“The Fraudsters Complain the Loudest and the Fastest:” Legacy Media Ignores Import of Gaza Condom Fact Check
At a weird appearance in the Oval Office rife with awkward projections that Elon Musk believes he is more powerful than Trump (here’s the full CSPAN video), a journalist asked Elon how — given the egregious error he made about condoms and Gaza — we should believe anything he said.
The exchange is bad enough: Elon basically confessed, in front of Trump, that a hoax Elon started that traveled first to Trump propagandist Karoline Leavitt and from there, through Jesse Watters’ exaggerations on Fox News, into several repetitions of the false claim by Trump was wrong.
The entire point of this presser was to substantiate Trump’s false (and undocumented) claim that DOGE [sic] had found billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse and use that to, first, pressure judges who are putting brakes on DOGE and, then, justify giving DOGE [sic] authority to fire a bunch of people via Executive Order.
When Trump asked Elon to substantiate such claims, Elon instead vaguely pointed to people who were wealthy even though they had meager salaries — not something that should be under his review. He listed other things that are known — and were known, during Trump’s first term — which are archaic but not fraud.
And in that appearance, a journalist called Elon out for inventing something about Gaza that led Trump to lie publicly.
That should have led to stories about how, in Trump’s presence, Elon admitted he makes shit up and Trump repeats them.
For the most part, it didn’t happen:
- NYT noted that Elon offered no proof of fraud, but did not mention the proof that Elon got caught in a lie.
- WaPo focused on the EO, but later explained that neither Trump nor Musk offered proof — but didn’t mention he got caught in a lie.
- Politico focused on the EO, but later noted that Elon said he would police his own conflicts.
- In an analytical piece, CNN claimed that Elon offered examples of fraud (which is false), but didn’t mention Gaza.
After airing Elon about scrutiny he claimed he was getting, WSJ did mention the Gaza question.
Asked about the Trump administration’s false assertion that the federal government sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, the billionaire acknowledged that he might at times promote erroneous information. “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected,” Musk said. “Nobody is going to bat 1,000.”
But WSJ didn’t pursue the implication of it: that Elon got caught in a false claim.
Indeed, the only specific example that Trump mentioned was funding FEMA spent in NYC to house migrants — something approved by Congress — for which the staffers have been fired (as I’ll return to, Trump’s DOJ is already misrepresenting this in courts), was also based on an Elon lie.
The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it had fired four employees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, including the agency’s chief financial officer, over their roles in disbursing federal funds to house migrants in New York City hotels.
The firings capped a startling chain of events that began on Monday with an early-morning social media post by Elon Musk who claimed, misleadingly, that FEMA had recently sent $59 million meant for disaster relief to New York City to pay for “high end hotels” for migrants, and who called the expenditure unlawful.
New York City officials raced to clarify that the federal money had been properly allocated by FEMA under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, adding that it was not a disaster relief grant and had not been spent on luxury hotels.
Nonetheless, just two hours after Mr. Musk’s post, FEMA’s acting director, Cameron Hamilton, announced that the payments in question “have all been suspended” — even though most of the money had already been disbursed — and that “personnel will be held accountable.”
By Tuesday morning, roughly 24 hours after Mr. Musk’s post, the Trump administration had followed through on one part of its pledge.
Elon also made a false claim that they had turned on AIDS prevention — in one of the state lawsuits, Washington State presented a case where funds for AIDS prevention programs was being withheld.
This press conference consisted of Elon (and Trump) making false claim after false claim.
It also consisted of Trump lying over and over, without proof, about how one only needed to look for fraud to find it. No one asked why he hadn’t looked in his first term. Indeed, several times he blamed Biden for problems that have existed for decades.
And yet, at best, journalists instead claimed only that Elon and Trump simply presented no proof.
“Nobody is going to bat 1,000.” The same philosophy behind having rockets frequently blow up,
sometimes spewing debris over nearby communities because you didn’t build a retaining wall.
Not even move fast and break things – it’s make sh*t up and never take responsibility or apologize.
I’m still mystified that Trump’s comments on Treasuries a few days ago (based on sh*t that Musk told him),
“It could be that a lot of those things don’t count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we’re finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought.”
didn’t blow up the bond market. I guess sophisticates on Wall Street are assuming he’s blowing off steam for his base, but they might be in for a rude surprise.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trump-says-us-might-have-less-debt-than-thought-2025-02-09/
The biggest lie is that the purpose of DOGE was to stop waste, fraud, and abuse. The purpose of DOGE (as we can see revealed by its actions) is to give the Executive Office unprecedented, unchecked, unilateral control over the rest of the government. This includes unconstitutional kinds of control: line-item veto over spending, as DOGE has developed in the Treasury department, and which violates congress’s Article Ii power of the purse. It includes the power to eliminate whole legislatively established agencies, as has been asserted with USAID and CFPB. It includes power over firing and hiring, as has been asserted with OMB.
The EO creating DOGE details 4 types of DOGE employees, working as a team within each agency, and reporting back to the Exexutive. These roles are (1) policy, (2) technical, (3) HR, and (4) legal. Those mirror four types of control that the Exexutive, thru DOGE, will now assert over agencies, constitution, laws, rules, or precident be damned.
The design of DOGE is to be the nervous center backbone of a dictatorship.
[Moderator’s note: see your comment at 12:45 am. /~Rayne]
I hope that emerging autocracy’s nerve center becomes very nervous.
It’s like the adult version of the old telephone game. One person tells the next, who tells the next and so on. What comes out at the end is often quite different than the original statement. Especially if the Fox propaganda network is the operator in the middle.
Both Trump and Musk are severely ill in the head. My belief is that Trump only wanted to win and get richer, Musk wants to rule, wreck things and also enrich himself. Both are megalomaniacs. Dollar bills cannot hug you.
And Musk has been tasked with ‘finding’ ‘fraud’ money that he will move into his and Trump’s interest’s pockets, and reward those, like Google who already show “Gulf of Mexico” on its maps, with a bit of this government cheddar.
I wonder how long before the every day evidence in people’s lives overcomes the fierce desire to believe Trump’s lies? I think probably never for 3/4 of them and then silent cracks of disbelief for the other 1/4.
As a retired newspaperman, the behavior of the reporters baffles me. F’rinstance when trump said over and over for a period of weeks that there was a valve in California that Newsom could turn to deliver water to Los Angeles, no one asked him where this valve is.
(For an amusing look at a previous fascist who spewed a firehose of lies that were largely unquestioned, I recommend Denis Mack Smith’s ‘Mussolini’s Roman Empire.’)
“People are saying there’s a valve.” What more confirmation do you need?
The head of DOGE now has an appointment clause problem.
DOGE mutated from an advisory committee to taking over the former US Digital Service. The mandate was to improve websites. Trump’s first EO changed that to maximize government efficacy and productivity, with the continuing goal of producing a report to congress.. He newest mandate is the be able to fire and eliminate agencies.
That has gone way above being an “inferior officer” to being an officer of the US, which requires senate confirmation. Any actions taken are illegal.
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Musk is either a government employee or not. He appears to be making a number of these comments as a private citizen, and is slandering government employees.
That is a lawsuit. A very large one. Any employee of US AID has been slandered as being corrupt, working in a corrupt organization, and that will both create harm in terms o being fired as well as future job prospects.
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Speaks volumes. The body language of Trump with his grim expression and lack of words. Musk blabbing on and on. A child in the mix. Steven Miller on the side with his scowl and arms folded.
One big happy family unifying the country.
The ONLY important thing about Elon:
Elon [“Some of the Things I Say Will Be Incorrect”] MU$K.
Which fits in pretty neatly with the only important thing about JD:
“We were told there weren’t going to be any fact checkers.”
Rep Jasmine Crockett [D TX30] calls MU$K’s lie a lie:
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lhylobneqb2t
February 12, 2025 at 11:26 AM
Marcy: It also consisted of Trump lying over and over, without proof,
about how one only needed to look for fraud to find it.
1/6/21 TRUMP, at his Rabble Rousing:
Dear Reader, THERE WAS NO FRAUD.
Elon has been selling self-driving Teslas knowing that they do not self-drive since 2016.
Many years ago, before I gave much thought to Elon, I attended an ethics class in which his particular brand unprincipled behavior was featured (others too like Elizabeth Holmes). Mostly the discussion focused on the unfounded and false claims he made regarding Neuralink. And how he encouraged and fostered the false narrative that he was an engineer (even showing up as an engineer in an Ironman movie). It was an eyeopener for me. Since then he’s gotten worse. Sadly, it’s been profitable for him.
We should, of course, give Trump credit for being an expert about fraud. He may not claim it when he does it, but he sure knows it when he wants to see it.
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Another example:
[“Things I say may be incorrect”] MU$K:
Mike Lee [BasedMikeLee] responds [Is this the Congressman?]:
Disinformation expert Kate Starbird re this conversation:
https://bsky.app/profile/katestarbird.bsky.social/post/3lhqzbn3qbk2s
February 9, 2025 at 11:08 AM
MS Windows – and probably most all software – is a walking testament to newly discovered vulnerabilities is not proof the vulnerability haas been exploited.
There is a whole “professional” cottage industry that shakes out just this – and reports it to the vendor first. Also beta testing by real (power) users.
Read a piece last night, which I unfortunately did not copy, by someone who seems to know about how SQL, the database language, has many different entries for a single Social Security number as part of its normal process. Each copy is NOT an example of fraud at all. The gist of the piece is that Musk’s minions have no idea how SQL works and are making incompetent mistakes which Elon himself then exaggerates into crimes.
Somebody who actually knows about these issues should check my work as I most certainly can be wrong.
PS: DOGE Is Hacking America
The U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history.
By Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Davi Ottenheimer, the vice president of trust and digital ethics at Inrupt, a data infrastructure company.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/11/doge-cyberattack-united-states-treasury/
If you hit a paywall, try https://archive.ph/lSHkJ
I think this was the Clown Show The Associated Press was barred from
because they didn’t follow TRUMP’s orders re renaming places.
AP statement on Oval Office access
https://www.ap.org/the-definitive-source/announcements/ap-statement-on-oval-office-access/
Lauren Easton, The Associated Press FEB. 11, 2025
Idea: rename Pennsylvania Ave. in D.C. “Stormy Daniels Ave.” or “34 Felonies Ave.” so Google Maps and reporters can align their standards accordingly
Why on Earth would they stop performing an act that has been so successful for them? And I am referring to the politicians, their online propagandists, and their traditional media propagandists.
I would love to have seen the NYT headlined “Musk Admits Lying to Justify Cuts”
Followed by the lede: “Three weeks into the Trump Administration’s incursions into federal systems, Elon Musk was unable to cite a single credible instance of fraud the effort had produced and admitted to lying to justify the dismantling of USAID.”
Sigh.
Sigh it is. Why not that headline everywhere?! Is it because it’s not somehow factual? Not sufficiently dispassionate? Sigh.
Maggie and Peter B and others in legacy media have turned a particular technique into an art form – casually twisting the core aspect of such lies in Trump pronouncements (e.g., USAID paying for Gaza condoms) AWAY from the wildly spurious nature (if not laughably and demonstrably false) by instead indicating that the centrality of interest in such a pronouncement is that it was offered “without evidence.”
Yes kids, you can play this at home and pretend to be a NYT reporter!!
Example: “Appearing With Trump, Musk Makes Broad Claims of Federal Fraud Without Proof”
=> Appearing with Trump, Musk Makes Broad Claims of Sunrise in West Without Proof”
Example: “He said that ‘quite a few people’ in the bureaucracy somehow had ‘managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in net worth while they are in that position,’ without explaining how he had made that assessment.”
=> He said that quite a few people in the bureaucracy somehow had managed to establish huge residential settlements on the far side of the moon without explaining how he had made that assessment.”
Example: “…Musk said in an extraordinary Oval Office appearance on Tuesday that he was providing maximum transparency in his government cost-cutting initiative, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for “fraudsters.”
=> He said that he had been providing lessons to others on how to levitate, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been supplanted by Martians and officials who had approved money for “Venus-ites.”
From AP: Senate confirms [intelligent] Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.
and
also from AP: Trump’s halt of US law banning business bribes abroad raises specter of a ‘Wild West’ of dealmaking [hee haw]
https://apnews.com/article/fcpa-bribery-trump-antibribery-law-executive-order-b656ef40a0035591618d053aa0ac7458
I submit that the word journalist should be reserved for the genuine like Marcy and these access chasers mentioned in the article should be relegated to a new term: stenogralist.
Then there was the body language of Elon-over-Trump that was unmistakeable. The icing on the cake was Elon bringing in the prop toddler. By all accounts, he and Trump have no time for children, let alone young ones. Trump must have hated it. Elon put up with it because the attention focused on his child – assuming it didn’t come from central casting – further denigrated Trump. Substance aside for a brief moment, it was stand-up comedy gold.
“Why did you bring your kid, Elon?” I was hoping a reporter would ask. Because not only was it a sick, exploitative, disgusting stunt, but it also displayed a supreme contempt for everyone present to do their job, including POTUS.
If only someone HAD asked. There is no answer, of course; the White House could have provided a babysitter had Musk not wanted to use his child as a prop. He could certainly pay.
These guys are narcissistic sociopaths. Worse, they are trying to turn us into a nation of narcissistic sociopathic bullies.
This. Is it supposed to be cute to hold a presser in the oval office with a child on your shoulders? It reads as the ultimate in secure contempt of everyone else everywhere – look kiddo you and I do whatever we want, we’re the only actual people here, we literally run everything and say whatever – remember that. So fun!
That kid is gonna need some therapy
Musk should be referred to Child Protective Services, for all the good that would do. And to your final point, his older children seem generally to reject him AND seek therapy.
I was particularly disgusted by the cowed performance of the WH press corps. Aside from the Gaza condoms question, no one pressed either Co-POTUS on his billowing falsehoods about “corruption,” a classic accusation-as-confession.
Nor did they question the propriety of tossing a toddler around for yuks. WTAF?
Nobody bats a thousand, nobody’s perfect, we’re all sinners, Biden lied all the time, etc.
MAGAs are all about forgiveness and redemption.
Plenty of distractions, as all the chess pieces are being moved into place. For no future elections, probably not, modern dictators prefer corrupted elections. You know like Trump tried the last time. I wonder what Putin offered him on their recent call.
The BBC’s fact check (safely out of Trump’s reach) on Musk’s lies points out there was a USAID donation to Gaza but it was Gaza Province in Mozambique, and it wasn’t for condoms either.
This is not surprising from Musk’s ramshackle, clueless, half-arsed ‘disruptors’, who don’t understand anything about what they’re breaking or indeed much about anything except code and being a part of the master race.
Fact-checking Elon Musk’s claims in the Oval Office
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyjz24ne85o
ps. What formatting works here?
Looked to me like Musk gave a press conference from the Oval Office while trump sat in quiet obiesance.