'Suddenly exposed' DOGE employees fear prosecution after Musk abandoned them
rawstory.com
rawstory.com
OTOH, in practical terms, you can't have big fish without little fish supporting them, so if you drive up the perceived cost of being a little fish, you make it harder for future would-be big fish even without the (obviously preferable) direct accountability for them, so its better than nothing.
(EDIT: originally had some both incorrect and unnecessarily indirect "former/latter" references, replaced with more direct language.)
Politico quote in the article:
> “a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still ‘brothers in arms’ and that Musk would continue to protect them.That led to another protesting and advising, “Guys, seriously get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”
> All the cut contracts and purported savings were triumphantly (if at times misleadingly and inaccurately) itemized on a new DOGE.gov website.
Yeah, they lied openly and brazenly in those numbers. They were not "at times misleading and inaccurate", that is making it sound much better then it was.
Imagine politico would try to report on it fairly and accurately instead of playing the "how can I make these people sound as good as possible while not lying too much" game.
As they say right at the start of their "About Us", "POLITICO illuminates the forces shaping global power".
They are not illuminating powers. They are obscuring uncomfortable acts and behavior or republican party.
It is very much one sided defense too.
It's understandable how they would think otherwise because Musk fell for the same shit (first time Republican supporter didn't realize the cries about the debt are pure kayfabe, lol). But the thing Musk has is the means to insulate himself from the (direct) fallout.
They just knowingly broke the law. They are not saying "omg, I thought I am doing fully legal thing". They are saying "omg, the mafia boss does not have interest or power to protect me anymore after I broke the law for him". And they are saying it very very literally:
> the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came.
This is not about "narrative changing". This is them working for crime boss, knowingly and now finding out crime boss does not care anymore.
The narrative there is/was that since Trump won the election, anything he decrees has a mandate from "the people" (cue Bane voice). So when the useful idiots were acting, they saw the law as irrelevant - everything they were doing was for the cause and thus they'd be protected (naive).
But obviously Trump's directly-harmful America-last policies are eventually going to be felt by a lot of the grassroots cheerleaders who think he's some kind of savior. At which point to try and maintain their support, it's going to become politically important to write off the harmful results by attributing them to some scapegoats. And the clear scapegoats for many things are Musk and his merry band of governmental arsonists.
From the linked Politico story.
This is just sad. I cannot begin to understand what motivates someone to do this. Sending people to the moon, curing cancer, sure. But sacrificing so much to fire people from a social media company?
money
If you have it in your head that he's our generation's equivalent to Newton or Euler then its natural to want to be his assistant or apprentice for the sake of participating (what you think to be) a historically significant event.
a big round of pardons may come before new elections, it actually may be in 10K numbers, autopen'd.
Really, this was pretty much the inevitable outcome from the start; Trump was always going to cut them loose.
It's also galling as it seems to be the opposite of the Nuremberg defense - employees can knowingly do illegal acts as long as their boss/commander wants them to. A complete lack of personal responsibility.
If Trump actually pardons them, and their crimes were exclusively federal, then none (barring something like a Constitutional amendment invalidating pardons, or providing a mechanism to do so, which seems quite improbable.)
If Trump doesn't pardon them, or any state crimes were committed, then potentially some (though, for federal crimes, unless the Trump Justice Department actively prosecutes them, which seems improbable even in the absence of a pardon, that requires the crime have a sufficiently long statute of limitations to be prosecutable in a subsequent administration, and even if that is in 2029 there is only a short window for most federal crimes, which have a five year statute of limitations, and I would suspect there is going to be a big investigative and prosecutorial backlog to address at that time.)