed DOGE had “found” in the government. But as she ran through a list of the financial arrangements—some of which had to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts from previous administrations—it became clear that the DOGE-targeted contracts didn’t constitute fraud but instead were simply “against the president’s policies and his America-first agenda.”

“Are all those things you just mentioned fraud? Or are they just contrary to the president’s policies?” pressed CBS News senior White House reporter Jennifer Jacobs.

“I would argue that all of these things are fraudulent,” Leavitt responded. “They are wasteful, and they are an abuse of the American taxpayer’s dollar. This is not what the government should be spending money on. They are contrary to the president’s priorities and agenda.”

Having federal line items that go against the grain of the president’s agenda doesn’t constitute fraud. Yet instead of providing legitimate receipts to back up that claim, Leavitt took the populist route, beckoning the American people to judge the media for daring to question Trump’s agenda. Leavitt further implored journalists to consider the Trump administration’s rationale, even though Musk has been granted free license to shrink federal oversight under the apparently faux banner of uprooting fraud.

“If anybody in here wants to argue that the federal government is not fraudulent, be my guest because I think that the American people at home would beg to differ,” Leavitt said.

So far, Musk’s team has gained access to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration. (That last one comes during a period in which the U.S. has experienced an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation accidents, with four deadly crashes taking place since Trump took office. Before 2025, the last deadly crash involving a U.S. airliner was in 2009).

Through all these agencies, Musk has extracted sensitive data on hundreds of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories.

Democrats had their fangs out for Elon Musk during the first ever House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

Representative Melanie Stansbury, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, said that lawmakers “can’t just sit here today and pretend like everything is normal.” She further accused Republicans of shielding Musk and Donald Trump, who are “clearly breaking the law.”

“Come and testify in front of the American people under oath, because we want to know what you’re up to,” Stansbury said in a direct missive to the world’s richest man.

Other Democrats were equally infuriated by the unrestricted demolition taking place across the executive branch under Musk’s direction. So far, Musk’s team has gained access to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Education, Commerce, Defense, and Energy Departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, among other agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration. (That last one comes during a period in which the U.S. has experienced an unprecedented uptick in critical aviation accidents, with four deadly crashes taking place since Trump took office. Before 2025, the last deadly crash involving a U.S. airliner was in 2009.)

Through all these agencies, Musk has extracted sensitive data on hundreds of millions of Americans, including their Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories.

But Democrats on the subcommittee were quick to highlight that, despite Musk’s apparent affinity for combing through the details of Americans’ lives under the helm of the executive branch, the multibillionaire hasn’t been too keen when the government has rooted through his own backyard.

“Five inspector generals that were looking into Elon Musk’s companies were fired by the Trump-Musk administration,” said Texas Representative Greg Casar. “These inspector generals, who are independent, protected by law; they are the people that find the waste, fraud, and abuse … fired because they were looking into Elon Musk.”

“You know what Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be looking into?” Casar continued. “His own contracts.”

“Just last year, Elon Musk was promised $3 billion from close to 100 contracts with the federal government,” Casar said, highlighting the discrepancy that seniors who rely on Social Security are dependent upon $65 a day from the government. “We’re not looking into Elon Musk’s $8 million a day. This subcommittee chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene and the House Republicans is looking into your grandmother’s $65 a day.”

Greene pushed back on claims that the administration shouldn’t be hacking and slashing away at all facets of government spending.

“We as a country are $36 trillion in debt,” Greene said during the hearing. “In 2025, interest payments are projected to be $952 billion, which is more than our entire military budget.”

But Democrats weren’t taking her direction very seriously, either.

“I find it ironic that our chairman, Representative Greene, is in charge of running this committee. In the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in our Oversight hearing, so I thought I’d bring one as well,” California Representative Robert Garcia told the committee, bringing out a large poster-board portrait of Musk. “This, of course, is President Elon Musk.”

Mitch McConnell has gone from being one of the most powerful men in the GOP, the face of conservatism, to failing to convince a single Republican colleague to vote “no” with him on Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for director of national intelligence.

The former Senate majority leader was the only Republican to vote “no” on Gabbard’s confirmation Wednesday, noting her support for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, her support for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and her views on China as dealbreakers for him.

“The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment,” McConnell said in a statement after the vote. “Entrusting the coordination of the intelligence community to someone who struggles to acknowledge these facts is an unnecessary risk.”

McConnell’s logic wasn’t enough to convince any of his colleagues. McConnell being the only Republican to vote against Gabbard signals a long fall from power for the man who has long been seen as the last bastion of “normal” conservatism in the face of Trump’s MAGA conservatism (not that they’re all that different in practice). Those days are long gone.

Shocking: Republicans don’t care about fiscal conservatism very much when it comes to funding their—and their rich friends’—agendas.

Mike Johnson and House Republicans on Wednesday released their budget plan, which would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion in order to dole out $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthy. They also threw in $2 trillion of compulsory cuts, $880 billion of which are expected to hit Medicaid, making health care even more expensive and inaccessible for large swathes of America.*

Adding $4 trillion to the national debt limit is a deeply ironic move for a party that is currently allowing the richest man in the world to destroy crucial federal institutions that he doesn’t like, in the name of “efficiency.” The programs that the Department of Government Efficiency is cutting are nowhere near as expensive as this blatantly pro-billionaire handout.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, costs the government about $40 billion a year. The GOP’s tax cuts will eclipse that yearly amount easily, but Republicans are justifying it with classic “trickle-down” economics.

“There will be a lot of economic growth. And if you think about what happened in 2017—dramatic economic growth, possibly even more this time,” Representative Steve Scalise said to HuffPost last Friday.

This appears to be a more shameless redux of the 2017 tax cuts, which crippled the country’s revenue base while lining the pockets of corporations and the wealthy.

* This piece has been updated to correct the expected cuts to Medicaid under the House budget bill.

The Department of Justice appears to be struggling to keep up with the torrent of lawsuits sparked by Donald Trump’s sweeping actions to freeze funding to federal agencies, and significant errors have cropped up in one of their cases.

In a court filing made Monday, prosecutors were forced to correct two factual mistakes they’d made during a court hearing, according to ABC News.

The lawyers had claimed that only 500 USAID employees had been put on administrative leave, and that only their future contracts had been frozen. In reality, more than 2,100 employees were out of a job, and all future and existing contracts had been paused, the lawyers revealed in the filing.

“Defendants sincerely regret these inadvertent misstatements based on information provided to counsel immediately prior to the hearing and have made every effort to provide reliable information in the declaration supporting their opposition to a preliminary injunction,” the filing said.

The errors had downplayed the scale of the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to dismantle USAID without the permission of Congress.

Last week, some USAID employees received letters telling them they’d been placed on administrative leave with pay “until further notice,” according to correspondence reviewed by The Hill. Some didn’t immediately receive a letter because they had been locked out of the agency’s system. The USAID website was taken down, and when it was eventually restored, it only included a note announcing that employees had been placed on “administrative leave globally.”

In a separate legal battle, in which 19 states are suing to rip Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency goons away from Americans’ taxpayer records at the Treasury, DOJ lawyers made another mistake.

They referred to Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE goon who resigned and was then rehired after his racist social media posts were discovered, as a “special government employee” within the Treasury.

In a filing Monday, lawyers said that Elez was a “Special Advisor for Information Technology and Modernization” at the Treasury, meaning he is a full-fledged employee subject to certain ethics requirements from which a “special government employee” would be exempt, according to ABC News.

Last week, DOJ lawyers also fumbled when asked whether they could ensure that a list of FBI agents who had investigated January 6 rioters would be kept confidential. They later said they had no “intention” to release the names. But Trump said Friday that he intended to “fire some of” the FBI personnel who’d been involved in the investigation, alleging that they were corrupt.