Elon Musk Stays Silent After Bombshell Report on Secret Putin Contact

Elon Musk has stayed unusually silent after The Wall Street Journal revealed Thursday night that the tech CEO has been speaking regularly with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The newspaper reported that Musk has corresponded with Putin since 2022, discussing personal topics, business, and geopolitical tensions. Putin even made a request of Musk in one conversation: to refrain from setting up his satellite internet service, Starlink, over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Musk has been tweeting around the clock since the story broke at 9 p.m. EST Thursday, but has not mentioned the Journal article once, mostly sticking to right-wing conspiracies and promotion of Donald Trump. According to the Journal, Musk not only had conversations with Putin, but with other high-ranking Kremlin officials as well. He even faced “implicit threats against him,” one source said.

The report is especially concerning given that the tech mogul has come out as a strong supporter of the former president, spending millions to help Trump return to the White House. The Journal report notes that Putin and Musk have continued contact this year as Musk has ramped up his efforts to reelect Trump.

In addition to his political activism, Musk has billions of dollars in government contracts attached to his companies. SpaceX, which operates Starlink, has a $1.8 billion classified contract and launches rockets for the Pentagon and NASA. He also has a security clearance giving him access to classified information.

With all of these government connections, the fact that Musk is consistently talking to one of the United States’ foremost adversaries in Putin presents a danger to national security. His control of Starlink gives him immense power over international communications, too. And Musk’s ownership of X also potentially puts the personal information of anyone who uses the social media service at risk. An anonymous source told the Journal that the Biden administration is aware of Musk and Putin’s relationship, but hasn’t raised any concerns over security breaches.

However, “they don’t love it,” the source told the Journal.

The Russian government has denied that Putin and Musk speak extensively, and the tech CEO did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment. But it fits a pattern for Musk: He’s met several times with autocrats like Javier Milei of Argentina as well as former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Putin, however, is currently under international sanctions for invading Ukraine, and has mounted disinformation campaigns in the United States to further his interests. If Musk is friendly with Putin, it raises the question of whether his activism for Trump is what the Russian leader wants as well.

Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Ron Wyden called Thursday for the United States to investigate Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The Senate Finance Committee, which Wyden chairs, found that Kusher’s firm Affinity Partners had yet to return any profit to its foreign investors after receiving millions of dollars in fees from foreign governments, including as much as $87 million from Saudi Arabia. Now Wyden and Raskin are calling for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Kushner.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Kushner had chatted with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman several times since leaving the Trump White House, specifically discussing normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Kushner served as a top Middle East adviser during Trump’s time in office, and has floated his own wretched idea for what Israel ought to do with Gaza’s “waterfront property.”

Three sources close to Kushner told Reuters that if Trump were reelected, they expected Kushner to be involved in any Saudi talks in an unofficial capacity. Wyden and Raskin allege that Kushner has already set to work.

“While on the Saudi government’s payroll, Mr. Kushner is simultaneously serving as a political consultant to former President Trump and acting as a shadow diplomat and political advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and other foreign principals,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Garland.

“Despite being engaged in plainly political activities, Mr. Kushner has not made FARA disclosures to DOJ related to the millions of dollars he receives annually by entities owned and controlled by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

“The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ,” they added.

The letter alleged that Kushner’s extensive political activities require registration under FARA. This includes his work advising MBS and Trump, selling advisory and advocacy services through his private equity fund, aiding in fundraising efforts for Trump, arranging meetings with foreign dignitaries on U.S. soil, and influencing members of Congress on domestic and foreign policy.

After receiving a warning from the Justice Department, Elon Musk has stopped his $1 million giveaway to swing voters from his super PAC.

The tech CEO pledged Saturday to give away the hefty sum each day to one registered voter in a battleground state who signed America PAC’s pro–First and Second Amendment pledge. Every day since then, a winner has been announced: three Pennsylvania voters and one North Carolina voter.

However, the move immediately raised legal questions, as it’s a federal crime to pay someone to register to vote, punishable by a fine of $10,000, five years in prison, or both. Experts were divided, with Musk’s plan falling into a legal gray area at best. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called the move “deeply concerning,” and author Stephen King accused Musk of “paying to register Republicans.”

Then the DOJ sent a warning letter to America PAC Wednesday, and there hasn’t been a giveaway since. Musk has also been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject. It would appear that the tech mogul has been scared straight by the federal government.

Musk is still engaging in political activity, even if he can’t make people millionaires. He met with conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch earlier this week to discuss the election, likely strategizing over how to get Donald Trump into the White House. He and Trump have coordinated to suppress negative stories about the Republican ticket on Musk’s X platform. Musk has also followed Trump’s lead, spreading debunked conspiracy theories as well as misinformation.

While he can’t skirt federal law, Musk has still been using his money for cynical political tactics, such as funding opposing ads to Arab American voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania. But in the short term, it appears that the world’s richest man has learned that there are legal limits to how he can influence the election.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is treating his home state of Missouri like a flyover state, according to a new report that shows just how rarely the hawkish Republican lawmaker returns there.

Records of Hawley’s taxpayer-funded travels reviewed by St. Louis Magazine revealed that the Missouri Republican has traveled between Washington, D.C., and the Show-Me State only 33 times between March 2019 and January 2024—an average of six times per year.

Many of Hawley’s trips were short: Eight of them involved Hawley hightailing out of Missouri after less than 48 hours. More than half the time, Hawley was traveling home around the holidays, which tended to be longer stays. Hawley’s longest trip home was between April 1, 2020, and May 1, 2020, around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While taxpayer-funded trips provide an incomplete picture of Hawley’s travel, it is a relevant data point when considering his travel plans. It’s common for senators to expense travel between Washington and their home state, according to Democratic strategist Jacob Long, who spoke with St. Louis Magazine.

Lucas Kunce, a Democrat running to unseat Hawley, responded to the report Thursday in a post on X. Kunce wrote that Hawley “isn’t running for reelection to keep serving us—he’s running to keep up his luxury lifestyle on the coast.”

Hawley has previously attacked “coastal elites” and “liberal elites” as part of his political campaigns.

The senator and his family previously purchased a house in Virginia, which is now valued at $1.7 million. He previously listed his sister’s residence in Ozark, Missouri, as his voting address, but now has two properties associated with his name in Christian County, less than a mile apart, according to the Kansas City Star. The one he technically owns was only bought in 2023.

October has been a rough month for the self-described Christian nationalist. Earlier this month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board endorsed Kunce, calling Hawley the “worst sitting senator in America right now,” and criticized him for pumping his fist in support of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Hawley also came under fire over his use of a private jet to campaign around Missouri, which was first reported by the Missouri Independent. Hawley had previously attacked his 2018 opponent, Democrat Claire McCaskill, for using a private jet, but apparently spent more than $132,000 on chartered flights between mid-December and June.

“Missouri’s flyover country for this guy,” said Kunce at the time, pointing out that he had been campaigning in a minivan with his wife and 16-month-old son.

Donald Trump has decided the most important issue of the election. It’s not the economy, immigration, or foreign policy—instead, it’s demonizing transgender people.

Since President Joe Biden stepped aside, Republicans have spent $120 million slamming Democrats in anti-trans attack ads, according to AdImpact data, with much of that spending coming in the past five weeks. However, polling out Thursday from Data For Progress shows that an overwhelming majority of all voters, or 80 percent, believe that candidates should spend less time talking about transgender issues. An astonishingly high 85 percent of Republican voters agree.

Nearly 3 in 4 voters, regardless of party affiliation, including 58 percent of Republicans, agreed that “transgender people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Moreover, most voters say they’d vote for a candidate who supports trans rights over one who does not. When messaging is introduced to explain two hypothetical candidates’ stances on trans issues related, 57 percent of voters chose the candidate “who says that the government should stay out of people’s private lives and that there is too much legislation targeting a small minority of the population.”

A plurality of Republicans (41 percent) and 58 percent of independent voters said they viewed Republican candidates using anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in their campaigns as “sad and shameful,” compared to 38 percent percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents who feel otherwise.

So why is it that Trump and his super PACs have spent $29 million over the past five weeks on TV ads attacking Kamala Harris over “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison?”

That’s six times the amount that the Trump campaign has spent on ads discussing the economy over the same timeframe, making anti-trans ads the number one topic for TV-spending for the Republican candidate. As other October polling from Gallup shows, while there are many topics that voters see as important, transgender culture war issues are not one of them. Trump’s new focus on demonizing trans people—targeting transgender athletes and lying about gender-affirming surgeries—might just blow up in his face.

JD Vance has drawn the ire of labor activists, after crossing the picket line by publishing an opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and defying a strike by the staff.

On Thursday, the newspaper published an article with Vance’s byline, titled “Kamala Harris’ prejudice against Catholics,” where the Republican vice presidential candidate criticized Harris for skipping the Al Smith charity dinner in New York last week, which benefits Catholic charities. Trump attended and made crass, profanity-laden remarks to a room full of Catholic priests.

The newspaper’s workers have been on a long strike since October 2022 with its owner, Block Communications. The National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that the company illegally imposed new working conditions that increased employees’ health care costs and reduced their vacation time. The employees are unionized under the NewsGuild-CWA. (The New Republic’s staff are also represented by the NewsGuild-CWA.)

“JD Vance has crossed a very obvious picket line by striking Americans,” Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, told HuffPost. “And JD Vance is a scab just like anybody else who crosses a picket line.”

Schleuss said that the picket line applies not only to journalists but also to contributors like Vance, even when they’re unpaid.

“You can deliver that message to any other publication,” Schleuss said. “Don’t go into work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, don’t click on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, don’t share articles from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.”

The NewsGuild called out Vance on an X thread, including a graphic that spelled out SCAB in big letters over a picture of the Ohio senator.

One year ago, Vance visited the United Auto Workers picket line in Toledo, Ohio, attempting to demonstrate support for the automobile workers’ strike against General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis. In reality, Vance was making a blatant political move while retaining policies that hurt autoworkers.

Despite making the occasional pro-worker statement, Vance has never done anything beneficial for labor unions or worker organizations. He had fake autoworkers in the audience at a campaign stop in Michigan earlier this month. A few years ago, he helped fund a startup that imposed poor working conditions on its employees, and when they left in droves, the company replaced them with migrant workers. Working people supporting Vance, or on the fence, should take note of the vice presidential candidate’s actions instead of his rhetoric.

Elon Musk’s efforts to help Donald Trump return to the White House have ramped up with less than two weeks left until the election. On Monday, the tech CEO and world’s richest man reportedly had dinner with conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch

The New York Times, citing two anonymous sources, reports that Musk left a hotel room in Pittsburgh, where his political team has a “makeshift war room” to help Trump, to travel to New York City to meet with Murdoch and other billionaires to discuss the presidential race.

Through his company News Corporation, Murdoch owns the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. He also owns the controlling interest in Fox News as well as several other newspapers and media outlets around the world. He has a strong reputation for pushing right-wing and conservative ideology in the media outlets he owns, and they have been unrelenting in their support for Trump, though Murdoch has been known to privately bash the Republican nominee.

During the 2024 campaign, Musk has been spending millions in donations to his America PAC to help the former president, as well as downballot Republican candidates. He’s even attempted a scheme to give away $1 million to one registered swing state voter every day until Election Day, which has already drawn a warning from the Justice Department.

Musk has also been coordinating with Trump to suppress negative stories about the former president and his running mate, JD Vance, on Musk’s social media platform X. He’s also been spreading debunked conspiracy theories as well as misinformation. His political spending has been used on nefarious tactics, exploiting Israel’s brutal war in Gaza to send opposing messages to Arab American and Jewish voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, respectively.

Musk’s efforts and Murdoch’s history raise disturbing questions about what the two could have discussed during their Monday dinner. Were they discussing the best way to spend their money to help Trump? Were they coordinating misinformation or messaging strategies to push on X and in Murdoch’s outlets? The two are among the richest people in the world and wield a lot of influence on the right in American politics. They could very well have made a last-minute plan they hope will tip the scales in less than two weeks.

Fox News made drastic edits to Donald Trump’s recent Bronx barbershop interview, cutting many of the Republican candidate’s lies and rambling rants.

According to a CNN investigation published Thursday, Fox News cleaned up several of Trump’s weaves and most politically extreme comments during his barbershop talk in New York City over the weekend. An unedited video uploaded to Instagram shows a much less polished performance from the former president, filled with meandering tangents and outright lies that never made it to air.

The Fox News broadcast of the event cut Trump’s comments about “gang members and drug lords” in Aurora, Colorado, and his lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. “They just dumped 50,000 people—32,000 migrants from another country—in Springfield, Ohio. They don’t know what to do,” said Trump, greatly exaggerating things. The city estimates somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 immigrants live in the entire county, not all of whom are Haitian. Those who are Haitian are there through temporary protected status, which means they are in the country legally. But Trump doesn’t care about the facts.

Fox additionally drastically edited Trump’s response to an audience member in the barbershop asking about federal taxes. In the unedited video, Trump can be heard rambling for seven minutes about the Keystone pipeline, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, and transgender sports, with the audience member generously trying to keep him on track but eventually saying, “I wasn’t able to finish my question.”

The Fox News video just shows what happens in a brief moment after Trump gets shepherded into answering about eliminating federal taxes, cutting out the rest.

Ironically, the Trump team has spent the past month threatening that they’d sue CBS News over Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview if the network doesn’t release the full unedited transcript. This week, Trump’s team threatened to sue the network if it doesn’t comply, despite having little legal basis to do so.

In his critique of Harris’s CBS appearance, Trump wants to blame it on the edit. However, with this new revelation about Fox, he just looks like a hypocrite.

Donald Trump vowed Thursday to “fire” special counsel Jack Smith on his first day in office, in hopes of washing his hands of the two federal cases against him.

During an interview with conservative radio commentator Hugh Hewitt, Trump said it would be “easy” to remove Smith. “I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said, according to The Washington Post.  

Smith has overseen two investigations into Trump, one regarding his alleged efforts to overturn the election results in 2020, and another into his alleged mishandling of classified documents.  

The special counsel filed a superseding indictment in the election interference case against Trump in September, amending some of the allegations against Trump with respect to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity for “official conduct.”

Trump has been accused of illegally attempting to block votes from being counted, and to subvert election results by engaging in conspiracies to defraud the government, obstruct and impede the counting of votes on January 6, and conspire against the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.

Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, tossed out Smith’s 42 felony charges against Trump in his classified documents case, ruling that Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland. Smith has since appealed Cannon’s decision.

Earlier this week, Cannon’s name appeared on a list of potential candidates to become Trump’s attorney general. 

If Trump wins the presidential election, he’s promised to fire the person trying to hold him accountable for his alleged crimes, while also making plans to hire the one who helped him get out of trouble. 

Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk went full fake fanatic during a campaign event for Donald Trump, attacking Democrats and urging U.S. pastors to break the law.

During the event Wednesday night in Duluth, Georgia, meme-loving fascist Kirk gave the audience a taste of the wildly divisive, incendiary, pseudo-religious rhetoric he’s been trotting out on Trump’s behalf.

“The Democrat Party supports everything that God hates,” Kirk said to cheers. “The Democrat Party is espousing the death of the unborn, the mutilation of our teenage kids, open borders, the destruction of our sovereignty, the elimination of our currency status.

“I believe there is a spiritual battle happening around all of us, but don’t expect a spiritual–uh” he said, appearing to choke on the words. “A spiritual victory, if our own pastors do not engage.

“Right now, this state is a Christian state, I want to see that to continue. But we need the faithful, we need those of you that have influence over your congregation to put pressure on your pastors,” Kirk said, making a call to action.

Kirk then addressed any pastors that might be watching. “I hope you give a Sunday sermon, and you talk about how the Democrat Party believes everything that God hates,” he said.

Kirk’s conservative youth organization, Turning Point USA, has become the centerpiece of an effort by pro-Trump Christian nationalists hoping to motivate religious leaders to violate U.S. tax law by preaching the gospel of Trump. As tax-exempt entities, such as charities and churches, are strictly barred from partaking in political campaign activity, Kirk has previously offered resources to pastors seeking to “challenge the IRS.”

Last month, JD Vance attended a town hall hosted by a virulently misogynist Christian nationalist, who also urges churches to be “courageous” in supporting Trump.

Kirk has previously made similar claims about the Democratic Party, as recently as during the Monday episode of The Charlie Kirk Show.

“Kamala Harris is wired to be repulsed by the name of God. They—she mocks God. Again, everything Democrats love, God hates,” the far-right activist said.

Kirk claimed, “If you’re a Christian that votes to the Democrat Party, you are voting for things that God hates. That’s between you and God.”

The Trump campaign is explicitly working with religious extremists like Kirk to drum up support among Christian voters, who might want to notice that none of the things Kirk listed are things “God hates.” According to the Bible, the only things God doesn’t care for are haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and a man who stirs up dissension among his brothers. I’ll let you decide which presidential ticket that sounds like.