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It’s Christmas at the Kremlin this week.

That’s according to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow who took to her show Friday night to call attention to new reports that emerged linking Kash Patel to a Russian filmmaker with ties to the Kremlin.

A guaranteed income pilot project called the Chicago Future Fund (CFF) has just released its latest report. The project, run by Equity and Transformation (EAT) Chicago, is based in the city’s west side, where high unemployment and high rates of police activity, arrests, and incarceration have challenged local residents. CFF’s guaranteed income project provided $500 a month from March 2023 to February 2024 to 100 formerly incarcerated individuals.

Rachel Pyon, research director at EAT Chicago, who leads the CFF pilot programs, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about CFF’s promising results for employment, housing, stress relief, and more.

A lifelong Republican who once ran the U.S. Agency for International Development delivered a stinging rebuke of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, which has its sights set on all but eliminating the agency.

Andrew Natsios joined CNN's "OutFront" on Friday evening to weigh in on a federal judge's temporary reprieve to thousands of workers in the agency, halting the Trump administration's plans for a mass purge of the agency from 10,000 to around 300.

President Donald Trump has moved on from joking about acquiring Canada as a U.S. state to thinking it's a good idea, former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Beth Sanner told CNN's Jake Tapper on Friday.

Trump has repeatedly made this suggestion as a solution to the trade war he started with Canada, imposing massive tariffs on their goods before agreeing at the last minute to a one-month delay while Canada moves forward with a pre-existing plan to secure its border with the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau caused a stir north of the border this week when he was caught on hot mic expressing his concern that Trump's interest in acquiring his country was "a real thing."

Tech billionaire Elon Musk was raked over the coals on Friday morning by a conservative who served in the administration of President George W. Bush for his part is dismantling USAID.

According to Andrew Natsios, who ran USAID from 2001 to 2006, what Musk is doing will create irreparable damage to the reputation of the U.S. and may be impossible to reverse.

Speaking with the hosts of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Natsios also took a shot at Donald Trump for calling USAID workers "lunatics."

ALSO READ: Top GOPer's ‘most immediate’ priority for new committee includes probing a MAGA conspiracy

After worrying, "All of that is being shut down. The camps are being collapsed in many areas, and people who've had their houses burned down, their children raped, who are traumatized, were getting food aid from us, the whole operation is going to be shut down," he told the hosts. "Now, Marco Rubio, who I've always had great respect for, is being blamed for this. But this is being orchestrated by Musk, not Marco Rubio and by the director of OMB. They don't care what happens to the people of the world because they don't vote in the United States."

"They don't care that hundreds of millions of people are going to be at the edge of starvation if these programs aren't restored immediately," he added. "Now, let me let me say the notion that you're going to spend $38 billion with 292 people is ridiculous. I am, one, a conservative Republican. I served in the Massachusetts House for 12 years as a Republican. I am a lieutenant colonel in the reserves, I am retired, I served in the first Gulf War. I am not a liberal. I am not on the left. Many, many church-based organizations get large amounts of money from USAID to do humanitarian work. There will be no one to process the grants, there will be no one to ship the food aid, because all those people have been fired or laid off."

"I trained students, many of them Roman Catholic and Evangelical, in Texas, to work at AID all of them have been laid off –– all of them," he exclaimed. "They were not lunatics they were not communists, and it's outrageous for the president to make those claims because it's complete nonsense."

He later added, "I have great respect for the State Department, they're the best diplomats in the world. I was a diplomat for a while as President Bush's envoy to Sudan, but they are not operational. They cannot deploy disaster assistance response teams which AID sends all over the world. They hire generalists in the foreign service, AID hires specialists."

"You have to have an advanced degree to work in AID, or you can't get hired, which means Phds and medical doctors, agricultural economists, agricultural scientists," he elaborated. "We have the logisticians. How do you think food aid gets moved? It doesn't just appear it magically. You have to have people, experts in logistics –– 294 people to spend to spend $38 billion. What are they, idiots?"

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Panelists on "CNN This Morning" were puzzled on Friday over the morbid gift offered to president Donald Trump by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The foreign leader gave Trump a golden pager, an allusion to a deadly September operation carried out by Israel in Lebanon targeting devices carried by members of the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, and the panelists agreed it was one of the stranger gifts received by an American president.

Reacting to a Guardian report that Donald Trump's administration is already inflating numbers to make the first three weeks more successful than they have been, journalist John Heilemann let out an expletive on MSNBC on Friday morning.

A "Morning Joe" co-host prompted the discussion by noting a report in the Guardian that stated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been tampering with time-stamps on press releases about immigrant roundups to create the impression they have been wildly successful in their mission.

Adding to reports that billionaire Elon Musk is making the lives of Donald Trump's inner circle a living hell with his freelancing, Wired's Jake Lahut reported on MSNBC that some are looking to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to step in and right the ship.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Way Too Early" with host Ali Vitali, Lahut claimed relations between some Trump insiders and the unelected tech billionaire are reaching a tipping point.

"You spoke to half a dozen Trump loyalists, Republican aides and advisers inside and around the administration," Vitali prompted her guest. "I think many of them, even though they say they're shocked to be saying this, the rift almost seemed inevitable. But how much of a rift actually is it? And what is the sense behind the scenes?"

ALSO READ: Fox News has blood on its hands as Trump twists the knife

"I still don't have a clear sense of the factions at play here, but it's happening," Lahut replied. "I wouldn't call it a full-blown freak-out quite yet, but the folks I talked to have all been loyal to Trump and have been on the [Trump] train since before January 6th, and it takes quite a lot to rattle or surprise these people."

"And these are folk who, you know, normally would be inclined to spin this in some sort of way," he added. "Instead, they don't know who to turn to. A lot of them want Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, to intervene in some form."

"I don't have any idea what that would look like," he confessed.

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Tech billionaire Elon Musk is leading an effort to drastically cut the federal workforce, setting off court challenges and furious pushback by Democratic lawmakers, and CNN's Kasie Hunt laughed off a conservative guest for downplaying his role in Donald Trump's administration.

The administration gave millions of federal employees until midnight Thursday to decide on a "deferred resignation" offer, which a federal judge has temporarily suspended while court challenges play out over its legality, and Wall Street Journal reporter Annie Linskey said the move closely resembles the wrecking ball Musk took to Twitter's workforce after taking control of the social media platform he later renamed X.

A CNN segment revolving around reports that the Trump administration is preparing to let go thousands of government health workers led to an on-air smackdown Thursday night when a prominent physician repeatedly clashed with a former Republican National Committee spokesperson.

The tense TV moment unfolded when Dr. Chris T. Pernell, a fellow and regent-at-large for the American College of Preventive Medicine, launched into her experience battling the COVID-19 pandemic with President Donald Trump in the White House.

The effort by President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk to purge the federal workforce with a so-called buyout program is filled with ambiguity and fraught with two major problems, according to CNN legal analyst Elliot Williams.

The analysis came Thursday when Williams, a former federal prosecutor, was asked about the legality surrounding the program that the White House is calling a “buyout” – which has drawn skepticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and threw several federal agencies into chaos.

A legal scholar minced no words Thursday evening on CNN, flagging what he called a "doomsday scenario" that may come to pass if part of President Donald Trump's agenda is dealt a fatal blow by the courts.

Anchor Erin Burnett asked panelists including former Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), a former prosecutor, if they believe Trump will abide by court rulings after he was dealt two blows Thursday.

Conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg is unsettled by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's gift to President Donald Trump during their meeting this week.

Specifically, he argued on CNN Thursday evening, the gift unnecessarily celebrated military violence.