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Two high Senate Democrats have known as for a federal investigation into Elon Musk’s reported contacts with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his high aides.
The senators have urged the Pentagon and the Justice Department to find out whether or not the conversations, which the Kremlin has denied, ought to drive a evaluate of the federal authorities’s contracts with Musk’s firm, SpaceX.
The Wall Street Journal reported final month that the world’s richest particular person has had “multiple, high level conversations” with Putin since 2022 whereas additionally sustaining contact with different high Russian officers.
Musk wrote on his X platform on Friday that he is “going to find out who’s making these accusations and nuke them”.
In one other submit, he slammed the 2 Democrats – Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a senior Democrat on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees – as “puppets” and “knuckleheads”.
The pair of Democrats despatched a letter on Friday to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Defence Department Inspector General Robert Storch elevating “serious questions regarding Mr Musk’s reliability as a government contractor and a [security] clearance holder”.
The Donald Trump ally presently advantages from billions of {dollars} in US defence and intelligence contracts, and likewise claims to carry a high secret degree safety clearance.
“Russia’s ambitions in the space domain pose a direct threat to US national security,” Reed and Shaheen write, pointing to reviews earlier this 12 months that the US adversary has deployed a counter-space weapon which may be able to attacking different satellites in low-earth orbit.
The senators observe that, not like others with high-level safety clearance, Musk doesn’t report his contacts with overseas authorities officers.
They add that the billionaire’s communications with Putin’s deputy chief of workers, Sergei Kiriyenko, comes amid a Justice Department discovering that Kiriyenko and different high officers had been concerned in an effort to seed Kremlin propaganda on social media, together with on the Musk-owned X (previously Twitter) platform.
“For these reasons, we urge an immediate review to ascertain whether Mr Musk’s relationship with multiple high-level Russian officials warrant an investigation and a determination by the Department of Defense’s senior debarment official whether SpaceX should exclude Mr Musk’s involvement in current or future US Government contracts,” Reed and Shaheen write.
Musk, who backed Trump’s profitable 2024 re-election bid with marketing campaign appearances and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in donations, was picked by the president-elect earlier this week to steer a brand new “Department of Government Efficiency”.
But he has additionally participated within the incoming president’s diplomatic efforts.
Musk joined telephone calls over the previous week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan.
The BBC’s US accomplice, CBS News, reported on Friday that he additionally not too long ago visited the residence of Iran’s United Nations ambassador in New York. Washington doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Tehran.
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