Week 20: Trump Partners With Palantir To Build A Real World Panopticon
All-Seeing Palantir Zeroes In On Us While MAGAworld Gleefully Breaks The Law
It’s week twenty of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight the latest slate of corporate corruption shaping the Trump Administration and the material impacts of that corruption on real people. Our first nineteen issues can be found here, and follow us on Bluesky and X for more updates on this work.
This week has put on full display the Trump administration's embrace of the white collar criminals, grifters, harmful extractive industries, and fascist tech bros jointly wreaking havoc on our social institutions and the environment. From Boeing sidestepping a criminal trial to a Trump-affiliated Chilean business magnate securing permission to mine on federal land and Peter Thiel’s Palantir building a comprehensive database of American’s sensitive information, corruption is fueling the ever-expanding war that corporations are waging on normal people.
…THEN THEY CAME FOR ME
Palantir Is Building A Panoptic Database Of Every American’s Personal Information. A recent New York Times report suggests that Palantir, enabled by a March executive order from Trump, is creating a comprehensive database of American’s sensitive government information. The company is reportedly using a tool called Foundry to merge data across federal agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service, compiling a cohesive window into every citizen’s lives.
While data brokers like Google already surveil a disturbing amount of our day to day lives, they are unable to access what is in our tax returns, how much debt we have, if we have any medical conditions, or the amount of money in our bank accounts—all of which could be contained in Palantir’s database.
In “First they came…” fashion, it seems like a wider extension of Palantir’s frightening surveillance tool called ImmigrationOS, which collected data on undocumented people to help ICE’s deportation campaigns.
PROFITING WHILE THE WORLD BURNS
Millions of Acres of Alaskan Wilderness Were Opened Up To Oil and Natural Gas Extraction. The Department of Interior, which oversees permits for oil and gas exploration on public lands, rolled back a Biden-era executive order that prohibited extraction in a 23 million acre area of Alaska known as the National Petroleum Reserve. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has a number of close ties to the fossil fuel industry. These connections have clearly paid off for the extractors, with industry-funded groups applauding the approval.
The reserve is central to the way of life of Iṅupiat people, for whom the area is their homeland. It also supports over 40 other indigenous communities with its water and other resources. Drilling would threaten the area’s rolling array of sensitive ecological zones and wildlife habitats: as a designated Important Bird Area (IBA), it crucially supports a number of threatened bird species such as Black Brants, whose health is particularly vulnerable to oil spills. Millions of birds from the entire world, of various species, migrate to the area to lay eggs. A variety of other wildlife will be harmed, including wolverines, polar bears, caribou, arctic foxes, moose, and even coastal marine animals such as beluga whales and walruses.
A Chilean Business Magnate Connected To The Trump Family Might Be Allowed To Mine On Protected Federal Land In Minnesota. As our friends at The Lever reported this week, Antofagasta, a mining company that is part of Luksic Group, the “largest business empire in Chile,” was granted permission to start mining in Minnesota in Trump’s budget reconciliation bill. Andrónico Luksic, the business magnate who owns the group, was Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s landlord from 2017 to 2021, when they lived in a mansion he owned in D.C. Back then, Luksic sued the federal government during the first Trump administration seeking approval for mining leases in Minnesota, which was granted a year after Trump’s children moved into the mansion.
The mine would release toxic pollutants into the nearby Boundary Waters, a collection of lakes, forests, and sensitive wildlife habitats that had previously been protected by a 20 year mining ban.
A New Report Summarizes All The Ways Elon Musk Undermined The Federal Government To Enrich Himself. The 14 page report released by Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office notes Musk’s direct influence over regulatory changes, firings, and political appointments at the FAA all the way to the FCC, SEC, NLRB and more. While Musk might be departing his role in the government, the 130 days he spent directing regulatory agencies to set the rules of the market in his favor has likely locked in a steady stream of public funds to his pockets. Unless Trump proves that their feud is not yet another kayfabe episode.
It’s exactly what my colleague Timi Iwayemi predicted last November:
“This is another dynamic Musk is likely to recreate, considering his deep involvement with numerous federal agencies. So even in situations where cuts are off the table, Musk and his allies would glean information on agencies’ internal deliberations as it pertains to regulations, enforcement, and procurement. In practice, insider knowledge like this could privilege Musk’s SpaceX over competitors such as Boeing in future dealings with NASA, for example. What’s more, if there are insufficient firewalls, he could learn more about the multiple investigations into his companies.”
See more: DOGE Still Lives, and We Will Continue To Track It; Elon Musk’s Fake Retreat From DOGE
THE HEYDAY OF WHITE-COLLAR CRIME
It’s Not A Crime To Kill 346 People? The aerospace company and the Department of Justice finalized the details of a settlement agreement on Wednesday in which Boeing would pay $1.1 billion and avoid a criminal fraud trial once a federal judge approves. The lawyer representing the families of the 346 people killed in two plane crashes called the deal “morally repugnant.”
See more: The Continued Decline of White Collar Prosecutions; TRACKER: Cuts to Corporate Enforcement Capacity
A New Trump Corruption Innovation: The Presidential Pardon Market. For lobbying and consulting firms connected to Trump, pardons are becoming a booming new source of profit. Reporting from NBC suggests that the going price for a pardon may be as high as $5 million. While presidents usually issue pardons at the end of their term, Trump is dishing them out on a rolling basis – allowing for an exclusive market to form around pardon lobbying, and for the price to keep climbing in the process.
Trump has already issued more first year pardons than the last five presidents. Many of those have been granted to tax evaders and fraudsters who have enough social and financial capital to get in the president's ear. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has assembled a running list of all the corrupt politicians who have received pardons from Trump, showing that bribery and racketeering are also on the list of crimes Trump is happy to forgive. It seems that the rule of law is a mere suggestion for MAGAworld members in Trump’s America.
Wall Street Continues To Run Up The Score On Consumers With The Helpful Aid Of Trump’s CFPB. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau capitulated to the banking industry's legal attacks on its October 2024 Open Banking Rule. In a newly filed brief, the CFPB agreed the rule is unlawful and that it should be “set aside.”
Originally finalized by Biden-appointed CFPB head Rohit Chopra in October 2024, the rule made it easier for consumers to switch between credit providers and financial institutions to get the most favorable rates, in turn creating more competition that would bring loan prices down.
Immediately after the rule was finalized in October 2024, the Banking Policy Institute and Kentucky Bankers Association sued the CFPB to fight it. Now, they have their wish as the Russell Vought-led CFPB strips away yet another pro-consumer rule.
TRUMP BROS CAN NO LONGER KEEP TRACK OF THEIR SPRAWLING GRIFT NETWORK
Trump’s Memecoin—A Battle Between The Grifters. On Tuesday, the $Trump memecoin’s official Twitter account announced a digital wallet that would be branded with Trump’s name and face, and would be used to trade the coin as well as other cryptocurrencies. The venture seems to be led by Bill Zanker, a “longtime Trump business partner and the architect of the president’s memecoin.” To create the wallet, the coin partnered with a company called Magic Eden—one of the attendees of an exclusive White House dinner staged for the top 220 holders of $Trump.
The wallet launch quickly got messy. Despite the memecoin’s team formally announcing the new wallet, Don Jr., Eric Trump, and even Barron Trump have all denounced the project on social media, telling The New York Times they are ready to legally challenge its creation. The reason for the denouncement is likely because the Trump bros already have a preferred grift: a plan to launch a wallet for World Liberty Financial, the masthead of Trump’s cryptocurrency-corruption that has created $550 million in sales of its governance token, with wealthy buyers purchasing tens of millions of it, potentially in return for political favors from the administration.
Don Jr. 's “GrabAGun,” A Virtual Marketplace for Rifles, Partnered With An AI Firm And Is Preparing To Go Public On The New York Stock Exchange. GrabAGun is finalizing its SEC paperwork and will soon go public “under the proposed symbols ‘PEW’ and PEWW’.” The company also partnered with AI firm Compatio to give users the ability to use AI to customize their rifles—even gun mania is now fueled by the ever expanding sea of AI slop.
Don Jr. and Omeed Malik are both heavily involved in GrabAGun, mainly through their shared venture capital firm 1789 Capital. Malik has openly claimed they are seeking to profit on the “parallel economy” of 73 million Trump voters, and its investment funds have piled up ever since Trump was inaugurated.
Firehawk—A New Source Of Public Funds For Don Jr. And Malik’s 1789 Capital. The defense contractor, backed by Don Jr. and Malik, was recently awarded a $4.9 million contract by the US Air Force “to support the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) initiatives to accelerate the development of next-generation hybrid rocket engines.” Last January, 1789 Capital led a $60 million Series C funding round by investing $15 million into the company.
Firehawk also secured a $1.25 million contract with the Air Force in April. To date, the company has received $8.2 million in public funding.
Major resource updates this week include:
TRACKER: Cuts to Corporate Enforcement Capacity — Our new tracker which records cuts made by the Trump administration to enforcement capacity at agencies responsible for overseeing corporations’ activities and identifying wrongdoing.
“Enforcement capacity” refers to staffing and funding dedicated to monitoring, oversight, investigation, and preparation of cases against corporations for breaking the law. Cuts to and attacks on enforcement capacity can include firings, buyout offers, funding cuts, reorganizations, and other steps the Trump administration has taken to date.
For more on our work tracking the Trump administration, visit DogeWatch.
And if you’ve got any tips on DOGE personnel or updates to any of our DogeWatch trackers, reach out to us at revolvingdoorproject@protonmail.com.
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I do not believe Trump / Musk fall out crap for one minute.