Kash Patel’s appointment as FBI director seems to be coming with conditions: He wants to live part-time in Las Vegas and work remotely, far away from FBI headquarters in Washington.
Why Las Vegas? Patel has long called the city home, but what’s most intriguing is his actual place of residence. The FBI director lives at a home owned by Michael Muldoon, a Republican Party megadonor who runs shady time-share companies, reported the Nevada Independent earlier this month. Muldoon has been sued over allegations of running a “bait and switch” scheme in his time-shares, where “owners” didn’t actually own their properties and were gouged for fees at the same time.
Muldoon appears to have a history of cozying up to law enforcement officials. He has donated a lot of money to the political campaigns of former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, whose office received multiple complaints about Muldoon’s businesses but never pursued them. And apart from sharing an address with Patel, Muldoon also has intricate business dealings with him, utilizing the same incorporation and legal services.
Patel and Muldoon even took a golf trip together to Scotland back when the FBI director was a federal employee on the National Security Council, which could be an ethics violation. Patel at the time was barred from accepting gifts, and the NSC at the time wasn’t approving any trips. He also would have had to report the trip, and records aren’t available from that time to confirm whether he did or did not.
All of this raises questions as to how Patel is going to run not one, but two, prominent federal law enforcement agencies (he is also head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) with such extensive ties to someone with questionable practices, living in Las Vegas part-time. It seems that the appearance of corruption is not a barrier to working in the Trump administration, even if you’re in charge of enforcing the law.
More on the Trump cabinet:
Elon Musk is planning to once again prompt federal workers to tell him what they accomplished with their week, and is apparently hoping to make it a regular part of government work, The Washington Post reported Friday.
Last week, federal employees received a message from a human resources email at the Office of Personnel Management asking them, “What did you do last week?” and prompting them for a bulleted list of five activities. Failure to respond would be tantamount to a resignation, Musk warned separately on his social media site that federal workers probably don’t use to the same degree he does. His authoritarian threat summoned a flurry of outrage and trolling, and an all too predictable lawsuit.
Several agency heads warned not to respond to the email, and eventually, OPM stepped in saying that replying to the email was voluntary. This week, they’re planning to bring it back, but this time, with a twist.
Federal workers are expected to receive another email in their inboxes Saturday, from addresses that are associated with the chiefs of agency human resources departments, rather than from the OPM, two people familiar with the plan told the Post.
This would give a stronger mechanism for gathering information, as those individuals would have more authority than the OPM within their own agencies. While Musk has tried to use the OPM as his chainsaw, on Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the office did not have the authority to demand mass firings across other agencies. This change to the email plan reflects the limits of the OPM’s power.
But Musk and the OPM apparently have even bigger plans for their strange bid to get federal employees to tell on themselves: a Microsoft form.
Documents reviewed by the Post showed that department heads planned to elicit the crucial five bullets of information from government employees by developing Microsoft forms that would make the responses mandatory. The information collected would be shared with department heads, and would not be released externally.
One person briefed on the government’s plans confirmed all of this, and said that the responses would become a weekly requirement.
Donald Trump claimed that the email was somehow intended to catch out nonexistent government employees—but the true purpose has emerged: to see how closely federal agencies are following the president’s agenda and sweeping executive orders, even as they face an onslaught of legal challenges.
Read more about the email:
Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had a sit-down with Trump the same day of his right-wing crackdown on the opinion desk, according to The Spectator’s interview with the president.
“A lot of the people who played a significant role in that election, and particularly on the tech side of things, have come around to support you,” The Spectator’s Ben Domench said to Trump.
“Unbelievable. I had dinner with Jeff Bezos last night,” Trump replied, before going on to describe Bezos and the rest of the MAGA billionaires as “smart guys.”
The Spectator conducted the interview on Thursday, meaning Bezos met with the president just hours after he announced a MAGA makeover of The Washington Post.
Bezos announced Wednesday that the opinion editor David Shipley would be resigning and that the Post’s opinion desk would only be focusing on “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” The pivot was a culmination of multiple ideological steps toward MAGA that the paper has taken over the last few months. This isn’t really about personal liberties as much as it’s about being on the winning team.
Donald Trump’s joint press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer ended up backhanding an independent nation across the pond.
In an email to the media ahead of the international leaders’ joint press conference on Thursday, the White House referred to Starmer as the “Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.”
“If you are receiving this email, you have been APPROVED for today’s Press Conference with President Donald J. Trump and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Keir Starmer at 2:00 PM EST in the East Room,” the email read.
That earned the administration the ire of at least one Democratic lawmaker—as well as the independent nation of Ireland.
“Remarkably stupid, and insulting, of the Trump White House to call the British Prime Minister the ‘Prime Minister of Britain and Ireland,’” Pennsylvania Representative Brendan Boyle wrote on X, calling the president an “eejit.”
Trump himself also did not appear cognizant of the fact that Ireland won its freedom from Britain’s colonial rule more than a century ago. While answering questions beside Starmer, Trump referred to the U.K. as a “place where I have investments,” before noting that he owns a golf course in “a great place called Doonbeg,” a village in County Clare on Ireland’s west coast.
It wasn’t the only diplomatic sin committed by the administration during Starmer’s visit. The Blair House, the presidential guest house where Starmer is staying, had the Union Flag flying the wrong way on Thursday, and during another embarrassing moment of the joint press conference, Trump appeared completely ignorant of the multibillion-dollar tri-nation security alliance between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S.
“Will you be discussing AUKUS with the Australians and the Brits? Were you discussing AUKUS with the prime minister, sir?” asked a reporter with a British accent.
“What does that mean?” Trump asked.
“The Australia-U.S. defense alliance, sir,” the reporter clarified.
The AUKUS agreement was extended in 2021 under Joe Biden to great fanfare by the alliance’s South Pacific partner. The arrangemen
1 Comment
adamnemecek
Makes sense, he’s probably committing a lot of crimes so he can investigate that from home.