Pulitzer Winner Journalist vs Trump & Musk: “ZERO EMPATHY, ZERO SHAME: How Ideologues and profiteers are wrecking the US Government”
In the cover image Musk, Trump and the journalist HershOriginal title on Substack:
‘ZERO EMPATHY, ZERO SHAME’ – How Trump’s ideologues and profiteers are wrecking the US government
by Seymour Hersh – Pulitzer Prize winner
All links to previous Gospa News Investigations have been added in the aftermath
Consider three premises about the current American leadership crisis.
One: there are many reasonable ways to trim the federal budget, and the most logical way to cut the budget is to start where it is most bloated—the Pentagon. Why not begin with the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which went into use in 2015 after two decades of cost overruns that totaled more than two trillion dollars. Shutting up Washington’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will give solace to the nation’s banking and finance world, but not much else. (Its annual budget is $823 million.)
Two: President Donald Trump believes or wants to believe—not sure there is a difference—that Article 2 of the Constitution, which says that executive power is vested in the presidency, gives him what he has called “the right to do whatever I want.” Hence his constant talk now of running for yet another term in office.
Three: I have been told by those who know the US hacking community that the young members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency computing team now running amok inside the Treasury Department, where America’s checks are drawn up, would not have been granted a clearance had they sought computer jobs with the federal government. But there is little doubt about the skills of Musk’s young Turks and their ability to get proprietary information that would enrich their boss. Musk does billions of dollars in business with the federal government, and analyzing and evaluating the way various bureaucrats evaluate his firms’ contract proposals—and those of their competitors—would be of prime interest.
The other key players along with Musk are Russell Vought, recently confirmed as a director of the White House’s Office and Management and Budget, which is as important as it sounds, especially to the Musk operatives, and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. Both are political extremists. Vought was one of the principal drafters of Project 2025, a radical proposal for the current reshaping of the government that emerged from the conservative Heritage Foundation. The proposals terrified Democrats—though not enough—during last year’s presidential race. The more outspoken and pugnacious Miller, once a close ally of Steve Bannon, worked on immigrant issues during Trump’s first term in office from 2017 to 2021. He was known for his harsh views on immigration that included the separation of migrant children from their parents when they crossed the US border. Such action, Miller said, would deter parents from attempting to cross the border illegally. Miller, too, was on the advisory board for Project 2025.
There is a history of this kind of right-wing madness. Two decades ago, I wrote a series of articles about the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, a secret intelligence unit that reported directly to Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense. It was staffed by a group of political zealots who were followers of Leo Strauss, a philosopher at the University of Chicago who believed that the work of ancient philosophers contained deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truth could be comprehended by only a very few and would be misunderstood by the masses.
Strauss’s intellectual followers included Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and many members of the Office of Special Plans, They chose not to rely on intelligence that had been analyzed and vetted by professionals in the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, and instead were sending their deranged and fabricated intelligence about the nuclear threat from Iraq to Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. The result was an unnecessary American war in Iraq in search of a nuclear arsenal that did not exist.
Some survivors of those years remain closely linked to the philosophies of Vought and Miller and they have insight and knowledge to the current goals of those who are now collaborating with Musk to turn America into an intolerant right-wing state controlled by billionaires like Musk and a president who dreams of being king.
Here is an interpretation of what is going on, supported in my other discussions with computer experts, from someone who has a great deal of insight about the people and political philosophies involved:
“Trump was led to believe that most of those working with Musk’s team have been granted ‘Read Only’ access” to Treasury and other vital government computer systems, “but in many cases the youngsters have been able to embed code in the system they were monitoring. The kids are not downloading every single database of the US government but rather focusing on areas within the government that either relate to Musk’s various businesses, or the implementation of Trump’s broader ideological goals—for example, the Treasury payment system.
“Musk has tens of billions of dollars in contracts with the US government.
All six of his companies, which include X (formerly Twitter); xAI, a rival to OpenAI; Neuralink, a brain implant startup; SpaceX, which includes Starlink, a satellite internet service; and the Boring company, a tunnel drilling firm); and Tesla, have netted a combined $20 billion in US contracts and subsidies, according to the Financial Times.
“Musk, either with or without the president’s approval, has the authority to review procedures and findings of the key personnel in those federal agencies that have the responsibility to reject or approve his contract bids, and then monitor the implementation of his federal contracts.
“Musk already has forced out several top managers in agencies responsible for monitoring his contracts and replaced them with people who have been with Musk, working in his different companies, for more than a decade.
“He is also getting into all the payout systems in the US government—that pay out $6.75 trillion annually.”
One expert I spoke to was especially critical of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has stated that he has only given Musk’s people “Read Only” access to the payout systems, which would bar downloading of files and the like.
By Syemour Hersh – originally published on his Substack
WHOLE ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE ON SEYMOUR HERSH SUBSTACK
Seymour Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. During the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, also reporting on the secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) program of domestic spying. In 2004, he detailed the U.S. military’s torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won five George Polk Awards, and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), an account of the career of Henry Kissinger which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
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