On Thursday, March 13, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s acting Inspector General. The complaint asks them to investigate if Elon Musk unlawfully influenced government decision-making and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) contracts involving his satellite business.
CLC is a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the challenges facing American democracy. Its mission is to fight for every American’s freedom to vote and participate meaningfully in the democratic process, particularly Americans who have faced political barriers because of race, ethnicity, or economic status.
CLC’s Kedric Payne said the following about the ethics complaint: “ The American people deserve an unimpeded investigation to determine whether Elon Musk has violated conflict of interest laws by prioritizing his own personal financial interests over the public good,” said Kedric Payne, vice president, general counsel and senior director for ethics at Campaign Legal Center. “Based on his public statements, it appears that Musk has corrupted decision-making at the FAA involving the agency's use of his satellite internet business. Corruption happens when government officials abuse their powerful positions for personal gain — Elon Musk owes it to the American public to remove himself from overseeing policy decisions connected to his personal profits.”
The complaint states the following: Campaign Legal Center writes to request that the Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”) investigate whether the Federal Aviation Administration’s (“FAA”) business transactions with Elon Musk’s satellite internet company are improper due to violations of the criminal conflict of interest law, 18 U.S.C. § 208. Specifically, public reports establish that the FAA began using Starlink services and considering contracts with the company in response to Musk’s requests, who is a special government employee (“SGE”) and the CEO of Starlink. Multiple FAA officials, including the Department of Transportation Secretary and one of the Department’s lead engineers, publicly stated that Musk is the source of the directives for the FAA to implement Starlink technology. If Musk participated in or directed discussions with FAA employees concerning business transactions with Starlink, he may have violated the criminal conflict of interest law and corrupted FAA’s business relationship with Starlink.
For over 60 years, federal law has banned executive branch employees, including SGEs, from participating in business transactions where they may receive a financial benefit. Courts have found that this law is intended to protect public trust in government because when an executive branch employee profits from a government contract, the contract is tainted, and it diminishes confidence in government.4 OIG is responsible for investigating ethics issues connected to FAA’s business partners, and its stated priorities include “fraud schemes that significantly impact DOT funds [and] employee integrity violations.
Accordingly, the evidence suggesting that Musk has blatantly and improperly influenced the FAA’s decision to work with Starlink warrants a thorough OIG fact-finding. The public has a right to know that their tax dollars are being spent in the public’s best interest and not to benefit a government employee’s financial interests. OIG should investigate the FAA’s recent decision to use Starlink and Musk’s conduct to determine whether a criminal violation occurred.
Federal Criminal Law Prohibits Special Government Employees from Influencing an Agency’s Business Transactions Involving their Financial Interests
Pursuant to the federal criminal conflicts of interest law, “an officer or employee of the executive branch of the United States Government . . . including a special Government employee,” shall not participate “personally and substantially as a Government officer or employee, through decision, approval, disapproval, recommendation, the rendering of advice, investigation, or otherwise, in a . . . contract . . . or other particular matter in which, to his knowledge, he . . . has a financial interest.
The full complaint with citations can be viewed by clicking HERE.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.