Politics

FBI Agent Wanted To Investigate Elon Musk For Asking Federal Employees What They Did That Week

Billy Hathorn, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

An FBI special agent sought a criminal investigation into Elon Musk for asking government officials what they do all day, a newly declassified email reveals.

Former Special Agent Kevin Gounaud emailed a colleague in February 2025 casting Musk’s use of his social media platform X to advertise the work of DOGE, his government efficiency initiative, as a criminal act. He likened it to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to exchange classified intelligence, according to the email declassified by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley.

Gounaud floated the legal theory that weekly emails that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent to federal employees asking them to list five accomplishments amounted to a petty crime.

“Happy to write the case opening and find a prosecutor (or at least try),” he said.

“And no, I’m not kidding,” the agent added.

Gounaud did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via LinkedIn.

“I would like to recommend the opening of a criminal 58 matter on the person(s) at OPM who approved the transmission of the earlier email,” the agent wrote. “That person in conspiracy with Elon Musk (who is reportedly an [Special Government Employee]), in addition to wasting a colossal amount of official time, encouraged, abetted, aided, etc. thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees outside of a strict need to know.”

Gounaud said that Musk had violated federal statutes outlawing personal enrichment, because his account on X — a company he owns, may have been monetized — and blackmail for saying in his post that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Grassley declassified the email during a Tuesday hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel.

The Iowa Republican has spearheaded investigations into overt partisanship at the Bureau.

A 2004 law requires intelligence professionals to produce reporting “independent of political considerations.”

But a slew of documents declassified by Grassley’s committee and the Trump administration has revealed senior officials operating in the shadows in a way that violates that professional ethos.

“For almost a decade now, I’ve made records public showing how a number of now discredited law enforcement and intelligence officials schemed to take out Trump and other Republicans. And here we are, in 2026, still finding records from years ago showing even more evidence of targeting,” Grassley said in his opening statement for the hearing.

“The overall sustained efforts by the Deep State in the dark corners of the bureaucracy is worse than anything Trump has been accused of. At least he’s upfront and open so people can judge,” he said.

These documents have revealed new information about an FBI investigation codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, a wide-reaching FBI probe into alleged ties between Trump and Russia. Newly declassified evidence has confirmed that investigation built on spun, cherrypicked and in some cases wholly manufactured raw intelligence reports, including the Steele dossier, a salacious opposition research document commissioned by Democrats during the 2016 election cycle.

Newly declassified documents have also revealed that the FBI smeared more than two dozen members of Congress, journalists and senior Trump administration officials as conduits of Russian disinformation in another operation codenamed “Round River” in order to paint derogatory information about former President Joe Biden and corruption in Ukraine as a Russian psyop.

Grassley’s office pointed out that targeting Musk’s status as a special government employee (SGE) represented a double standard. The DOJ declined to investigate Huma Abedin when she worked as an SGE for then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while simultaneously working for the Clinton Foundation, a congressional aide said.

Other newly released documents have generated questions about why the FBI did not conduct a more fulsome investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server to exchange sensitive documents while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.

The FBI secured 600,000 missing emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server in the final days of the 2016 presidential election.

An email from former FBI Director James Comey to his media liaison Daniel Richman, released as an exhibit in the Department of Justice’s case against Comey in 2025, underscores the trove of evidence available to the bureau about Clinton’s apparent evasion of federal recordkeeping law that went unexamined.