Even by the standards of this administration...... yikes:
Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
This is exactly what I expect from this administration. Mob tactics. Take the silver or get the lead.
I’d not want to be a whistleblower during this presidency. Whistleblowers tend to have really bad luck crossing the street on a good day.
That's what they want. Now is when we need whistleblowers the most so they want to put the fear into them.
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That’s just uncalled for. Hope your day gets better.
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Really?
Seems way more obvious to me that Thiel/Vance/Musk would have Trump whacked... probably in the 2nd or 3rd year so that Vance can take power during a Reichstag fire with enough time left till elections in order for them to consolidate power.
Trump is primarily an actor pretending to be a gangster/president on TV to serve as a front for the real gangsters pilfering our government, at some point he will better serve those people by becoming a martyr in a way which transfers his power to someone else they control.
Hypothesis:
The tariffs are a “reichstag fire” lighter - assume extra powers as things go down in flames.
I'm surprised to see this kind of blue-anon discourse here. Why are we discussing the players of this administration "whacking" each other? There's plenty of horrible things happening in broad daylight, harms that the administration is inflicting on the American people. Why add a layer of speculation about a power struggle where they may or may not be trying to harm each other, when there's no reason to believe such a thing exists? What matters is that they're getting along well enough in the moment to push through their agenda. Hell, Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of running for a third term, which would in and of itself be an illegal power grab; no need to speculate some scenario where Trump gets martyred and Vance takes over when the much simpler and more likely scenario is that Trump just ignores the law and does it himself.
What is "blue-anon" discourse?
Trump being an actor is pretty important though. Does Vance really have the Charisma to keep carrying Maga?
Trump doesn't have charisma.
Trump's been trying to be political for decades. It's no coincidence that it only started working when they brought in social media teams.
His supporters will continue to parrot whatever their preferred influencers insist, even after he is gone.
I'm sorry but if you don't think Trump has Charisma then you're just blind to it because you don't like what he's saying.
The trouble with that is that they're all fronting Russia's efforts to control the US government. This is why prosperity isn't exactly in the cards: that's the promise, but all the actions lead directly the other direction in conclusive ways.
Because that's the background, it explains Trump's prominence. He is trusted by Russia in ways a Musk or Thiel can never be, so if we're talking mysterious falls from balconies, it would be Musk, Thiel et al who are more in danger. They have to work with Trump, because Trump is the one Russia trusts, and that's because Russia made him. His wealth has never been real: he's an op from way back.
The Kremlin absolutely will not trust Elon Musk, nor should they. He's more capable, but he is most certainly scheming against them or even looking to supplant/eject Putin and replace him. Thiel is on less drugs and has the sense to stay out of the spotlight, so he will be trying to offer eternal life to Putin or something like that. Whether there's any truth to that is moot: it's whether Putin believes there is.
None of them are safe replacements for Trump, because they all hold power of their own. Trump stays so long as he lives, because he doesn't hold power of his own, and is therefore safe to use as the puppet.
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What does this mean? You sound pleased the administration is doing things like this.
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The gaslighting is you calling the report that this whistleblower was threatened “fan fiction”.
You should be.
But you're out of patience with the wrong sources.
What kind of response is this?
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Cyber criminals is factual. This is who Elon staffed DOGE with.
https://fortune.com/2025/03/27/a-doge-staffer-working-as-a-s...
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it’s pretty clear that doge isn’t targeting things for efficiency but for anything deemed as ideologically incorrect. also the whole bit about how they’re ignoring congressional mandates on how money should be spent. comparing them to prior administration’s attempts at efficiency is either willful whataboutism or boneheaded naive
I don't think this is whataboutism because I'm not saying "what about this unrelated thing that the last guy did?" I'm saying "what about the fact that the last guy said he was doing the exact same thing?" It seemed fine then, why isn't it fine now?
Prior administration USDS wasn't stealing sensitive NLRB data or sending threatening notes to would-be whistleblowers in the process.
ok but they literally aren’t doing the same thing? did you read any other part of my post?
"Nobel invented dynamite. I don't see any difference between him and the guy using it to blow up children."
"Nobel already created dynamite to make civilization more efficient. Then as soon as the new guy comes along with dogemite and actually wants to have fewer mouths to feed, people start complaining about the children, conveniently ignoring that Nobel started it!"
> yes lots of cybersecurity experts were black hat hackers at one point
It makes some sense to hire a former blackhat to secure your computers, with appropriate supervision. It's a lot less reasonable to hire a former blackhat to get into your own computer and treasury systems to run audits. I could almost buy an argument like "If you have a legal right to get in but the door is locked, you hire a locksmith to crack the lock. So they needed hackers to take control of the systems away from obstructionists." But you would then send the locksmith home, not have them root through all the records in the building and decide who to fire.
> At one point Obama had then-VP Biden in charge of government efficiency efforts utilizing USDS to do it: literally the DOGE playbook with a different name, except the person in charge now actively wants to have fewer federal employees.
Could you provide more information on Biden's nominal assignment, and what exactly he was supposed to make more efficient? I couldn't find it by Googling, as everything is about DOGE now.
Anyway, on USDS in general. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Digital_Service:
> It provides consultation services to federal agencies on information technology. The agency's 2014 mandate was to improve and simplify digital service, and to improve federal websites.[7][8][9] The mission of the agency is to "deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design."
I could agree that these could be termed "efficiency", but clearly they are very different from the goals of DOGE. USDS had a 2016 value statement that included "Hire and empower great people." So yeah, they didn't reduce the government headcount, as it wasn't their goal and that's not the only way to deliver "efficiency" or government improvement.
The Obama origins are a historical footnote and possibly done this way by Trump for legal expediency reasons. But USDS and DOGE have basically nothing else in common. Most of the USDS staff were fired, their mission statement is replaced. You're holding USDS accountable to DOGE's goals, when USDS didn't share those goals. In 2024 USDS reported "$285 million in projected estimated savings over five years in infrastructure expenses for the Social Security Administration" according to Wikipedia, so it's not like they were allergic to saving money, they just didn't do it by axing the bureaucracy.
You can think DOGE is better or more effective than USDS if you want, but it's partisan distraction to claim they are nominally doing the same work.
Here's some more information about the differences between the original USDS and DOGE: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/03/05/trump-doge-obama/
> But it's certainly telling that only one of these off topic comments actually got flagged.
Well, right now, the flagged one was "Oh, you guys are adorable.", which didn't try to make a substantive argument or convey information. At least the Cheeto one did. "Adorable" is the least-civil and least-useful comment, so it's not only ideology that explains why it got flagged.
I don't think an off-topic comment about Roger Stone and a 15-year old ad hominem meets the bar of constructive HN discourse but we can agree to disagree. I've seen plenty of constructive, right-leaning comments downvoted and flagged while unconstructive partisan pablum from the other side sits there without even being greyed out.
I'd love it if partisan comments regardless of affiliation were more aggressively pruned and the accounts behind them more aggressively moderated, but what we have currently is... not that.
The problem is that factual comments can also be partisan.
- When Biden did dumb stuff, pointing that out was "right-leaning"
- When Trump does dumb stuff, pointing that out is "left-leaning"
Honestly, the greatest improvement to discourse would be stopping trying to apologize for current fuck-ups by pointing at past fuck-ups. That only leads to all fuck-ups being excused.
'Well the last guy...' -> Doesn't matter, not what we're talking about (and will even out in the long run)
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DOGE aren't federal agents. They are cyber criminals doing Elon's bidding.
The reason you are being downvoted to smithereens is that Bryan Malinowski was credibly accused of serious crimes (arms trafficking) wheres Daniel Berulis is accused of reporting serious crimes. You're making a preposterous and immoral false equivalence.
You can't seriously be defending the treatment of Malinowski. The agents did not wear body cameras in direct violation of ATF policy. They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home). This wasn't an arrest warrant, it was a search warrant. They covered up the doorbell camera so if he had checked it he wouldn't see the half-dozen police vehicles outside.
They could have done the exact same thing in the middle of the day when nobody was home and everybody would be alive today.
They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
They could have worn body cameras as ATF policy and common sense demands.
"Arms trafficking" is a funny way to say "buying guns legally and reselling them at gun shows" but let's say every single thing said about him is 100% true. If you think someone is a gun runner why wouldn't you take their house when they're not home to get all the evidence without having to worry about what they're doing? Why wouldn't you arrest him at the airport, where he almost certainly isn't armed, and police presence won't raise any alarms?
> They conducted an early-morning no-knock raid for a search warrant when they knew Malinowski would be there (having cancelled an earlier one because he wasn't home)
Among many other points that are wrong - everyone involved agrees there was plenty of knocking.
> They could have waited until daylight and knocked on the door with their warrant and walked right in.
Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
You are correct - and I was wrong - that it wasn't a no-knock raid. Malinowski's widow said they heard the knocking but no announcements that they were law enforcement. 28 seconds later their door was knocked in with a battering ram. That anyone announced they were law enforcement is disputed; we'd know what really happened but for want of a single body cam (which IMO makes it much more likely there was no announcement whatsoever).
> Search warrants almost always begin at 6am - and when weapons are involved, they almost always execute them soon after.
I'm not making any comment on whether or not this itself is standard practice, but it seems pretty obvious to me that if this raid was conducted 4 hours later Malinowski would be alive today.
Yeah the ATF is a shit show of an agency with a strong history of fucking up in violent and unconstitutional ways - but unfortunately, their search warrant execution and 'raids' are completely standard operating procedure for US police.
It likely could've been resolved if they'd just sent him a letter asking to meet him at the Federal Building but who wants to be a desk jockey when you can play dress up like GI Joe?
Nobody gets promoted by making a phone call and telling their boss that nothing is actually in violation of law.
But kick a door down in your sparkling clean body armor and perp walk some guy who makes a quarter million dollars a year out of his mansion and you're well on your way.
No, I'm not defending it, but this is a ridiculous false equivalence to compare a botched execution of a legally valid search warrant to lawlessly intimidating a whistleblower. (You're also not stating the facts, he clearly bought the guns illegally since he filled out forms promising he wasn't going to resell them.)
Nobody, not even the ATF, is claiming he bought the guns illegally. They're claiming he was illegally "engaged in the business of" dealing weapons because he didn't have an federal firearms license. Prior to 2022 he wouldn't even be on the ATF's radar but "with the principal objective of livelihood and profit" was amended to remove "livelihood."
This is the form you fill out when you purchase a gun[0]. Please let me know where on this form you "promise not to resell" a firearm you purchase.
Straw purchases are illegal. Reselling firearms is not.
[0] https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-trans...
Question 8 on the form, “check if any part of this transaction is to facilitate a private party transfer,” is what he lied about. I phrased it loosely.
Question 8, that's filled out by the seller? So the gun store?
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?????
It’s a bot. They’re everywhere these days.
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I meant it in a more general sense. Any person that feels the need to create a burner account to argue with people online with a comment history like yours is a bot to me, meat based or otherwise. Follow your instructions!
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Lol in consecutive comments you claim the whistleblower made it up and NPR made it up. Take a break.