[rtkwe]

Even worse when you know more of the whistleblower's story which is that ~15 minutes after one of DOGE's accounts were made there was an attempted login with the correct password from Russia. Not many explanations for that that look good for DOGE...

[ourmandave]

That's straight up traitorous.

DOGE needs to be shutdown and everyone of them held as a flight risk while the whole thing is investigated.

[vimax]

Not to defend doge at be all, but the article specifically mentioned installing a bunch of proxy and scraping tools. Is this likely to be an actual Russian state attack or just extremely poor opsec / an attempt to evade internal controls, still likely very illegal. I'm all for holding all involved accountable to the fullest extent, but this is too sloppy for Russian state involvement to make me think they're on any intelligence payroll anywhere.

[rtkwe]

On the other side, why would Russia need to hide it's involvement in anything with this administration? If they're not willing collaborators they're seemingly entirely beguiled by Russia propaganda and schmoozing.

Brazenly just logging in from Russia can be a statement all its own.

[DrillShopper]

They work for Trump so they'll never be held to account, even if a Democrat wins the next election (assuming even have one and it's fair and free)

I never thought I'd be calling for UN observers for an election in the US but here we are

[JumpCrisscross]

> They work for Trump so they'll never be held to account, even if a Democrat wins the next election

Why? If Democrats take the House in the midterms, which looks more likely the longer Navarro and Musk have West Wing access, they can basically turn these folks' lives into a living hell of back-to-back hearings (and contempt charges down the road). And if Democrats win the next election, they'll presumably put someone with a pulse in charge who doesn't take two years to bring the most important cases of their administration to the docket.

[DrillShopper]

When Biden was elected they didn't seriously crack down on them before outside of the one case at Justice that went nowhere.

They also didn't prosecute GWB/Cheney/Rumsfeld for war crimes when they had the chance. This is a long standing policy of theirs.

[rtkwe]

I get the instinct and the reasoning behind it but it really has proven to just let the whole mess fester into the madness we're getting today.

[JumpCrisscross]

> didn't prosecute GWB/Cheney/Rumsfeld for war crimes

Not relevant to domestic crimes committed by non-Cabinet folk.

[DrillShopper]

Yeah, but you'd think racking up hundreds of thousands of non-combatants deaths and flash frying Pakastani wedding parties remotely because of target misidentification would be high on the list of things to prosecute, if you're the Democrats.

If they won't even investigate the wholesale murder of civilians by the command of the White House and CIA and prosecute those reaponsbile for murder and torture then what hope is there that they'll hold Trump and co to account?

[efnx]

I think Trump could simply pardon them, unfortunately.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Trump could simply pardon them

Ironically, one of the most useful things Trump could do is prosecute e.g. Hunter Bide so SCOTUS can strike down preëmptive pardons.

[xoa]

>I think Trump could simply pardon them, unfortunately.

FWIW I think you're not correct here, or rather, it's not merely irrelevant but would actually harm them. The pardon power protects against criminal prosecution by the federal government. But it doesn't protect against mere embarrassment, nor against new actions performed after the pardon. Congress isn't prosecution, their inquiries are just about information finding, and while they can result in information on crimes surfacing, whether or not the USDOJ decides to pursue that or not is completely up to them. The reason a pardon might flat out hurt in such a scenario is that there is an argument it would eliminate any claim of 5th Amendment privileges. That's commonly referred to the right to be silent, and normally that's effectively what it is, but the actual right is the right against self incrimination [0]. If you've been pardoned for something purely federal then by definition it's impossible to incriminate yourself regarding that, because no criminal case can be brought against you. So there'd be no right to refuse to cooperate with a congressional inquiry, and if you didn't that could be treated as contempt which would not be covered by any pardon for the underlying actions.

So yes if a future Administration wanted to pursue criminal prosecutions for crimes that were undertaken by the current Trump Administration, Trump's pardons could certainly put a stop to that. But in terms of "they can basically turn these folks' lives into a living hell of back-to-back hearings", pardons don't help with that one. And if the Democrats just wanted to thoroughly document exactly what went down and who was responsible to make it an indelible part of the history books, with any social consequences that'd come from that, pardons can't help with that either.

----

0: Text of the 5th Amendement: "...nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."

[DrillShopper]

> in terms of "they can basically turn these folks' lives into a living hell of back-to-back hearings", pardons don't help with that one

Trump has so thoroughly poisoned the well on the "weaponized DOJ / weaponized IRS / weaponized Congressional investigations" that the Democrats, having no spine, won't bother doing any of that.

[jarym]

The guy in the oval wants to defund the UN… he’s one step ahead of you!

[stephenitis]

Citation?

[orochimaaru]

Not parent but it’s here - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-sipho...

DOGE is a complete clusterfuck. Fwiw I think there is hard to spot fraud in the govt that should be looked at (eg price inflation at the pentagon, VA, Medicaid/Medicare, SS). They should have done the hard work of uncovering that. Instead they just went for clickbait headlines.

[mmooss]

> DOGE is a complete clusterfuck.

It depends what the objectives are. My impression is that they have been very successful pursuing their actual objectives, while providing a cover story of a 'clusterfuck'.

[rtkwe]

And conveniently gutting agencies that are or were soon to be thorns in Elon's side. FAA and EPA were annoying him around SpaceX's Starship test launches, CFPB would be annoying for his future everything app plans for Twitter, etc.

[orochimaaru]

Maybe. But none of those make him as much money as Tesla which is in the dumps with all the shenanigans. From a motivation perspective it seems more like rank stupidity than Machiavellian.

[mmooss]

Their aim seems to be power, and many wealthy people in the US have jumped on the bandwagon of supporting the seizure of power while sacrificing some money. Musk will have a roof over his head regardless.

[rtkwe]

It doesn't seem rational but he's not exactly been acting that way for a while, he's made a pretty hard right turn that was always going to damage Tesla's main market.

Also if Twitter/X became a payment and banking platform that's a huge revenue source that could dwarf Tesla.

[DrillShopper]

> But none of those make him as much money as Tesla which is in the dumps with all the shenanigans.

Give Musk a year or two out of DOGE and it won't matter - Tesla will be back up after Musk isn't in the government spotlight. The voters in the US (who by and large are good little consumers) have the memory of a goldfish for things like this.

You can't even get progressives to not eat at Chick-fil-A despite their founders blantent homophobia. This incident is not going to keep people from buying Tesla in the long run.

[rtkwe]

Take your pick it was widely reported and you can read the original whistleblower report;

https://whistlebloweraid.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025... - page 2 & 11

"This declaration details DOGE activity within NLRB, the exfiltration of data from NLRB systems, and – concerningly – near real-time access by users in Russia. Notably, within minutes of DOGE personnel creating user accounts in NLRB systems, on multiple occasions someone or something within Russia attempted to login using all of the valid credentials (eg. Usernames/Passwords)"

"For example: In the days after DOGE accessed NLRB’s systems, we noticed a user with an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia started trying to log in. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating. There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers."

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/04/whistleblower-doge-sipho...

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...

[gnabgib]

From the whistle blower.

> Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...