Elon Musk Will Be Deposed Over What He Did With DOGE

Elon Musk will have to testify over his role in shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that “extraordinary circumstances justify” compelling Musk and two former USAID officials, Peter Marocco and Jeremy Lewin, to be deposed in a lawsuit. Former USAID employees and contractors are suing Musk, accusing the former head of the Department of Government Efficiency of illegally dismantling the aid agency.

Chuang noted that the government wasn’t giving the plaintiffs access to documents on key decisions on USAID (and who made them), with previous deposition requests going unanswered. The judge also pointed to Musk’s many posts on X bragging about how DOGE shut down USAID, ruling that Musk and the two officials “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case.”

The Justice Department tried to protect Musk from testifying, arguing that forcing him to do so would “intrude on White House activities and the president’s performance of constitutional duties, which triggers significant separation-of-powers concerns.”

Chuang said in his ruling that Musk wasn’t a Cabinet secretary or agency head, so it wasn’t clear that he had legal protection from testifying. The Trump administration also tried to have the employees’ case dismissed, but Chuang rejected that effort over the summer.

According to a study from The Lancet, USAID had prevented an estimated 91 million deaths in the past 20 years, including those of 30 million children under the age of 5. Now, with the agency in shambles, 14 million more people might die by 2030.

Musk may finally face some accountability for closing the agency, even if depositions are usually kept secret from the public.

“Thousands of federal employees—and millions more around the world—have suffered profoundly as a result of Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s callous dismantling of USAID,” said Tianna Mays, legal director for Democracy Defenders Fund, which is representing the former USAID employees. “We look forward to Mr. Musk being compelled to testify so the American people can finally learn how this administration illegally destroyed a congressionally established agency.”

President Trump is suddenly being nice to the Clintons after they announced their plans to testify in a House investigation into sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein—suggesting that our current president may fear being called to similarly testify once his term ends.

President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were called to testify by House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer.

“I had nothing to do with [Epstein], and they did,” Trump told NBC on Wednesday. “It’s a shame. You have an ex-president, you have the president’s wife and secretary of state. And I said it’s a shame. It is a shame.”

While President Clinton’s ties to Epstein are well documented, this is an aggressive and unusual move to make against a former president. As The New York Times reported, no former president has ever been compelled to testify to Congress under a subpoena.

And Trump certainly noticed the news.

“The Democrats are already saying, ‘If you bring President Bill Clinton, and he has to testify, we’re bringing President Trump,’” NBC’s Tom Llamas asked. “What do you say to that?”

“Well, I think they might say that. But they’ve already brought me.… They had me indicted many, many, times. Many many times.”

“It bothers me that somebody’s going after Bill Clinton,” Trump continued later in the interview. “I liked Bill Clinton. I still like Bill Clinton.… I liked his behavior toward me. I thought he got me, he understood me.” 

On Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked to clarify the president’s glowing comments about his presumed adversary. 

“Yesterday, President Trump in an NBC interview said that ‘it bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.’ That somebody is the House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Republican,” a reporter said. “Why is the president bothered that they’re investigating Bill Clinton and his Epstein ties?”

“Look, I think that the president has respect for the former president of the United States, Bill Clinton,” Leavitt said. “He said yesterday himself they’ve shared a good relationship, and that’s what he was reiterating.”

This 180 from Trump will only lead to speculation that he is either afraid that the Clintons have something on him, or that he is afraid Congress will come for him too, once Democrats win back control.  

When private industry refused, Donald Trump tapped his extraordinarily wealthy allies to deport Palestinians back to the West Bank for him.

On January 21, eight Palestinian men were flown from an Arizona airport to Tel Aviv thanks to Florida real estate magnate Gil Dezer, one of Trump’s biggest private donors and a longtime business partner.

Dezer, the son of Israeli American billionaire Michael Dezer, is also an old friend of Donald Trump Jr. and a member of the Miami branch of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.

The deportees’ trip aboard Dezer’s sleek, 16-seat private jet was a part of a “secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Israeli-occupied West Bank,” reported The Guardian.

Dezer’s involvement in ICE’s operations came weeks after Avelo Airlines, the primary commercial air fleet that carried out the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, canceled its contract with the federal government over mounting public pressure.

And earlier this week, Dezer’s plane was caught shipping more Palestinian deportees. The jet landed at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where the deportees were met by a swarm of Israeli security personnel and shepherded by armed guards to a checkpoint near the West Bank village of Ni’lin.

“They dropped us off like animals on the side of the road,” Maher Awad, a 24-year-old who was born in the West Bank but had spent nearly a decade in the U.S., told The Guardian. “We went to a local house, we knocked on the door, we were like: ‘Please help us out.’”

The tail of Dezer’s jet is unmistakable, bearing the logo of Dezer Development, his father’s company. The Dezers and Trump have collaborated for the better part of the last two decades, building several Trump-branded properties in Miami.

The luxury aircraft reportedly made four “removal flights” prior to its trips to Israel, according to data from Human Rights First, an organization that tracks deportation efforts. Those included trips to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea, and Eswatini, all of which have taken place since October.

In an interview with Traded Miami in November, Dezer spoke of his “love” for Trump and said that he’s “very proud of the job he’s doing” in office.

Senator Elissa Slotkin has denied an interview request from the Justice Department regarding its sham investigation into her participation in a video message telling troops they should “refuse illegal orders.”

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, joined five other military and intelligence veterans in Congress last fall to urge service members to refuse illegal orders.  The video angered President Trump, who accused them of sedition and suggested they be executed.

The Justice Department announced an individual probe into Slotkin’s role in January, and her recent refusal to cooperate is a confrontational move that will force the administration to show how serious it really is about this sedition thing. 

“I did this to go on offense,” Slotkin said on Wednesday. “And to put them in a position where they’re tap dancing. To put them in a position where they have to own their choices of using a U.S. attorney’s office to come after a senator.”

Slotkin’s lawyer, Preet Bharara, requested that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro “immediately terminate any open investigation and cease any further inquiry concerning the video.”

Senator Mark Kelly has also struck back, suing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for retaliating against him and violating his rights to free speech and due process.

The White House is letting Attorney General Pam Bondi take the heat for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office during an FBI raid.

Last week, Gabbard was photographed overseeing FBI agents as they packed up and walked out with ballots from the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that she is prohibited from taking part in domestic law enforcement operations. As public scrutiny boiled over, Gabbard told Democratic lawmakers that Donald Trump himself had asked her to be there—but he is apparently not sticking by her side.

Instead, Trump blamed Gabbard’s attendance on Bondi Thursday, telling attendees at the National Prayer Breakfast that Gabbard “took a lot of heat ... because she went in at Pam’s insistence ... and she looked at votes.

“They say, ‘Why is she doing it?’” Trump said. “Because Pam wanted her to do it.”

But the president’s explanations have been far from consistent. During a sit-down interview with NBC News Wednesday, Trump tried to explain away Gabbard’s latest controversy by blaming the whole fiasco on China’s alleged attempts to infiltrate U.S. elections.

“Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?” asked NBC’s Tom Llamas, point-blank.

“I don’t know, but you know, uh, a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating,” Trump told the network. “You have people—they say—from China trying to, let me ask you, do you think China tries to influence our election?”

“We know that foreign governments try to influence a lot of things in this country,” Llamas replied.

“Well, therefore, she’s foreign governments,” Trump said.

Since Trump first planted the seeds of doubt about the results of the 2020 election, a litany of his allies have continued to tend and water the theory—so much so that within a handful of years, refusing to admit that Trump ever lost to Joe Biden has become a fealty test for MAGA membership.

But there is no doubt: Trump lost that election by a landslide, coming up short by 38 electoral votes. More evidence that Trump did not win is the fact that he was not inaugurated in 2021, and did not serve a day as president until he succeeded in 2024.

But for anyone still in doubt, know that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by the president’s own appointees. Trump’s previous attorney general, Bill Barr, announced in 2022 that despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, no evidence of widespread fraud had been discovered that supported the president’s wild claims.

Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts announced a lawsuit Wednesday aimed at challenging the FBI’s sudden seizure of the county’s electoral ballots.