If only the President knew what was happening

If Elon Musk is a national security threat, at some point we have to ask what Joe Biden is doing about it.

This is, um, definitely not what you want to read about a major national defence contractor and potential major player in a second (gulp) Trump Administration:

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a linchpin of U.S. space efforts, has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.

The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.

At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.

Musk has emerged this year as a crucial supporter of Donald Trump’s election campaign, and could find a role in a Trump administration should he win. While the U.S. and its allies have isolated Putin in recent years, Musk’s dialogue could signal re-engagement with the Russian leader, and reinforce Trump’s expressed desire to cut a deal over major fault lines such as the war in Ukraine. 

At the same time, the contacts also raise potential national-security concerns among some in the current administration, given Putin’s role as one of America’s chief adversaries. 

To be clear, an American citizen (and, yes, Musk is very much an American citizen, I’m sorry to report to those who want him deported immediately, even though as all good progressives and liberals know, you can’t trust dirty foreigners) having contact with a hostile world leader isn’t per se illegal. If it is, the many academics and celebrities who’ve met with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Un and even Putin himself would all be in jail.

Many of them should be in jail, for other reasons, but never mind.

Picture unrelated.

But it’s disturbing nonetheless, especially since this Wall Street Journal report says Musk’s contacts with Putin started in late 2022, which just happens to be right around the time his online rhetoric about the Ukraine conflict took a more, shall we say, dovish turn.

A passage about Putin asking Musk not to activate Starlink in Taiwan is getting most of the attention, though the actual reason it’s not yet operating there seems to have more to do with Taiwanese law than with Musk carrying out the wishes of Putin and Xi.

This is what really caught my eye:

A Pentagon spokesman said: “We do not comment on any individual’s security clearance, review or status, or about personnel security policy matters in the context of reports about any individual’s actions.”

One person aware of the conversations said the government faces a dilemma because it is so dependent on the billionaire’s technologies. SpaceX launches vital national security satellites into orbit and is the company NASA relies on to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. 

“They don’t love it,” the person said, referring to the Musk-Putin contacts. The person, however, said no alerts have been raised by the administration over possible security breaches by Musk.

So, the Biden Administration has known for some time about conversations between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin. And they seems to be…pretty chill with it, actually.

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Needless to say, the overwhelming consensus on Musk’s own social media platform is that he’s a traitor who should be investigated and/or lose his security clearance and/or be arrested and/or deported and/or worse, and that his companies should be seized by the government.

In the future, everyone will be deemed arrestable by Keith Olbermann for fifteen minutes.

And yet…as time goes on and none of this happens, the President of the United States remains somehow immune to criticism about the issue. Attorney General Merrick Garland and his Department of Justice, sure. But not the guy at the top.

It comes across like the apocryphal story about the Russian peasant, fittingly enough, being hauled away to Siberia by the secret police and screaming, “if only the [Czar/Stalin] knew what was really happening!”