Senators Reed, Shaheen want Musk Russia contact probe
Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a senior Democrat on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees send a letter (link) to Attorney General Garland and Defence Department Inspector General Storch asking for a proble into Musk’s contact with Russian officials.
We write with serious concern regarding open source reporting detailing conversations between Russian officials and the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk. On October 25, the Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Musk had multiple, high level conversations with Russian President Vladmir Putin as early as 2022, and sustained contact with high-level Russian officials, including Putin’s deputy chief of staff, Sergei Kiriyenko.1 At the same time, Mr. Musk asserts that he holds a Top Secret level security clearance. These relationships between a well-known U.S. adversary and Mr. Musk, a beneficiary of billions of dollars in U.S. government funding, pose serious questions regarding Mr. Musk’s reliability as a government contractor and a clearance holder. We urgently call upon the U.S. government to open an investigation up to and including a determination by the senior debarment official of the Department of Defense, consistent with section 4654 of title 10 United States Code, to determine whether this behavior should force a review of Mr. Musk’s continued involvement in SpaceX’s varying contracts with the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.
Over a series of posts Musk reacts:
I’m going to find out who’s making these accusations and nuke them. [Shaheen and Reed] are just the puppets. Who actually wrote this and made those knuckleheads sign it?
I’m going to find out who’s making these accusations and nuke them
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 16, 2024
Unemployment benefit restoration
Sens. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) introduce new legislation to restore emergency unemployment benefits. Unlike the Reed/Heller bill passed by the Senate in April 2014, this bill does not include retroactive payments for jobless Americans. Any unemployed person whose aid was ended in December would be eligible to receive insurance payments for as many weeks as they had remaining when benefits ceased. Reed states:
I would rather fix the entire problem, but there’s not the votes to do everything. I understand that some people will say, ‘this is not fair. I was cut off for two months before I was able to find a job and this bill isn’t retroactive so it won’t cover me.’ I agree that this program should never have been forced to expire and it is unfair that partisan gridlock in the House prevented the bipartisan, Senate-passed Reed-Heller fix from ever getting an up or down vote and becoming law.
Unemployment extension
The Senate passes a bipartisan bill reauthorizing emergency unemployment insurance in a 59-38 vote. The bill is authored by Sens. Jack Reed (D-RI) and Dean Heller (R-NV). Senate Democrats incorporated Republican ideas into the bill, including banning millionaires from receiving benefits and offering enhanced assessments and referrals to reemployment services. It is fully paid for by extending ‘pension smoothing’ provisions and customs user fees. Reed:
Millions of Americans are struggling to find work, and today, the U.S. Senate finally passed a bipartisan bill to provide them some targeted, temporary relief. Restoring emergency unemployment insurance is the right thing to do and this is a critical moment to get it done. The bipartisan bill we crafted is a fiscally responsible compromise that will help save and create jobs, assist our neighbors in need, and improve both our short-term and long-term national economic health.