Musk Supports Moscow Again / Justice Targets California Voters / Kash Fudges The Numbers / Wild Insider Trading Investigated, Until It Wasn’t / Moscow’s Missiles Rain Down on Kiev
Elon Musk Again Supports Moscow, Shutting Down Starlink Support Needed for Ukrainian Defense Against Russian Missiles
The Guardian
Russian ballistic missiles raining down on Kyiv as Elon Musk pulls the plug on Starlink resources used to defend against the missiles. Reuters
Scott: Studies have consistently shown that Elon Musk’s climb to trillionaire status was achieved on the back of US taxpayers, who funded the research and development of his various ventures with little return on their investment. His is quite simply the most dramatic example of state investment converted to private wealth in human history. Now add to this the fact that Elon Musk, also the most powerful holder of government contracts in US history—many of them involving highly classified projects—has decided to pursue his own foreign policy. And that policy is unmistakably aligned at critical points with Vladimir Putin… a man with whom, as the WSJ and ZDF have reported, he has maintained a covert and illicit dialogue for many years. Putin’s obsession right now is simple: to secure as much advantage in his war against Ukraine as possible before America’s midterm elections produce likely constraints against his various US sock puppets, particularly Trump, Musk and Thiel. And Musk is chiming in right on time to allow Russian ballistic missiles meet their targets in Ukrainian cities with no defense from the Ukrainians defenders, who rely, to their detriment, on Musk’s StarLink.
Launch of Russian ballistic missiles on Ukraine, with no US warning, coincides with outage of Starlink managed by Musk’s SpaceX
Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately.
The terminals, which are produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX but managed by the US government, are a key component of Ukraine’s military operations and the sudden restrictions on the terminals travelling at high speeds on Tuesday evening led to the failure of several combat missions, said an adviser on military technology to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The sudden outage came as Russia launched ballistic missiles at Ukraine without any advance warning from the US for a second night. For years, the US has provided Ukraine with intelligence when strikes were about to take place.
Donald Trump has denied that his administration has cut intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Zelenskyy also indicated that the US was continuing to share intelligence with Ukraine in an interview with NPR aired on Wednesday, but confirmed that military advisers had received threats from the US that intelligence sharing could be limited.
Ukraine did not receive any warning before Russia launched its first barrage of ballistic missiles on Tuesday evening, according to Col Yurii Ihnat, a spokesperson for the air force. But it did receive warnings from “foreign partners” about three subsequent barrages, leaving further confusion about whether or not the US is intentionally withholding intelligence from Ukraine.
Musk said that Starlink is not licensed to clients who are using weapons, and that the Ukrainian military was linked to a separate network called Starshield, which is operated by the US government. “This is not under SpaceX control,” Musk wrote.
Terminals travelling at more than 100mph and using a version of Starlink for the military and other national security agencies suddenly lost connectivity, said Serhiy Beskrestnov, in what appeared to be a targeted outage meant to disrupt military operations.
“Our armed forces did not receive a warning about these restrictions and this led to the failure of a number of missions,” said Beskrestnov, who is also a popular military blogger. “It’s clear that this action cannot be a coincidence and is connected to the current political situation.”
Limiting Starlink’s access speeds would have a significant effect on Ukraine’s air defences because it is being used, according to Beskrestnov, in “the most current effective solution”: interceptors that target the jet-powered Shahed drones now deployed in large numbers to bomb Ukraine.
“With their actions our partners are depriving us of one of the few chances we have to defend ourselves,” he added in a follow-up post. Shahed interception rates had already dropped from more than 90% to about 60% when Russia upgraded its engines to jet power in the early summer.
Musk has supported Trump’s calls for Zelenskyy to be replaced as Ukraine’s leader – an extraordinary act of political interference against a wartime ally – as a personal feud between the two presidents has burst into the open.
The reports that Starlink was being throttled on the frontlines were interpreted by some as further pressure on Ukraine to end the fighting and make a deal with Russia at any cost.
US Department of Revenge Targets California With New Election Disruption Scheme
Charles: With early voting already under way, the Department of Revenge (formerly, Justice) launched a new scheme to disrupt voting in California, demanding state officials prove the citizenship of any voter flagged by the Feds as a possible noncitizen, or set aside their ballots.
In letters to the California Secretary of State and the Los Angeles County Clerk’s office, the acting deputy U.S. Attorney General demanded that state officials check their rolls against a list provided by the Feds of possible noncitizens. “We request that you review the list within 48 hours to determine whether any citizens are listed. For individuals whom you cannot independently confirm citizenship status, we request that you immediately instruct the appropriate elections officials to segregate — not cancel — those individuals’ vote-by-mail ballots until their citizenship status can be determined,” R. Trent McCotter wrote. “Voters on the federal list who haven’t already been sent a ballot should not be sent one until their citizenship is verified, while ballots already returned by voters on the list should not be counted until their citizenship is verified,”
Todd Blanche, head of the Department of Revenge
Similar Federal lists provided to other states have been wildly unreliable:
“One must question why the DOJ would violate its own rules about investigating elections close to election day, and over a week after they knew the state had already mailed ballots out, particularly when their past claims have been full of errors,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.
Becker noted the Trump administration alleged that there were nearly 16,000 noncitizens registered in Nevada, later reduced that number to 185 after additional scrutiny, and then determined all of them were in fact citizens.
Obviously, the only reason for the Feds to make these demands nineteen days before election day is to sow as much chaos and confusion as possible–because they know they are facing one of biggest blue waves of all time.
FBI Crime Enforcement Plummets; Kash Patel Starts Fudging with the Numbers
MS-Now
Kash Patel, director of the FBI, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 15, 2026, in Washington, D.C.Graeme Sloan / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Scott: As he heads off to Moscow and St Petersburg for curiously extended meetings hosted by his handlers or counterparts at the Russian FSB (successor to the KGB), Kash Patel faces embarrassing disclosures concerning the performance of the FBI as America’s leading police force. Overall criminal case filings by the FBI have dropped precipitously. This stems directly from two major events during Patel’s tenure at the Bureau: first, firing or forcing the resignation of some 1,500 special agents on various pretexts; and second, reassigning thousands of agents to politically-motivated wild goose chases targeting political adversaries as well as a preposterous effort involving hundreds of agents to prove that Trump won the 2020 election. Additionally, the data suggests that a major shift under Patel’s leadership includes assigning FBI agents to support immigration enforcement, with immigration cases comprising a massive 59.3% of all federal criminal cases filed from February 2025 through July 2026: hardly any of these cases are actually criminal in the strict sense of that term. To cover this up, Patel has grotesquely adulterated FBI crime statistics by including arrests made by state, local and foreign police forces and claiming they involved the FBI, when the FBI’s involvement usually consisted of nothing more than having a special agent present when the charges were announced.
With fewer agents and a strained budget, the FBI under its director, Kash Patel, has brought thousands fewer criminal cases than previous administrations, an MS NOW review of Justice Department data shows. The findings rebut Patel’s repeated claims that he has led a crackdown on violent crime.
Patel has boasted that the FBI has arrested 54,000 violent criminals, which he describes as a 90% increase in arrests from the same period in the Biden administration. What he doesn’t mention is that his count is inflated by including arrests that state and local police forces and other federal agencies have made when an FBI employee is present.
Many of those arrests are not FBI cases, the FBI acknowledges.
In reality, the FBI has referred 15% fewer criminal cases for federal prosecution during the second Trump administration than during the same period in the Biden administration. And, while the FBI does not break down its criminal referrals into types of cases, the data also shows that the DOJ prosecuted 15% fewer cases of violent crimes during the first 16 months of the Trump administration than during the same period of the Biden administration.
There were nearly 3,800 fewer people charged federally with violent crimes during the first part of the second Trump administration than during the comparable Biden period — the opposite of what Patel says. That figure includes cases referred from all federal agencies, not just the FBI.
MS NOW analyzed public DOJ data obtained and shared by Justice Connection, a group of former DOJ and FBI employees who have accused the Trump administration of weaponizing the department and breaking long-revered norms to pursue President Donald Trump’s political ends. The data covers all criminal cases with a filing date recorded for a U.S. district court.
The biggest priorities shift in the second Trump administration has been a huge increase in arrests and charges related to immigration crimes. Patel has required FBI agents to support immigration enforcement, which has traditionally not been part of their mission.
According to the public DOJ data, immigration cases comprised a whopping 59.3% of all federal criminal cases filed by the DOJ from February 2025 through July 2026 — compared to 41.1% over a similar period in the first Trump administration and 35.5% over a similar period in the Biden administration.
In public appearances, Patel has consistently made false or seriously misleading claims about the Bureau’s crime enforcement activities:
“1.1 million fewer violent” crimes: on Oct. 2, Patel told Fox News that there were “1.1 million fewer” violent assaults, rapes, robberies and homicides. In fact, 1,119,768 was the entire estimated 2025 violent crime total, and the FBI says the year-over-year decline was 9.3%. He appears to have confused the total with the decline.
“197% increase” from 34,000 to 67,000 arrests: In February, Patel made a basic math error in an op-ed under his own byline. The increase is 97.1%; 67,000 is 197% of 34,000.
“Rape, robbery, assault, all down double-digits”: Patel said this in August, but two of the three named categories were not down double digits. The FBI’s own release — which contained Patel’s quote in a video — put robbery down 18.5%, but rape down 7.6% and aggravated assault down 7.2%; overall violent crime was down 9.3%.
The Massachusetts Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweep: Patel said in May 2025 the FBI had joined ICE to round up “370 violent and dangerous fugitives.” ICE’s own description was 370 alien offenders; it said 205 had “significant criminal convictions or charges.”
“Operation Restore Justice”: On May 7, 2025, Patel said the operation lasted a month, involved 450 warrants, and rounded up nearly 400 child predators. DOJ’s same-day release says the named operation lasted five days and produced 205 arrests.
Trump Corruption Watch
Four Alarms Sound in CFTC Over White House Oil Trades
Bloomberg
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) headquarters in Washington, DC. Photo: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg
Scott: Since the start of the Iran War, market observers have noted a consistent phenomenon—the White House would issue a statement from Trump and sometimes other senior Trump players which would report either a sudden unanticipated peace breakthrough, which rarely bore out as truthful over the coming days. Usually a matter of minutes before this statement, commodities brokers would report the sudden booking of hundreds of millions in futures trades, the value of which would spike suddenly on the release of the statement. It appeared to be insider trading and market manipulation by people in the immediate proximity to Trump based on their knowledge of his soon to be released statement. In his piece studying Jared Kushner for the New Yorker, Dexter Filkins reported that Kushner’s own senior staffers strongly suspected that he and other members of Trump’s family were behind these trades, but lacked direct evidence of this.
CFTC is the regulatory agency with oversight responsibility for this area and the duty to enforce the law in the event of insider trading or market manipulation. Now we learn that career staffers at CFTC in fact flagged these highly suspicious trades, did a preliminary investigation and concluded that circumstances warranted a referral to the enforcement department for civil or criminal enforcement action. Then political appointees at CFTC demanded that they retract their referral.
This furnishes more reason to believe that senior figures in the White House were involved with insider trading and have gleaned massive profits from it… and they are using raw political muscle to stop the machinery of law enforcement.
When President Donald Trump backed away from threats to strike Iranian power plants on March 23, it sparked a frenzy of buying and selling across oil, equities and other markets.
Traders had grown accustomed to prices lurching wildly on developments in the Middle East. But this time, some bettors had timed it perfectly. Billions of dollars’ worth of contracts predicting oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise were placed about 15 minutes before the president announced his U-turn in a post on Truth Social, fueling widespread speculation about whether someone had an unfair advantage.
Responsibility for looking into the incident fell to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal derivatives regulator whose remit — and profile — has soared with the advent of cryptocurrencies and prediction markets. There, a team of career forensic analysts embarked on their usual task of pulling together data on the day’s winners and losers.
Based on the timing of the trading they observed and who was behind it, the analysts, from the agency’s Division of Market Oversight, filed a referral to the Division of Enforcement, which would decide whether to launch a full-scale investigation into potential insider trading, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing government deliberations. Representatives from the two divisions also met and talked through how best to collaborate, people familiar with the matter said.
What happened next, they said, was highly unusual: Mel Gunewardena, a senior adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman, Michael Selig, told a supervisor within the market oversight team to retract the referral.
The team didn’t know how to proceed, the people said. As a practical matter, it was unclear how they might even carry out such an action since it had rarely, if ever, been done before. It marked a break with precedent in another way as well. Career experts had always been entrusted with the specialized but prosaic task of gathering reams of data and writing preliminary reports that the attorneys in enforcement would then decide whether to pursue.
Now, according to the people, an adviser to political appointee Selig was intervening to scuttle the referral and oversee the gathering of data himself. Gunewardena, a Wall Street veteran who spent time at the CFTC during the first Trump administration, had rejoined the agency a few weeks before as head of the Office of International Affairs and Senior Markets Advisor to the chairman, and it wasn’t clear what role he had in the evidence-gathering process.
“In every previous administration I’m familiar with, that would not just have been unusual — but never done,” Aitan Goelman, who served as the agency’s Director of Enforcement from 2014 to February 2017, said when asked generally about such an intervention. “It makes it harder for the staff, if they know that any moment the rug can get pulled out from under them.” (Goelman has represented CME Group Inc. in a lawsuit against the CFTC.)...
The trading in question was eye-popping. In a two-minute window starting at 6:49 a.m. in New York on March 23, traders sold contracts equivalent to at least 6 million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate, more than 8.5 times the volume that had changed hands that time in the morning over the prior week. A similar increase in activity was observed in futures tied to the S&P 500, with contracts worth more than $2 billion in notional value traded — far more than would be expected in an otherwise quiet premarket session. Unusual volumes were also visible in natural gas and other futures markets.
Those trades paid off 15 minutes or so later, when Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was reversing his threat to attack Iranian infrastructure unless the country re-opened the Strait of Hormuz. Brent oil prices plunged as much as 14% after the post. US crude plummeted in the double digits as well, while stock markets in the US and Europe jumped about 4% from their session lows to intraday highs.
Russia Launches Ballistic Missiles at Ukraine, and Suddenly NATO Stops Getting Warnings. Trump is Behind This.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Russian ballistic missiles devastate Kyiv as suddenly Ukraine receives no warning of the launch and Elon Musk pulls the plug on Ukrainian defense systems. Ukrainians are convinced that Trump and Musk are now backing Moscow. They’re right.
Scott: Ukraine has been devastated by Russian ballistic missile attacks over the last 72 hours that it has been unable to defend. Why? Two things suddenly occurred. First, Ukrainian defenses have been predicated on distant warning at launch time furnished by NATO monitors. Three days ago, they suddenly went silent, giving Ukrainians no inkling that the missiles were coming, with a resultant loss of hundreds of civilian lives. Second, Elon Musk suddenly and without notice pulled the plug on anti-missile defense systems that use StarLink, meaning that the Ukrainian defensive shield disappeared. What’s behind this? As FAZ notes, all signs point very clearly to one explanation: Donald Trump has decided to realign himself with the Kremlin. He talked about an energy ceasefire. Zelenskyy instantly accepted. Putin responded by launching his heaviest attack on energy plants in two years. Trump replied by again blaming Zelenskyy. All of this points clearly to acts of perfidy and deceit… by Donald Trump.
Russian ballistic missiles hit Ukraine’s electricity supply harder than they have in a long time. Zelensky complains about the lack of information. There are also new problems with Starlink. Is Trump behind it?
Ukraine has been exposed to massive Russian attacks on the energy system since US President Donald Trump announced an energy ceasefire. At the same time, the USA is putting increased pressure on Ukraine. According to Ukrainian information, Russia used 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 combat drones in the attacks on Wednesday night. Loud explosions were heard in Kyiv throughout the night. All three thermal power plants in the capital were hit. The result was power outages, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of “significant damage to 26 locations on the power grid.” Three civilians were killed.
When repelling the attacks, the Ukrainians had to deal with several problems at the same time. On the one hand, the air defense still lacks interceptor missiles for Patriot anti-aircraft systems. On the other hand, there were once again no warnings about the launch of the ballistic missiles. After a rocket attack on Monday evening, Zelensky had already complained about the “lack of warnings from Western partners”. His complaint caused great concern in Ukraine. Many suspected that Zelensky was referring to the Americans with the phrase “Western partners.”
Western partners usually warn Kyiv when they detect Russian missile launches. Then Ukraine can raise an air alarm so that people can get to safety in time.
Dependent on American intelligence
There are fears in Ukraine that the transmission of American intelligence information will be interrupted. There had already been one in March 2025 for a week after a rift between Trump and Zelensky in the White House. According to media reports, Trump’s negotiators once again threatened the Ukrainian delegation with such a scenario during talks in Miami over the weekend. On Tuesday evening, after the first strikes in Kiev, Zelensky said it was “unfair that Ukraine had not received any warnings about ballistic missile launches.”
It is unclear why the warnings failed to materialize. Technical reasons are also conceivable. Ballistic missile launches cannot always be reliably detected. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that they were continuing to provide information to Kyiv. The spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force also said on Wednesday morning that after the first wave of attacks (without warnings), partners had, as usual, warned about the launch of ballistic missiles.
No European replacement in sight
Neither with Starlink nor with reconnaissance data can the Europeans step in for the USA and provide Ukraine with replacements. They are themselves dependent on American capabilities – in real-time battlefield surveillance as well as in satellite communications.
NATO does have 14 AWACS surveillance aircraft, which are primarily deployed on the eastern flank. They monitor the airspace over Ukraine and warn states there if missiles or drones come dangerously close to them. Depending on the altitude of the target object, their radar has a range of 400 to 500 kilometers. But it is designed for aircraft and large drones, not ballistic missiles.
It’s different with the Patriot system’s radar. It can detect such targets at a maximum distance of 180 kilometers. What the Europeans are missing, however, is the permanent monitoring from space that allows the entire trajectory of a ballistic missile to be recorded in real time.
NASA’s Space X CRS-35 Launch Jellyfish
Sunlight illuminates the exhaust plumes of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon spacecraft on Oct. 13, 2026. This visual phenomenon is known as a “jellyfish”; it happens near sunrise or sunset when the exhaust plume from the rocket becomes brightly illuminated, creating a glowing shape resembling a jellyfish.
The mission lifted off at 6:33 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying scientific investigations, supplies, and equipment to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s 35th commercial resupply services mission for NASA. The rocket’s exhaust plumes were visible across the eastern United States.
Image credit: NASA/John Kraus
THKR Screen Tip
The most important figure in the history of the US in the 21st century thus far isn’t Donald Trump… he isn’t even American by any reasoned measure. He’s a South African businessman named Elon Musk, who shot to power and became the world’s first trillionaire almost entirely on the strength of US government contracts he acquired through dark channels. Now he may well be the most powerful figure in the country. And what most Americans think they “know” about Musk consists of a long train of lies that he has carefully planted and cultivated. Go to a theatre to see the most important documentary of this decade: Musk, by Alex Gibney.
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Your Online Moment of Zen
Most of the Time
By Bob Dylan
Alternate version
Bootleg Series Volume 8
One of the saddest and most beautiful songs Dylan has ever recorded.
Reposting for anyone who missed it the first time.
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