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Elon Musk barred from accessing US Treasury payments data

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Elon Musk barred from accessing US Treasury payments data

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Elon Musk’s crusade to slash US government spending suffered setbacks on Thursday after a federal judged barred the Treasury department from handing data from its payments system to outsiders and one of the billionaire’s staffers was forced to resign over racist social media posts.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly put the temporary order in place after Musk boasted that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was “rapidly shutting down” Treasury remittances. They apparently gained access to the system that disburses trillions of dollars, including social security payments and Medicare, each year.

Hours after the judge’s decision, 25-year-old coder Marko Elez, who was working for Doge at the Treasury, abruptly resigned after apparently racist comments from a dormant social media account were unearthed. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the historic remarks.

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Elez was one of a handful of young engineers recruited by Musk’s Doge and installed in various government agencies. When asked about their roles this week, President Donald Trump called the coders “very smart” and defended their work.

Representatives of government employees and retirees had earlier this week sued to stop the sensitive data — accessed by Elez — being shared with Musk and others at Doge, arguing that such moves were “depriving them of privacy protections guaranteed to them by federal law”.

Although the US government reassured the court that only two of Doge’s emissaries, Cloud Software Group chief executive Tom Krause and Elez, had access to the sensitive system, Kollar-Kotelly pushed for an order preventing any information being shared outside the Treasury, while she considers a more permanent injunction. 

As a result, Musk himself will not be able to review data pulled from the payments system. 

The legal challenge comes as Treasury officials and the White House have sought to quell fears over Musk’s and Doge’s purported access to the system, and his broader authority, after the entrepreneur suggested his team was unilaterally cancelling “illegal” payments. 

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On Monday, Trump said Musk, who has been made a special government employee, “can’t do — and won’t do — anything without our approval”. 

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt also confirmed that Musk would extricate himself from any situations where he might have a conflict: “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with [his companies’] contracts and the funding that Doge is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts . . . he has abided by all applicable laws.”

Anti-Musk protesters outside the US Department of Labor in Washington on Wednesday © AP

Doge, whose emissaries have infiltrated the networks of various government agencies, including USAID, Health and Human Services and the Department of Transportation, has been sued multiple times by groups claiming the body is circumventing various legal protections.

Separately on Thursday, a judge in Massachusetts ordered a deadline for federal employees to accept or reject a buyout package — part of a personnel reduction effort spearheaded by Musk — to be extended at least until Monday.

The White House also confirmed that only 40,000 workers had thus far accepted the offer, well short of the hundreds of thousands it had previously forecast.

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Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Washington

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Justice Department sues Chicago and Illinois over 'sanctuary' laws

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Justice Department sues Chicago and Illinois over 'sanctuary' laws

A pedestrian walks past the flag of Puerto Rico and the colorful door to the sanctuary apartment of Chicago’s Adalberto Memorial United Methodist Church in Chicago in 2021. The church has provided shelter to immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP


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Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

The Department of Justice is suing the City of Chicago, the state of Illinois and Cook County over their “sanctuary laws” that limit cooperation with immigration authorities.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Illinois, accuses those jurisdictions of “making it more difficult for, and deliberately impeding, federal immigration officers’ ability to carry out their responsibilities.” 

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Responding to the lawsuit, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s office said in a statement: “The bipartisan Illinois TRUST Act, signed into law by a Republican governor, has always been compliant with federal law and still is today. … Instead of working with us to support law enforcement, the Trump Administration is making it more difficult to protect the public, just like they did when Trump pardoned the convicted January 6 violent criminals. We look forward to seeing them in court.”

President Trump and his appointees have often threatened to punish “sanctuary cities” and states before. During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department tried to withhold funding from those jurisdictions — but they fought back and were often able to defeat those efforts in court.

Chicago has been a focus for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations since President Trump returned to office, spreading fear in immigrant communities and schools across the city and beyond.

Mayor Brandon Johnson told NPR’s Morning Edition that Chicago will stand by its policies.

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“We are firm in that our police department will not intervene or participate in any way” in immigration enforcement, Johnson said last month. “Whether you’re undocumented, whether you are seeking asylum or whether you’re seeking a good paying job, we’re going to fight and stand up for working people.”

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Russian billionaires Fridman and Aven sell Alfa-Bank stakes in bid to overturn sanctions

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Russian billionaires Fridman and Aven sell Alfa-Bank stakes in bid to overturn sanctions

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The sanctioned billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven have sold their stakes in Russia’s largest private lender and its insurance arm, as they attempt to overturn EU sanctions against them.

Fridman and Aven offloaded Alfa-Bank and Alfa Strakhovanie to their longtime partner Andrei Kosogov last year, according to documents seen by the Financial Times, completing a deal struck in 2023 that values the two companies at about Rbs240bn ($2.5bn). The oligarchs held a combined 45 per cent stake in the bank and a 42 per cent stake in the insurer.

Kosogov, who is not under sanctions, has emerged from relative obscurity to become the largest shareholder in Alfa-Bank and LetterOne, the Mayfair-based conglomerate, after buying out his sanctioned partners.

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The oligarchs hope that selling the bank and insurer — a deal expedited by Russian government intervention on ownership of “economically significant” firms — will aid their challenge to the EU sanctions imposed on them in response to president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Last year, the EU’s General Court partially annulled the basis for the sanctions by ruling the bloc had not presented enough evidence to show Fridman and Aven were involved in efforts to undermine Ukraine.

The oligarchs’ victory was the highest profile blow to the EU sanctions regime against Russia since the invasion.

The EU sanctions remain in place, however, under a separate justification that points to Fridman and Aven’s status as “leading business persons [ . . .] involved in an economic sector providing a substantial source of revenue” to the Kremlin.

Fridman and Aven are separately challenging that justification. If they are successful, EU member states could decide to lift the sanctions, appeal the court decision or reinstate them under another new justification. Latvia has appealed against the first ruling in the oligarchs’ favour.

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Anitta Hipper, EU spokesperson for foreign affairs, said the European Commission could not comment on ongoing legal proceedings. “Restrictive measures against Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman remain in place — these were renewed based on the Council decisions in September 2023 and March 2024,” she said.

Hipper added that the council of EU member states “regularly reviews the listings”.

UK and EU sanctions forced Fridman and Aven, as well as their former partners German Khan and Alexei Kuzmichev, to cede control over investment group LetterOne and resign from its board.

Kosogov, the former head of Alfa’s investment unit, had the smallest share in the oligarchs’ empire until he bought Khan’s and Kuzmichev’s stakes in Alfa-Bank and LetterOne in 2022, making him the largest shareholder in both companies. Khan and Kuzmichev lent Kosogov funds to buy their stakes in LetterOne for a combined $7bn and agreed an option allowing them to buy them back within 10 years, according to a High Court ruling in December.

Kosogov then agreed a deal to buy Fridman and Aven’s stakes in Alfa-Bank via a Cypriot holding company and secured an agreement to finance the purchase with a loan from state-run Gazprombank, according to correspondence seen by the FT.

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The regulatory approval in Cyprus required for the sale stalled, however, prompting repeated public complaints by Alfa-Bank’s Luxembourg-based parent company.

In the meantime, Russia passed a law allowing the state to redomicile “economically significant” companies held in western jurisdictions.

The initial list of such firms released by Russia’s government last March only named six — the first three of which were the local holding companies controlling Alfa-Bank, Alfa Strakhovanie, and X5, the supermarket group founded by Fridman.

Two months later, a Russian court annulled the Luxembourg-based company’s rights to Alfa-Bank and Alfa Strakhovanie, transferring Fridman and Aven the rights to hold the shares or offload them to Kosogov.

Kosogov has undertaken to pay for the deal out of his own funds, according to the sale agreements.

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Though Cyprus approved the deal in July, the Russian decision had in effect rendered it moot as Fridman and Aven no longer needed to seek EU approval to transfer control of the Russian companies.

The law “gives owners a legal way to wipe their hands, because it’s a court and government decision that they seemingly have nothing to do with, but the companies on the list always had good relations with the Russian government,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

By allowing Russian companies to pay dividends and protecting them from seizure under the sanctions, the process “ties their owners to the Russian regime even more closely”, she added.

Fridman and Aven declined to comment. Kosogov did not respond to a request for comment.

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