Elon Musk, DOGE to review 'strangely wealthy' federal lawmakers

During his town hall event in Wisconsin on Sunday, Elon Musk said that he and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were going to review those in Congress who are "strangely wealthy."

"There’s a lot of strangely wealthy members of Congress," Musk told the crowd at the event held ahead of the state’s Supreme Court election.

Musk said he was "trying to connect the dots of how did they become rich while earning— how did they get $20 million if they’re earning $200,000 a year?"

"Nobody can explain that," Musk continued. "We’re going to try to figure it out and certainly stop it from happening."

Among the wealthiest members of Congress are former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose net worth is around $250 million, and Senator Rick Scott, whose net worth is around $552 million. The former’s wealth has largely come from investments she and her husband, Paul Pelosi, have made into companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, while the latter gained much of his fortune before entering Congress by co-founding HCA Healthcare, which runs Florida hospitals and healthcare facilities, and Solantic, a chain of urgent care clinics, per the New York Post.

In January, Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez raised concerns about insider trading in Congress. "There needs to be Democrats who walk the walk and talk the talk. There is an insane amount of hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is what gets exploited to use the cynicism and wherever there’s a hypocritical window. For example, I think one of the biggest examples of this is insider trading in Congress."

Ocasio-Cortez and others have called for a ban on elected officials trading stocks to prevent insider trading, and in January, bipartisan legislation was reintroduced to ban such a thing from happening, the TRUST in Congress Act.

This is the latest review for potential waste for fraud undertaken by Elon Musk and DOGE since the Trump administration entered office in January. As of Monday afternoon, DOGE’s tracker website states that there have been an estimated savings of $140 billion made so far by the department, with thousands of contracts, grants, and leases being terminated, including funding for climate change initiatives in Peru and gender equity programs in Mexico.

We demand the Biden Crime Family be prioritized as
to how the Delaware dwellers all got filthy rich. Did Hunter ever have a real job?

FR thread-—The Biden Family is Above the Law

Biden pardoned Hunter unto eternity, saying Hunter Biden has always been “treated differently.”

<><>If Hunter had a different last name, he would never have been able to launch a career in corrupt influence-peddling or launder millions through his “art” or write a self-serving memoir about crack-fueled whoremongering or dump a gun next to a high school without any real consequences.

<><>If Hunter’s last name weren’t “Biden,” special counsel David Weiss would never have let him get away with failing to register as a foreign agent or avoid paying millions in taxes that flowed from his foreign arrangements. If your name isn’t Biden, don’t try writing off your hookers and crack as tax deductions.

<><>If Hunter had been treated like anyone else, the Justice Department wouldn’t have tried to give him blanket immunity not only on gun and tax charges but on a slew of uninvestigated potential offenses, including bribery and corruption.

<><>If it hadn’t been for a principled judge named Maryellen Noreika, asking the government’s so-called prosecutors if they could provide a single precedent in which immunity was offered to a person for “crimes in a different case” (they could not), Hunter Biden would have walked last year. The DOJ was trying to pardon Hunter Biden long before Donald Trump won the presidency.

<><>Then again, if it weren’t for the congressional testimony of Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, it’s highly unlikely Hunter Biden would have ever been charged even with those two piddling misdemeanor counts.

Because for four years, Merrick Garland and the DOJ acted as the Praetorian Guard of the Biden crime syndicate, doing everything possible to keep Hunter Biden out of a courtroom and then dragging their feet to ensure that the statute of limitations on the most serious potential crimes ran out.

Yes, Joe Biden lied on numerous occasions about never having discussed the family business with his son. Joe Biden also lied when he told the country he would never pardon his son. But the pardon letter itself is also a lie. Like the president, many media outlets framed Joe Biden’s pardon as shielding Hunter Biden from specific gun and tax charges when it is a pardon for all federal crimes committed over the past decade, which includes the times Joe Biden was the vice president and president.

Any genuine investigation into the family’s $17 million foreign influence-peddling business would necessitate deposing the president of the United States and compelling him to answer numerous difficult queries about his connections to disreputable authoritarian regimes. Being a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” will only get you so far.

Hunter Biden’s laptop, despite censorious efforts of the press and social media platforms, was real and spectacular. It was filled with messages referencing his father’s role in securing the money and taking cuts from the business, not to mention the witnesses who said that the “Big Guy” had a part in that outfit or the checks referring to Joe Biden.

If Hunter Biden hadn’t been treated differently by the government, he would have had to answer for the 20-plus shell companies he helped set up with his uncle James Biden.
Indeed, the pardon’s decade-plus time frame is tremendously convenient, considering it coincides with Hunter Biden first pulling in $50,000-$83,000 per month as a board member of Burisma in 2014, just as his father was forging policy in that country for the Obama administration.

The pardon extends to 2015, when Hunter Biden received emails from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet with Joe Biden when the latter was vice president. It extends to 2017, when we have an email proposing an equity breakdown of a venture with Chicom energy concerns, which included the line, “10 held by H for the big guy?” It is the same year Hunter Biden threatened his Chinese partner Raymond Zhao with the words, “I am sitting here with my father.” Even the Obama administration was worried about Biden Inc. The pardon also extends to 2019, when Hunter Biden received two wire transfers totaling $260,000 from Beijing with the president’s Delaware home listed as the beneficiary address. The “perception of access” can be quite lucrative.

But what is certain is that a patriot would never have put the country or his family in this position.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books – the most recent, “The Rise of Blue Anon,” available now. His work has appeared in National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Reason, New York Post and numerous other publications. Follow him on X @davidharsanyi.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.