On Sunday's edition of MSNBC's The Weekend, co-host Alicia Menendez said that NBC News had obtained a copy of the email sent out to federal employees at Elon Musk's behest requiring them to list five things that they had accomplished in the last week.
If the show's panelists had to list five things they had recently accomplished, one thing they couldn't mention was actually having read that email.
Because if they had, they wouldn't have fretted, as two of them did, that in responding to the email, "classified information" or secrets would be divulged.
That's because, as you' see, the email instructed recipients in bold letters, "do not send any classified information."
So there was no risk of classified information being divulged. Unless the federal employees--described as "heroes" by a panelist--are incompetent or subversive.
A pervasive theme in the liberal media has been to condemn the Trump administration's cruelty in firing federal workers. But guess who else fires people? NBC News, MSNBC's parent company. Last month, NBC News announced that it was laying off 40 staffers.
And just today, as our Tim Graham has noted, news broke that MSNBC itself has fired Joy Reid.
And guess who are the beneficiaries of Reid's defenestration? Yup: the hosts of The Weekend! Menendez, Symone Sanders, and Michael Steele reportedly will be moving from the relative obscurity of their weekend-morning slot to occupy the higher profile 7 pm weekday timeslot that used to be Reid's.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
The Weekend
2/23/25
8:00 am ETALICIA MENENDEZ: New overnight, Elon Musk demands federal employees justify their work or resign. The bizarre new email that's unnerving government agencies.
. . .
SYMONE SANDERS: Executing that Project 2025 strategy with Donald Trump's approval, Elon Musk wants federal workers to sing for their supper.
Last night, federal received an email asking them to summarize their work from last week. Yes, this is what happened. The unelected billionaire, he actually posted on his social media site, quote, Failure to respond will be taken as a
. . .
MICHAEL STEELE: This nonsensical email from Elon Musk acting like we're in kindergarten. Tell us what you did last week.
. . .
MENENDEZ: Let's talk about those emails that were sent from the Office of Personnel Management. They were shared with NBC News. They asked employees to send approximately five bullet points listing what accomplished this week, ccing their managers. They set a deadline of Monday at 11.59 p.m. Eastern. Notably, FBI Director Kash Patel instructed employees to pause any response to the email. State Department employees were told to do the same.
Because, you know, you wouldn't want FBI secrets and State Department secrets in emails that then could be widely circulated. Will their incompetence be their undoing?
. . .
HEATH MAYO: It's disgusting, quite frankly. It's indignant. It's insulting. And, you know, federal workers, you know, I don't know how they're going to really step through this, honestly. I feel for them. I don't know how you respond to an email like that. And certainly, to your point, the threat to classified information leaking out, I mean, you basically would have to just say, one, you know, redacted, two, redacted. I mean, you'd have to redact everything you're working on for some of these people. So it just doesn't make a lot of sense.
. . .
COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: When you add all these assaults up, it really is an attempted coup. It's not a violent coup, of course. But there are different kinds of coups. Political scientists talk about auto coups. And what an auto coup is, is when the President of the United States or a person in power tries to seize and rearrange the law so that it only serves that person. So it only serves Trump.
And that's what's going on here, this attempted auto coup. How do you prevent it? You need those who are charged, the more than two million people in the executive branch, to carry out the law, to refuse to go along with illegal orders and an attempt to really destroy the system of American government, not just what Trump calls the bureaucracy.
