Panic! At the FBI

Last month, The Atlantic published a story about FBI director Kash Patel. It shared sources’ accounts of Patel acting erratically, being frequently absent from his job, and drinking excessively. Then, he sued The Atlantic and the reporter who wrote the story, saying it included false information. Then, in what’s been described as an effort to make you forget about that Atlantic story and convince you the agency he runs is really cool and fun and hot actually, Patel posted what appears to be an AI-generated promotional video essentially plagiarizing a 1994 Beastie Boys music video.

Two days later, MS NOW reported that the FBI launched a criminal investigation focusing on The Atlantic journalist who wrote the story about Patel’s drinking. Sources told MS Now the agents involved are part of a unit that typically focuses on officials who divulge state secrets or classified documents, not leaks to reporters. For those keeping track at home, this means the FBI director is simultaneously arguing that somebody leaked things that were happening inside of the FBI and that the story about those things is not true. Curious!

The same day that MS NOW reported on the criminal investigation, The Atlantic published another story by the same reporter. In it, people in the FBI director’s orbit describe Patel traveling with personalized bottles of liquor as well as gifting these bottles to staff and civilians while on official business. A spokesperson insisted to the reporter that Patel was following ethical guidelines. When asked what those guidelines were, exactly, he did not clarify.

And the next day, MS NOW published a story in which sources told them Patel had ordered polygraph tests on over two dozen members of his team, which I hope does not give Dave any ideas. The polygraph tests are reportedly meant to find leaks among his team. Patel testified before the Senate about all of this, leading to contentious back-and-forths with Democratic lawmakers.

Transportation secretary and aspiring YouTube star Sean Duffy is launching a web video series that raises some ethical questions. A forthcoming YouTube series will show Duffy and his family road tripping across the U.S. in honor of the country’s 250th birthday.

But if I can’t afford gas, and you can’t afford gas, then who’s paying for Sean Duffy’s road trip? Reportedly, a nonprofit whose list of public sponsors includes companies with ties to the Department of Transportation, which Duffy runs. In other words, companies that a government official is supposed to regulate indirectly paid for that official’s family road trip.

A government watchdog filed a complaint over this, alleging Duffy violated rules around gifts and travel. The group is urging the Transportation Office’s inspector general to look into whether taxpayer money went into promoting the show and whether Duffy solicited gifts.

This is a wild sentence to write, but this is not the Transportation Secretary’s first reality series. Duffy was previously on “The Real World: Boston” in 1997 (before I was born, as Dave sadly noted in the LNI slack). He later met his wife on another MTV reality series called “Road Rules: All Stars,” also before I was born.

We can’t. Because it’s leaky, algae-ridden and not American flag blue. At least, that’s how Trump described it when he decided to renovate it.

Trump’s reflecting pool renovation project is reaching a $15 million price tag, according to an ABC News review of federal contract records. $15 million is way more than the $1.5 million estimate Trump previously gave for the renovation.

The contracts didn’t go through a competitive bidding process because the administration argued there was an unusual or compelling urgency to finish the project by the 250th birthday of the United States.

As a result, the contractor renovating the reflecting pool is reportedly the same firm that Trump says works on his pools at his Virginia golf club.

The pool is also, hilariously, still not American flag blue.

If 92-year-old Republican Senator Chuck Grassley is reelected, he will be 101 when his next term expires. Trump is the oldest person to ever serve as president and regularly appears to fall asleep in meetings. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein died in office in 2023 at age 90, after months of questions over whether she was in decline. Five members of our current Congress have died in office, and they were all over age 65.

Calls for age limits in Congress often draw critiques that such a policy would be ageist. It also points to a disparity between elected officials and the people they represent. Boomers and the Silent Generation make up almost half of the U.S. House of Representatives and two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. That’s way more than the general population, even if we exclude people under age 25 who aren’t eligible to serve in Congress.

This brings us to this week’s media literacy tip from our friends at MediaWise! When journalists report on trends like how Congress keeps getting older, journalists ensure accuracy by citing experts. And you, too, can check the evidence behind a story to make sure it holds up!

AI is not immune to shrinkflation, which is when manufacturers make products smaller or lower quality without lowering prices.

Inc. wrote that tech companies have paused signups for some AI tools, introduced more pricing tiers, and even admitted they’ve accidentally given users worse versions of their products than the ones they meant to provide.

Behind all this are the rising costs of AI. People are using it way more and for more complex tasks. Nvidia develops most of the chips that are powering the AI boom, and they say that can now cost more than human employees’ salaries. More usage + higher costs for that usage = a problem for AI companies.