From Politico:
Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time. …
Shapiro, a longtime DOJ veteran, said it’s not yet clear whether either of the two DOGE team members — who are not identified in her filing – actually shared data with the advocacy group, which is also unidentified. But she said emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.” …
Shapiro also revealed that Steve Davis, a senior adviser to Musk and DOGE’s team, was copied on a March 3, 2025 email that included a password-protected file containing private information of about 1,000 people contained in Social Security systems. It’s unclear, she said, whether Davis ever accessed the file. And Shapiro said current SSA employees have been unable to access the file to determine precisely what it contained. …
6 comments:
Shocking misconduct but not surprising - everyone knew this was happening.
Shapiro also revealed that despite prior assertions in court, SSA’s DOGE team members “were using links to share data through the third-party server ‘Cloudflare.’”
“Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” Shapiro indicated. “SSA did not know, until its recent review, that DOGE Team members were using Cloudflare during this period. Because Cloudflare is a third-party entity, SSA has not been able to determine exactly what data were shared to Cloudflare or whether the data still exist on the server.”
House Social Security subcommittee ranking member John B. Larson (D-Connecticut) and Ways and Means Committee ranking member Richard E. Neal (D-Massachusetts) said Tuesday that DOGE “appointees engaged in this scheme — who were never brought before Congress for approval or even publicly identified — must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for these abhorrent violations of the public trust.”
But a Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal decisions, said the department is not currently investigating DOGE.
Privacy experts said the details in the new court filing raise serious concerns about the DOGE members’ compliance with the Privacy Act, which says federal employees can only access data that they need to carry out their jobs.
I’m flabbergasted,” University of Virginia privacy law expert Danielle Citron said. “If that information is shared willingly and knowingly and they are sharing without the reason they collected it, it’s a violation of the Privacy Act.”
Joe Spielberger, the senior policy counsel at a nonpartisan watchdog group, the Project on Government Oversight, said it was a good sign that the Trump administration would make such a referral. But, he said, the corrections filing “goes way beyond potential Hatch Act violations, to say the least.”
He said the filing raised questions about whether the Social Security Administration misled the court last year about what officials knew at the time.
Tuesday’s court filing also revealed that a DOGE employee agreed to help a “political advocacy group” review voter rolls in search of voter fraud as part of an effort to “overturn election results in certain States.
The Social Security Administration only became aware of the agreement in November, when it was doing a review of internal records unrelated to the case before Hollander.
Hollander initially blocked DOGE team members from accessing Social Security’s records, but the Supreme Court later restored DOGE’s access.
The Social Security Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
Two House Democrats called for a criminal investigation into DOGE’s activities and prosecution of the team members who participated in them.
This current DOJ rarely admits they made a mistake. Secondly, why did the Supreme Court step in and give DOGE access to the files? What was so important that DOGE needed additional time to complete the project?
Tip of the iceberg. What else have they done with the data?
Notice of correction by DOJ…
DOGE teams may have sold our Social Security information and sold it to companies that were involved in election interference.
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