The Briefing with Jen Psaki
Muskquerade: Elon Musk's Havoc Is Not What Voters Bargained For
Sun, 9 Feb
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As Elon Musk elbows his way into every corner of the government, Jen Psaki is joined by Senator Cory Booker to discuss the importance of fighting back against Musk's hostile government takeover and his concerns about a potential "constitutional crisis" if Musk defies court orders to temporarily limit DOGE's power. Next, Jen shares her wide-ranging interview with Governor Wes Moore, covering the challenges of governing amid Trump's efforts to dismantle federal agencies, and why the a diverse governing body matters in the face of GOP's war DEI. Then, Jen sounds the alarm on the band of tech bros who have been granted access to sensitive government data as a part of Elon Musk's DOGE team. Jen is joined by Former Twitter Executive Rumman Chowdhury to offer her takeaways from Musk's acquisition of Twitter that could serve as helpful advice on how to deal with his current takeover of Washington, DC. Later, Jen is joined by attorney Chris Mattei to discuss a lawsuit defending FBI agents from retribution. Finally, Jen shares details about her new project, 'The Blueprint with Jen Psaki', a podcast that launches this week, which explores the question of what’s next for Democrats and how they can win again.Check out our social pages below:https://twitter.com/InsideWithPsakihttps://www.instagram.com/InsideWithPsaki/https://www.tiktok.com/@insidewithpsakihttps://www.msnbc.com/jen-psaki
Chapter 1: What is the main concern regarding Elon Musk's influence on government?
Well, Donald Trump might be giving Elon Musk free reign to wreck the federal government. But the good news is the backlash is getting stronger and louder every day. I'm going to talk to Senator Cory Booker about what Democrats and the courts are doing to fight back. Plus, my exclusive interview with Maryland Governor Wes Moore, whose state is dealing with this assault in real time.
And later, I'll talk to the former Twitter executive who's giving out free advice to federal workers about how to handle a Musk takeover. Okay, I kind of think that, I mean, to some degree, what we are seeing from Donald Trump right now is sort of what we expected. The strange obsessions and the constant bluster and the wild pronouncements, none of that is anything really that new.
There was also the talk about taking over Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal. There was the short-lived trade war with nothing to show for it. There was the decision just yesterday to strip security clearances from people he doesn't like. There was the third-person announcement that he's appointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center.
And I could go on and on and on, but I'm not going to. The point is, if you have been following Donald Trump for the last decade, and many of you I know have been, this is all very much what you might expect from a Trump 2.0. And I guess this continuation of the Trump show is, on some level, what a slight majority of the American people may have voted for. I don't know.
But what you may not have bargained for, what they may not have bargained for, and I certainly didn't, is what I'm going to call Musk 1.0. I actually think it's safe to say people were not prepared for the way Trump has basically ceded his power. I mean, there's a reason. Time magazine's latest cover shows Musk sitting in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.
And I'm just going to leave that up there for a second because why not? And because over the past few weeks, Elon Musk has elbowed his way into nearly every corner of the government, shuttering agencies, firing employees, gaining access to the sensitive personal data belonging to millions of Americans. In an interview that's going to air later today, Trump said he's not done yet.
I'm going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education. He's going to find the same thing. Then I'm going to go to the military. Let's check the military. We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse. And, you know, the people elected me on that.
I mean, did they really? Did the American people really elect you to let Elon Musk do what he's doing? Because it turns out the American people don't love it. A new poll out just this morning shows that just 23 percent of all Americans say they want Musk to have a lot of influence over government operations and spending. And boy, does he seem to have a lot of influence.
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Chapter 2: How are protests and public dissatisfaction manifesting against Musk?
And this dissatisfaction isn't just showing up in polls. I mean, it's also showing up in real life. We saw protests all across the country this week and big ones here in Washington. Like this protest you can see on the screen from the country's largest federation of unions.
When workers caught wind that Musk planned to show up at the Department of Labor on Wednesday intending to shut it down, hundreds of people, you can see them there, gathered on the building steps ready to meet him. Guess what? He never showed up. People are also lighting up the phone lines of congressional offices, many of them fed up with Elon Musk, what he's doing. Of course they are.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said the usual call volume coming into the Senate is about 40 calls a minute. But right now, it's 1,600 calls a minute. Independent Senator Angus King said he's been hearing from constituents constantly about Doge and Musk and that his office can hardly pick up the phones fast enough. Democratic Senator Tina Smith put it like this. It's a deluge on Doge.
According to the New York Times, an aide for Republican Senator John Curtis estimated that about 60 percent of the calls coming into his office were critical of Musk, while the other 40 percent concerned Trump's nominees.
As the Times reports, Congresswoman Becca Ballant has reassigned at least six additional staff members to keep up with a nonstop flood of calls about Doge's access to personal and private information. And listen, I can definitely see why someone might want to pick up the phone to ask about that. They should. So, yeah, we are seeing the satisfaction in the polls.
We're seeing it in protests all across the country. And perhaps most importantly, we are seeing pushback in the courts. On Friday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop some aspects of its attempt to shut down USAID. And overnight on Friday, another federal judge temporarily blocked the judge crew from accessing sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.
And of course, Musk already seems to be suggesting he may defy that order. And a lot of this is happening in the courts and in the streets and in Congress because of Trump's decision to let Elon Musk do basically whatever he wants. Now, Trump, of course, isn't blameless in all this. I'm not suggesting that. He chose to empower Musk, and he's watching it all happen without objection.
But right now, he's not really the main character. I mean, heading into the new administration, we had this guiding light, at least I did, this core principle. Watch what Trump does, not what he says. Don't get distracted by that. But at least right now, I think we have to make a bit of a revision. Right now, we need to watch what Musk does, not what Trump says.
And what he's doing is genuinely concerning and alarming. But the good news is that everyone from the courts to Congress to the American people are watching. And for the most part, they don't seem to like what they see. And joining me now is Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
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Chapter 3: What legal actions are being taken against Musk's government influence?
And then when the courts stop him, how we've settled things from the Reagan administration to the Obama administration to defy court orders brings about a constitutional crisis. And so, what Elon Musk is saying there is that we should not be a nation of three branches of government with checks and balances. We should be an authoritarian dictatorship.
And that should scare everyone, because that's when democracies begin to unravel. We must check him. We must hold him up. We must stop them. And we must use every means necessary in a nonviolent way to do what is necessary to stop him from turning our democracy into what we're seeing in other governments like Russia's.
We've seen some significant efforts to push back. There's been protests across the country, here in Washington, D.C., as well. We've seen congressional Democrats push back. We watched your effort to hold the Senate floor overnight this week in opposition of Trump's OMB director, Russ Vogt, who did eventually get through.
I know you said this morning that you guys are going to do whatever it takes—you just kind of reiterated that—to stop Donald Trump. For people watching right now, what does that mean specifically? What does that look like? What specific things can they look out for?
Yeah, well, let me just give you a nod to the fact that elections matter. You know, if we had picked up one more Senate seat, for example, 20,000 votes in Pennsylvania, we could have stopped Hegseth from being—because remember, three Republicans went. So, every congressional seat, every Senate seat, people don't think it at the time.
That's the time we really need people leaning in, because the consequences for that we're seeing right now. We do not control the House. And we're in a minority in the Senate, and we don't control the White House. That gives them tremendous power, even within the bounds of how our democracy is supposed to work. But that does not mean we are powerless, that we don't have agency.
Democrats are going to fight in four ways. One is in the courts. We've discussed that already. Over 42 cases have been filed. We've won over a dozen of them already, and we're going to continue to fight him in the courts. The next two ways are legislatively and using our oversight power.
Senators do have power in the quorums of our procedure and our oversight to just slow things down, to force people to take a look at it. Kash Patel is a great example. Just by postponing his four-vote over a week, we've seen more information coming out, like him receiving thousands and thousands of dollars from a Russian-implicated news agency that literally he took money from.
that has done other documentaries that are pro-Putin and more. And so, that's very important for us to be able to slow things down, get a deeper look, to be able to provide oversight.
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Chapter 4: How is Governor Wes Moore responding to the federal government changes?
One of the impacts on your state is on federal workers and the federal workforce. Two million federal workers were offered a version of a buyout, which is not legal, to leave their jobs. What's happening at USAID is also having ripple effects around the world, but it's affecting hundreds of employees in Baltimore. This all seems to be at the hands of Elon Musk.
When people or your constituents are calling you or questioning your office, what's going on here? What can we do about this? What do you tell them?
You know, part of the challenge I'm seeing with some things we're seeing with Doge is that it's not thought out and actually much of it is illegal. Because you cannot just dismantle departments or agencies. The Congress actually does have a check and a balance on that. The Congress has a role in that.
And so when you're hearing things like we're going to offer an eight-month buyout, it can't be honored because it's illegal.
Do you tell people not to take it when they call your office?
Oh, I tell people, be careful on what you're signing. Because once you sign something, that is permanent. And so when you are hearing that there is gonna be an eight-month buyout or a 10-month contract negotiation, just be clear, unless Congress approves that, it's not legitimate. And so the thing that we want people to know that, you know, and I believe in government efficiency.
You know, in fact, I signed an executive order just months ago for starting the government modernization initiative in the state of Maryland, where we are going to save the people of our state tens of millions of dollars by doing basic things like fleet management and IT consolidation and procurement reform and real estate.
And so you can actually do really important work, save the people of your jurisdictions money and do it smartly, efficiently and transparently. The challenge that we've seen with DOGE is it's not smart, it's not efficient, and it's definitely not transparent.
Is there anything you can do as governor to help prevent these federal workers from losing their jobs?
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Chapter 5: What role does the Department of Education play in state education policy?
And the governor had much more to say when he and I sat down for a different kind of conversation, one that's part of a new project we're working on. You might have noticed a little hint in the corner of your screen. I'm very excited to tell you more about that a little bit later in the show.
But first, as Elon Musk continues his crusade against multiple government agencies, as we've been talking about, we're going to do a deep dive into the highly problematic 20 somethings carrying out his orders. Hard to believe. We'll be right back.
As we've been talking about throughout the show, this week, unelected billionaire Elon Musk and his doze posse continued their hostile takeover of the federal government.
Of course, it's all become increasingly clear that Musk is hijacking entire departments and agencies and access to information as he wages an unprecedented and likely illegal assault on the millions of public servants who make up the civil service.
But new reporting this week has also given us a clearer picture of the band of young tech bros who make up Musk's team, many of whom are barely out of their teens. So let me start there. And I have to say, given the things they've said, and I'm going to tell you what they've said and done, it is quite a crew.
Take Edward Korostein, a 19-year-old member of Doge entrusted with sensitive information. Bloomberg reports that before he was in the job he's in now, where he has access to sensitive information, he was fired from an internship in 2022 for, wait for it, leaking company secrets to competitors. So, yeah, I mean, exactly the kind of guy you want to have access to sensitive government information.
Then there is Gavin Kleiger. According to Reuters, he was reposting content from white supremacist Nick Fuentes as recently as October. And then there's 25-year-old Marco Iles, who, according to Wired, had access to the code controlling the Treasury Department's trillions in federal spending.
Now, if that wasn't alarming enough, and it is alarming, the Wall Street Journal uncovered multiple racist posts from a since-deleted account that had belonged to him. So here's a post from that account in July, which says, quote, just for the record, I was racist before it was cool. Lots to unpack there, which I'm not going to do.
This is one from September, quote, you could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity. And here's another one from that month, quote, normalized Indian hate. And according to NPR, another post from December advocated for a, quote, eugenic immigration policy. These are things he's posting online on his own account just a couple months ago.
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Chapter 6: How can federal employees protect themselves during this transition?
And also just be careful what you say, no matter what platform you're on. And the unfortunate truth is there are a lot of federal employees sharing documents, you know, working together. But we do have to be careful when we're working with each other, you know, to push back.
And is there anywhere we can expect to see this? We'll see it in the coming days or weeks? Or how should people look out for it?
Yes. Some of them will be published on JustSecurity. And again, those are the ones particularly targeted towards device security and workplace surveillance.
Good. That's very helpful information. I just talked through some of the very young, in some cases, very problematic, given their posts, people that Musk is surrounding himself with to help carry out his plans. And Does any of that surprise you about what we've learned about these people? And what else should federal employees know about the kind of people he seems to surround himself with?
I mean, sadly, no. I wish it were surprising. But again, it's sort of a very tired and old and boring playbook, right? Anybody with any sort of experience is not attracted to the kind of confusing and toxic work environment. I think it's very appealing to a certain kind of person. We saw it at Twitter as well. They were inexperienced engineers from Canada.
his other companies, who even knows what the legality of that is, coming in and evaluating my team's code, other people's code. We had to do performances of loyalty, of literally printing out code, physically standing in line like we were about to be scolded by a teacher, and sitting there having to justify our teams.
And I'm hearing parallel stories, frankly, of multi-decade federal employees having to sit in front of a child and explain to a child why they shouldn't be fired, not only is that demoralizing, it's insulting. It's actually insulting to the legions of federal employees who do hard work every day.
No question about it. I wanted to ask you, because you have so much expertise, I mean, there are reports that Elon Musk's Doge crew is now feeding sensitive federal data into AI systems to help target spending cuts.
I mean, as an expert on AI, what kinds of, and most people don't entirely understand what it does yet, what kinds of risks does that pose, in your view, for government operations and for data security?
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Chapter 7: What is the impact of DEI on federal programs?
And this administration ordered a sweeping review of the bureau's workforce to identify the rank and file agents who played any role in those January six cases. So, yeah, it certainly seems like those agents are being targeted for retribution. Joining me now is Chris Maddy. He's the lawyer representing the FBI agents in their lawsuit against the DOJ. So thank you for joining me.
I just gave a summary of where things stand, but this is far from over. I think it's fair to say. Where does it go from here?
Well, we were very grateful that Judge Cobb issued this order on consent last week, protecting the thousands of members of the FBI who worked on January 6th. We're now going to be moving towards a preliminary injunction.
Our objective is to make permanent this prohibition against identifying FBI agents and doxing them and publicly retaliating against them simply for doing their jobs in connection with the January 6th investigations. That's going to be moving forward over the course of the next weeks as we brief it and prepare for argument in front of Judge Cobb.
I was just talking earlier in the show with Senator Booker about how Elon Musk and Trump, they don't always think they need to abide by court orders. What happens if the president did move forward in disclosing the names of these agents or someone from his administration in violation of this court order?
Well, certainly, if anybody within the federal government publicly discloses the names of these agents, they would be in violation of the court's order. We would immediately seek a contempt order against them.
Obviously, there remain questions about the extent to which the president may be immune from that type of conduct, but everybody else in the administration would face significant consequences for doing that. But beyond that, the injury to law enforcement and their ability to conduct their jobs would be catastrophic.
It's important to note that, especially. I wanted to ask you, in court this week, one of your colleagues pointed out that Doge could already have access to DOJ computer systems. Not that we know that, but that's a possibility. Did you get any assurances in court, or do you think that's still a possibility?
Well, that was a brilliant insight by my colleague, Margaret Donovan. We don't know the extent to which Doge has penetrated Department of Justice computer systems. And the really concerning thing was that the Justice Department lawyers apparently didn't know either. We couldn't get a straight answer out of them. whether or not that type of access had been granted.
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