An urgent message from Heather Cox Richardson

As I’m sure many of you know, historian Heather Cox Richardson has, since 2019, published an invaluable nightly newsletter, Letters from an American, which reports, contextualizes, and analyzes the most important events of the day. While she has not held back from expressing her concerns, tonight, in her live Sunday chat, she talked about the constitutional crisis that the actions of this past weekend have brought us to and urged us to take action.

I’ve done my best to distill what she shared and urge you to watch the video. She’s a very dynamic speaker. You won’t be bored. I imagine the recording will turn up on her YouTube channel shortly, but for now here’s the Facebook link.

• The payment office of the U.S. government handles about 6 trillion dollars a year. Any time you and the federal government have a financial interaction, the US government payment systems handles that — social security, tax refunds, grants, your paycheck if you’re a federal employee.
• On Friday, Musk’s people tried to get access to those government payment systems. The person who was in charge of all that, and who had ben at Treasury since 1989, said No, not happening. This is absolutely secure information, you cannot have it. He was pressured to resign.
• Musk gets permission from the new Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, for Musk’s people got into the computers of the US government’s payment system.
• It is the largest data breach in human history. Everything that the federal government has handled is potentially in Elon Musk’s hands.
  • “He has claimed on social media that he is reading through the payments that the US government has made or is supposed to make to different organizations, and deciding which ones to keep and which ones are, in his mind, illegal.”
  • One of the ones he boasted today about cutting is a human services organization associated with the Lutheran Church. They provide migrant services but also fund nursing homes… “if these places that rely on federal government funding suddenly don’t have that funding, you’re looking at layoffs… hospitals that don’t get grants… law enforcement that suddenly can’t make payroll… all the places where the federal government has been active in the United States suddenly at the mercy of Elon Musk.”
• Yesterday Musk’s people tried to get into a secret area operated by USAID, which works on longterm socio-economic development in other countries. It’s less than one percent of the budget and Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said they’re going to get rid of it.
  • Why is there a secret area? Because USAID is in the State Department “and the State Department has an intelligence agency… that means that breaching that USAID computer breached the State Department’s intelligence. There was a fight over it — with some reports saying it was a physical fight… — the top two people who were trying to keep Musk’s people out of the USAID’s computers got taken away and put on administrative leave, and Musk’s people got access to those computers. What this means is that Musk’s people potentially now have had access to US Intelligence computers…You have to assume that they are all compromised.”
• Today, Wired reported that Musk’s people appear to be six young men, ages 19 to 24, “who almost certainly have no idea what they’re doing. They know what they’re doing computer-wise, but the extraordinary breaches here of American law and of the constitution and of American national security are what I characterized this morning on social media as a coup.”
• Elon Musk doesn’t have any legal or constitutional authority to do what he’s doing. “But everybody is standing back and going, oh gee, he can’t do that. Well, no, he can’t. But somebody’s got to stop him.”
  • “This is not about politics or partisanship. This is about whether or not we want the United States government to be in the hands of a single man, a single billionaire, who at this moment is sitting there tweeting on X that he is cutting programs and policies that the US Congress established.”
• This is not being reported on right wing media. “Make sure that the people you know who voted for Donald Trump… know that Elon Musk has control of all of their financial information. And that unless they are stopped, he can do whatever he wants with it… Get this into right wing circles so people know it’s happening.”

“If we don’t stop this and stop it fast, the damage that these guys do is not going to be fixable. If you stop all of these payments for even two or three weeks, you kill those institutions. There is still time to turn this around but we have to move as quickly as they do.

“Remember, the people who have breached these computers appear to be six young men from ages 19 to 24. Six! There’s 332 million people in this country. We can stop this. But we must make sure people know it’s happening and get them to speak up as well because if Republican-dominated states, and people in Republican-dominated counties and districts start to call their elected leaders and say WTAF?, that’s when things really will move.”