There’s “real energy” in the halls of Congress and across the country as voters begin to take notice of “just how lawless” President Donald Trump’s new administration is prepared to be – and Elon Musk is at that top of that list, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
In an interview published Wednesday in Rolling Stone, Warren saved her fiercest attacks for Musk as she condemned the “monumental conflicts” he carried into Capitol Hill as he began an unprecedented assault on the federal government as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“I’ve been in the fight against conflicts of interest for a long time, but I’ve never seen anything like the Musk conflicts,” Warren told Rolling Stone. “They are the Mount Everest of conflicts — something on a scale that no one had contemplated.”
Warren, who was instrumental in establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, ripped apart the Trump administration’s move to dismantle the watchdog agency. She told the magazine Wednesday that if she could meet face-to-face with Musk, she would tell him: “If you want to cut costs, there are legal ways to do that — in fact, some damn good ways.”
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“But you have to be willing to stand up and defend your ideas and persuade people to vote for them,” Warren said. “You don’t get to slither around in the dark and put a handful of teenage hackers into the middle of [America’s] payments systems, as a way to give yourself control of the functioning of our government.”
The Massachusetts senator added that the $288 million the tech billionaire spent helping elect Trump “is a smart investment that he’s planning to collect on.”
“And sidelining the CFPB and putting his little suck-ups in there to take the data from that agency will create a return on investment many times over,” she said to Rolling Stone.
Warren concluded: “We have our toes on the line of a constitutional crisis right now.”