'Pure pointlessness and waste': Musk legacy seen in botched, illegal grab of independent group

So, you've probably all seen the photos of um President Trump's top campaign donor, Elon Musk, um in the Oval Office on Friday with a big old shiner with his black eye. Uh he claimed to have gotten that by being punched by his 5-year-old son. Okay, maybe.

Um but with this Oval Office appearance ostensibly being his farewell after several months in Washington gutting the American government, everybody sort of had the same idea at the same time, right? The metaphors practically wrote themselves. You know, Musk has literal black eye and figurative black eye as he leaves.

What may I suggest an even better metaphor for what Elon Musk did in these last few months in Washington? Um, starting in March, um, we pretty closely covered the story of one little agency, an independent nonprofit called the US Institute of Peace. Um Elon Musk's operatives at Doge literally forced their way into the Institute of Peace in an operation that reportedly involved um the FBI, the DC Metropolitan Police, the DC US Attorney's Office, and a private security firm.

Musk and Doge literally used armed force to get into the headquarters of this little institute. They then used that armed force to physically throw out the staff. They then purported to fire all the staff even though they legally don't have have the power to do that.

The thing that has always made the story sort of weirder and wilder than you might expect is that this US Institute of Peace, it doesn't belong to the executive branch. It's an independent nonprofit. It was created by Congress over 40 years ago.

It's largely funded by its own private endowment. The institute owns its own building, its headquarters. They control the land the building sits on.

And yet, uh, Trump and his top campaign donor, Elon Musk, used force to not only take the building, but to also take the institute's money, its endowment, which again was not the government's to take. Once Elon Musk's people had had forced their way into the building and forced out the employees, one Institute of Peace official told us, quote, "They were very thorough in how they decimated us. They wiped our IT system, canceled contracts, shredded documents, took down our website, including all of our 40 years of research and work we had done.

They seized not only our building, but also all of our funding, including our endowment funds. Well, now perhaps predictably, a federal judge has ruled that all of that, from the armed takeover of the building to the firing of the employees to the seizing all the institute's assets, all of that was quite flagrantly illegal. The judge called it a gross usurpation of power and a way of conducting government affairs that unnecessarily traumatized the committed leadership and employees of the US Institute of Peace, who deserved better.

The judge ordered the Trump administration to give everything back. And so Musk and all his minions have been forced to give it all back. And when the reinstated actual leaders of the US Institute of Peace returned to their building for the first time in over two months just a few days ago, what they found was water damage and rats and roaches, things they had never had before.

The acting director of the Institute of Peace told Judge Howell in a sworn statement that the Trump administration essentially abandoned the building as soon as they stole it and that quote failure to maintain and secure the building resulted among other things in the rats and roaches and apparently um whole juicy buds. Uh, The Economist reports tonight that cleaners also found a whole bunch of marijuana that was apparently left behind by Doge staffers after they left the place. So, maximum destruction, leaving everything soiled and in disrepair and littered with drugs.

And now because all of that was totally illegal, the folks at the US Institute of Peace will have to like repair everything and stand everything back up in order to even start to get back to where they were before this whole thing started. It's just pure pointlessness and waste. And may I suggest that yes, the black eye was cute, but may I suggest that this is perhaps more on the nose as the legacy of what the Trump administration has done through Trump's top campaign donor Elon Musk as Elon Musk leaves Washington.

A building seized pointlessly, shut down pointlessly, left to be infested by vermin. All so its rightful owners can eventually come back and have to put it all back together again for no reason at all. I think that's a better metaphor.

I'm just going to say it.