Even a cursory review of this blog will quickly reveal I’m no fan of the New York Times and distrust most of the publication’s reporting, particularly on matters relating to Donald Trump, racial issues, and anything to do with Israel. The Times went into a tailspin with its discredited 1619 Project, accelerated its decline with the execution of former editorial page editor James Bennet and the firing of Donald McNeil, and shamelessly published this story just weeks before Joe Biden’s presidential debate, co-authored by its misinformation reporter no less, suggesting that videos purporting to show his mental or physical decline were distorted or lacked “context.”
Then there’s the Times’ Maggie Haberman, whose cell number possibly is etched in the minds, and possibly tattooed on the limbs, of every Beltway deep stater who despises Trump and wants to anonymously dish some dirt on the president. Haberman was among the reporters awarded a Pulitzer for the publication’s false stories alleging that Trump colluded with Putin to sway the 2016 election – a grand conspiracy theory that’s been debunked.
Haberman has never been held to account for the damning allegations in this January 2018 story she co-authored reporting that Trump ordered the firing Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, but ultimately backed down after White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II threatened to resign rather than carry out the directive.
McGahn subsequently testified that he never explicitly threatened to resign nor did he make clear to Trump he wouldn’t carry out his order. Tellingly, McGahn also testified that he only told three people he was considering resigning — Annie Donaldson, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, and presidential advisor Steve Bannon about his resignation intent — but claimed he didn’t disclose details of what Trump ordered him to do because he didn’t want to ensnare them in Mueller’s investigation.
If McGahn testified honestly, only four persons were aware he considered resigning – himself, Donaldson, Priebus, and Bannon. Haberman’s co-authored story said it was based on information provided by four anonymous sources.
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to how McGahn’s intention found its way into the Times with some spit and polish that made him seem like a principled hero.
Just as a broken clock has the correct time twice a day, the New York Times and Haberman can sometimes post a blockbuster story that’s the absolute truth. I’m confident that was the case last week with this bombshell report that the Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China. Although Haberman was one of the report’s five authors and Trump and lackeys in his administration dismissed it as “fake news,” there are substantial indications the carefully nuanced report was 100% accurate.
The Times said that two U.S. officials confirmed that the Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China. Another anonymous official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth anonymous official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday but offered no details.
The Times reported that chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to an email seeking comment about why Mr. Musk was to receive a briefing on the China war plan. Soon after The Times published its article on Thursday evening, Parnell gave a short statement: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”
About an hour later, Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.” President Trump also chimed in a late-night social media post. “China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Trump said.
Parnell appeared Friday morning on Fox News to further trash the Times’ reporting.
“On the record, that (story) is completely fake,” Parnell said. “This is egregious, this is fake, and the New York Times should retract its story.”
If the Times’ story was egregiously false, why didn’t Parnell deny it from the get-go? Perhaps he’s like former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who didn’t regard his job as requiring round the clock attention, or perhaps Parnell has bad news judgment and didn’t initially appreciate the explosiveness of the Times’ story.
The New York Times didn’t retract its story but rather doubled down. Here’s what Eric Schmitt, the Times’ national security correspondent and one of the five co-authors of the story, was quoted as saying.
The Pentagon was scheduled to give a briefing to Musk this morning on the classified war plan for China. We were told it was going to be in this secure conference room called the Tank, which is typically where you’ll have very high-level military briefings with members of the Joint Chiefs or senior commanders. The idea that a civilian like Elon Musk, who’s not in the chain of command, would be getting any briefing in the Tank — much less on highly sensitive war plans for China — was certainly unusual, and it was alarming to some people.
We’re absolutely sure this is what was scheduled. There were a couple of things that gave us confidence, besides our sourcing being very strong. If Musk were really coming to the Pentagon for a more casual discussion, why would you hold it in the Tank? What’s more, the main briefer for the originally scheduled meeting was the four-star admiral in charge of the Indo-Pacific area, Samuel Paparo — and he would be the wartime commander in the event of a conflict with China.
That’s a lot of very specific information and detail. While I wouldn’t put it past some of the Times’ younger reporters to make stuff up, Schmitt has been with the Times for 40 years and began his career at the publication when it was the gold standard of U.S. journalism.
In any case, it’s alarming that Musk was even allowed into the Pentagon for a military briefing of any kind, particularly one involving China.
Musk has demonstrated that he is unstable, unpredictable, and impulsive, three traits that should disqualify him from having access to top secret national security information. He either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t care, for the consequences of his reckless statements, and foams at the mouth with abandon. He once posted on his X site that Canada isn’t a real country.
Musk has extensive business interests in China, a country for which he’s expressed great admiration for its communist government and its citizens. I’m always mindful of this December 2021 Wall Street Journal story explaining why the country rewrote its rules for foreign auto businesses and allowed Tesla to operate without the requirement it partner with domestic businesses.
The Journal reported that authorities showered Musk with cheap land, low-interest loans and tax incentives, expecting in return that Tesla would groom local suppliers and bolster then lagging Chinese electric-vehicle players. Musk was granted these privileges because President Xi Jinping viewed the South African-born entrepreneur as “a technology utopian with no political allegiance to any country.”
Prior to his full-throated endorsement of Trump, Musk planned on opening a massive plant in Mexico to manufacture and export Teslas to the U.S. Bloomberg reported that Musk encouraged China’s suppliers to follow him to Mexico and replicate the local supply chain at Tesla’s Shanghai plant.
If these details aren’t sufficient cause for alarm, how about this? The New York Times’ David Sanger, another legacy reporter who joined the publication more than 40 years ago, reported that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has targeted some of the organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert. There have been no published studies of the costs and benefits of losing those capabilities — and no discussion of how the roles, arguably as important as a manned fighter, might be replaced.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Office of Net Assessment, an internal think-tank. With an annual budget that Sanger said, “accounted for a few seconds of Pentagon spending each year,” the office was focused on identifying the challenges the United States would face a decade or two in the future — such as the new capabilities of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and the hidden vulnerabilities of supply chains for military contractors. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page referred to the department as “The Office That Won the Cold War.”
Sanger reported that the Department of Homeland Security has eliminated a series of cyberdefenses, at a moment when China’s state-backed hackers have been more successful than at any time in recent memory.
How successful?
Sophisticated Chinese government hackers in 2021 were believed to have compromised dozens of U.S. government agencies, defense contractors, financial institutions and other critical sectors, the Washington Post reported. The breach was so extensive that the Post quoted a cybersecurity expert saying there was “data theft that occurred that we won’t ever know about.”
The U.S. government clearly hasn’t become better at protecting against China’s hackers. The U.S. Treasury disclosed last December that Chinese hackers remotely accessed several department workstations and unclassified documents after compromising a third-party software service provider. The hack was being investigated as a “major cybersecurity incident.”
The conservative media has coined an ailment dubbed Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), which refers to people who are so consumed with hatred towards the president they would see evil lurking even if he rescued dozens of nuns from a convent raging in an inferno. An ailment inflicting too many conservatives and Trump supporters is Musk Idolization Syndrome (MIS), a mental disorder that prevents his legions of bros and admirers from seeing their hero isn’t driven by altruism and humanitarian concerns but rather power, greed, and sometimes undeniable cruelty and wickedness.
If Musk were the great patriot Trump makes him out to be, he’d volunteer to make America’s military complex the go-to place for the best and the brightest engineering graduates to hone their skills, much like Israel’s tech entrepreneurs got their training serving in the military. But there’s no money to be made from such an endeavor, and Musk would risk alienating his handlers in China.
Musk has called for the prosecution of the Pentagon officials who leaked the allegedly “fake news” to the New York Times. “They will be found,” he thundered. Bloomberg reported that The Pentagon has initiated an investigation incorporating polygraph tests to hunt down leakers.
Some unsolicited PR advice for Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell: If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dares to prosecute those who were responsible for preventing Elon Musk access to the most sensitive U.S. military secrets to combat China, a big swath of Americans will rightfully regard them as national heroes.