Inside Trump and Musk’s Clumsy, ‘Exhausting’ Hunt for Leakers
Over the past two weeks, President Donald Trump and his billionaire patron Elon Musk have embarked on a frenzied MAGA purge of federal agencies and departments. The duo and their allies’ blitz across the government triggered a torrent of press leaks, coming from career officials and other personnel appalled by the speed and scale of Trump and Musk’s power grab and budding constitutional crisis.
The Tesla CEO and world’s richest person — who the Trump White House now calls a “special government employee,” seemingly free from actual oversight — says he is regularly talking to the president about his mission to slash the bureaucracy, and received Trump’s blessing to “shut down” the government’s foreign aid department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The duo’s onslaught and power grabs have already begun ripping through the Treasury Department, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Federal Aviation Administration, among others.
One of the things Musk and Trump have discussed, according to a source familiar with the situation and another person briefed on it, is the geyser of leaks coming from the administration and the need to identify, root out, and persecute the leakers.
The problem is there is so much leaking going on currently that doing so would likely be a mammoth task.
“Come and find me, assholes,” says one federal career official, directing the insult at Musk, Trump, and their allies and officials working in vain to plug the wellspring of leaking.
Musk is not hiding his interest in purging the federal government of anti-Trump leakers — with or without proof. “With regard to leakers: if in doubt, they are out,” he posted on X at 2:10 a.m. ET on Monday.
The world’s richest man and Trump’s interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin have both publicly threatened action against people posting the identities of those involved with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team, which is spearheading the efforts to bulldoze agencies and any checks on their power.
The Trump administration sought to head off any leaks at USAID on Jan. 25 in a memo, obtained by Rolling Stone, informing agency staffers that “all communications outside the agency” would need to be approved by top officials — threatening “disciplinary action” against any who failed to comply.
While that effort clearly failed, there is no shortage of leak-hunting ideas, as described to Rolling Stone by four Trump administration officials and Musk allies. Some are more decidedly ham-handed than others. Some have been briefed to Musk or Trump directly.
Among the ideas internally kicked around the Trump and Musk teams was the thought of planting younger informers or “spies” in different parts of the federal government to gain the trust of offices and teams suspected of anti-MAGA sentiments. (The Trump administration has already sought in other ways to erect a snitch network across the federal bureaucracy, encouraging staffers to anonymously tip off their superiors if they see any hint of hush-hush diversity programs operating in the shadows.)
Other ideas include potentially accessing, via virtual back-door access, some staffers’ government emails or communications to see if there’s any recent evidence of leaking to the media, though sources generally concede that it is unlikely career officials would be using their work accounts for these kinds of sensitive and unauthorized conversations. Other plans focus on Trump administration officials sending different staffers different internal messages or pieces of disinformation, to see what does or doesn’t leak — in the hopes of isolating where some of the leaking could be stemming from.
Trump and Musk allies have also discussed compiling dossiers of various federal staff and creating shortlists of suspected leakers by scouring their social media accounts to see who is friendly with certain reporters and who is “clearly a liberal,” in the words of a Trump administration official. One Musk ally says they have already asked trusted Trumpists installed in multiple agencies and departments for “brief rundowns” of names of their immediate coworkers or underlings who are the likeliest to be blabbing to the press over the past several days.
Though Trump and Musk have carried out a good deal of firings, put many on forced leave, and deployed numerous intimidation tactics over the past couple of weeks, it’s unclear if any of the haphazard leak hunts have turned up much of value. In fact, it appears that the leaking has only accelerated — perhaps most prominently these days from the aid agency USAID, which Trump and Musk are attempting to shutter and fold into the State Department.
Still, the climate of fear and rage that Trump and Musk have imposed throughout the federal government has created mass confusion and an information clampdown that’s left numerous staffers in the dark about what their jobs even are anymore.
“It’s been exhausting,” says a federal law enforcement career official. “So much of this is just pointless, unless you believe every conspiracy theory out there.”
During their ongoing onslaught and purge, Trump and his lieutenants have strangled the internal flows of communication to such a degree that various government employees — at USAID and elsewhere — have started religiously scanning Reddit groups for information and rumors on what is happening in their own offices, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation say.
Then, when these staffers attempt to corroborate each rumor or morsel of information, they have to be unusually careful about with whom they try to confirm it, at times unsure which colleague or which superior is going to rat them out to Team Trump or Team Elon as a possible subversive. Indeed, according to a Trump official and one Musk ally, one of the many ideas for their ad hoc leak investigations is to plant misinformation or eye-popping details on Reddit pages, to see if doing so causes a stir among specific offices or agencies — and could thus help ferret out some of the more elusive and prolific anti-Trump leakers.
Several of these career officials have considered mass-deleting their social media posts, or even selectively deleting some of their more innocuous online missives that they think might be construed as politically left or pro-diversity initiatives. However, some have decided not to, given that they’ve heard chatter that many federal employees’ public social media histories have already been flagged or screen-grabbed by Trump and Musk lackeys.
The intra-office paranoia has reached a point where even receiving a message of kindness or support can set off alarm bells. Recently, according to one person familiar with the matter, a former Biden administration official simply sent a note of well wishes and warmth to some of the staff at USAID, given the utter chaos the agency is going through at the advent of a second Trump era. Some responses this ex-official got weren’t of gratitude or reciprocation.
Instead, the former Biden official was told that even having this paper trail of recent communication with this ex-official could be bad for them, during the course of Trump and Musk’s wave of leak investigations and federal purges.
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