Grand Vizier Musk Is A Problem For The Justice Department

King Ketamine strikes again.

Every day, in dozens of courts across the country, the Justice Department is desperately trying to convince federal judges that everything’s on the up and up, nothing to see here. And every day, Elon Musk busts in like LEEEROY JENKINS to announce that it’s time to move fast and break laws.

“The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” he tweeted Monday. “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!”

Every word of this is a lie. While most people associate FEMA with disaster relief, part of the agency’s remit is to provide relief to migrants awaiting immigration proceedings, including by providing housing under the Shelter and Services Program (SSP). And so, in the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Acts of 2023 and 2024, Congress specifically allocated funds to FEMA to reimburse state and local governments for housing, food, and medical care for migrants. In other words, exactly zero dollars were diverted from funds “meant for American disaster relief.”

FEMA did not send cash to “luxury hotels” in New York City or anywhere else. FEMA sent money to New York to reimburse it for money already paid to house migrants for roughly $156 a night, which is, frankly speaking, Roach Motel prices in New York City. And in fact only $19 million of the allocation went to housing in any facility. But none of that mattered to Musk, who recently made the preposterous claim that USAID sent $50 million to Gaza for condoms.

“Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order,” he fulminated, promising that “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

The fact that it was nonsense made no difference to Cameron Hamilton, the acting administrator of FEMA, who leapt to his keyboard to assure the Ketamine King that his command was being fulfilled.

Note that Hamilton went out of his way to make it clear that this money was appropriated by Congress in “bills,” but that he nonetheless refuses to spend it.

Announcing that you absolutely intend to break laws is never a great move for a public figure, but that’s especially true if you are in the middle of about a dozen impoundment cases and a federal judge has just ordered you to not break any more laws. And it’s exceptionally ill-advised if that judge just threatened to hold you in contempt if you keep disregarding his orders and refusing to spend money pursuant to congressional allocations.

Pissing Off Judges Is Bad For Your Health

On January 31, Judge John McConnell of the US District Court of Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order barring the Trump administration from arbitrarily withholding congressionally allocated funds. The order came in response to a lawsuit filed by blue states after Trump purported to unilaterally pause all federal disbursements so as to give himself time to decide which congressional appropriations he’d like to cancel by executive fiat. (Which is not a thing!) On February 10, the judge granted a motion to enforce his original order after the plaintiffs pointed out that the government was willfully violating it six ways from Sunday. Then Tuesday, after Hamilton's public announcement that he was about to do some more arbitrary confiscation of federal dollars, the DOJ raced back to Rhode Island to ask Judge McConnell to retroactively sign their permission slip — or at least not to throw them in jail.

The government argued that FEMA was “pausing” the allocation to New York “on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes, regulations, and terms” and pursuant to regular process — although they didn’t specify which “statutes, regulations, and terms” they meant. Instead they offered a declaration from Hamilton attesting that the allocation had been yanked “based on significant concerns that the funding is going to entities engaged in or facilitating illegal activities.”

Strangely, the FEMA bro failed to mention his gratitude to DOGE for “making me aware” of said illegal activities. Probably because Musk said the allocation itself was illegal and insubordinate, not that the grant money had been misused. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

Instead Hamilton pointed to quotes from an NYPD detective about teenage pickpockets living in the midtown Manhattan Roosevelt Hotel where asylum seekers are housed, a screed from the National Review, and a New York Post article describing Spanish language TikToks about the building.

He alluded ominously to ongoing “criminal investigations” that are “law enforcement sensitive and should not be shared in a public declaration.” And then, perhaps cognizant that this was all rather thin gruel, told an amazing whopper about “a previous Office of Inspector General report [that] concluded that Department of Homeland Security grant recipients used funds from a similar program to provide service to clandestine aliens who never had an encounter with the Department” — i.e. not asylum seekers. In reality, the IG report has nothing to do with criminal immigrants, although Hamilton dropped a footnote to a Fox News story (which grossly mischaracterized the report) to imply that it did.

What he did not do was point to language in the contract which would allow him to claw back the money even if all that were true. He simply stated that “The Department paused funding quickly in this matter to protect that funding from the potential for its misuse for the illegal activity described above.”

It’s hard to determine whether this pleading was an attempt to head off a charge of contempt of court, or to get the judge to bless the arbitrary edict of the Ketamine King and his courtiers. In either event, it seems to have failed.

Judge McConnell responded that nothing in his prior orders would “require the Defendants to seek ‘preclearance’ from the Court before acting to terminate funding when that decision is based on actual authority in the applicable statutory, regulatory, or grant terms.” And so he denied as moot the request for “targeted relief” as to the FEMA grant.

Translation: If you’re doing something legal, you don’t need my permission. And if you’re not, you’re on your own.

AND THEN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT STOLE $80 MILLION FROM THE CITY OF NEW YORK

According to City Comptroller Brad Lander, his office discovered the missing cash shortly after Musk’s tweet.

This morning, my financial team shockingly uncovered that President Trump and his crony Elon Musk illegally executed a revocation of $80 million in congressionally-appropriated FEMA funding from New York City’s bank accounts late yesterday afternoon. This is money that the federal government previously disbursed for shelter and services and is now missing. This highway robbery of our funds directly out of our bank account is a betrayal of everyone who calls New York City home.

After which Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem channeled her inner Colonel Jessep and tweeted that YOU’RE DARN RIGHT she “clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep state activists unilaterally gave to NYC migrant hotels.”

Like Hamilton, Noem appeared to concede that this payment was made pursuant to an enforceable contract entered into by government agents. She just decided to steal back the money because she didn’t like it. Note that she stole the entire $80 million transfer, not just the portion that went to house migrants at the hotel. And then, for good measure, she fired the civil servants who put the transaction through as they were obligated to do by both federal law and Judge McConnell’s order.

All of this is wildly illegal.

There was a procedure to unwind this contract, and it didn’t involve a smash-and-grab operation. It involved an audit, 60 days notice, an appeal mechanism, and payment arrangements. Only at the conclusion of said process are recipients who refuse to reimburse the government sent to the Treasury Department for collections. FEMA doesn’t get to reach into a private bank account and grab the cash. (And it’s an open question how they did it!)

And so, while the parties to this case haven’t yet raised the issue of the stolen $80 million, Musk’s insane tweets, along with the helpful online admissions by Hamilton and Noem that they are intentionally violating the law, will certainly lead to years more of ugly litigation.

But on the plus side, the Justice Department just announced that it was holding the bribery charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams in abeyance, so he’ll probably keep the City from trying to get back its cash for a hot minute.