
Trump and Musk take questions from reporters in Oval Office
NBC News- 1,266 views
- 12 Feb 2025
Elon Musk joined President Trump in the Oval Office and took questions from reporters about the work of the Department of ...
Coming off with?
X, are you okay? This is X, and he's a great guy. High IQ. He's a high IQ individual.
He's got this cool plane. He's gone.
So thank you very much. We had a busy day today. The King just left, and we've had a great discussion, terrific discussion, concerning Gaza and everything else. We had discussions also about Saturday at 12: 00. It's going to be a big moment. We'll see what happens. I don't expect much happening with these people, but we'll see what happens. We're going to be signing a very important deal today. It's George, and I'm going to ask Elon to tell you a little bit about it and some of the things that we found which are shocking. Billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. I think it's very important. That's one of the reasons I got elected. I said, We're going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that sick, and that corrupt. It seems hard to believe that judges want to try and stop us from looking for corruption, especially when we found hundreds of millions of dollars worth, much more than that, in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption, and it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, We don't want you to do that.
Well, so maybe we have to look at the judges because that's very I think it's a very serious violation. I'll ask Elon Musk to say a few words, and we'll take some questions. Elon, go ahead.
Sure. At a high level, you say, what is the goal of Doge, and I think a significant part of this of presidency, is to restore democracy. This may seem like, well, are we in a democracy? Well, if you don't have a feedback with Okay. I would have to. Sorry. I tell you gravitas can be difficult sometimes. If there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected in the form of the President and the Senate and the House, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy. It's incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, we fix that feedback loop, and that the public's elected representatives, the President, the House, and the Senate, decide what happens, as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy. This is not to say that there are good people who are in the federal bureaucracy, but But you can't have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that's responsive to the people.
That's the whole point of a democracy. If you asked the founders today and said, What do you think of the way things have turned out. We have this unelected, fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy, which has, in a lot of ways, currently more power than any elected representative. This is This is not something that people want, and it does not match the will of the people. It's just something we got to fix. They're also going to address the deficit. We've got a $2 trillion deficit, and If we don't do something about this deficit, the country is going bankrupt. It's really astounding that the interest payments alone on the national debt exceed the Defense Department budget, which is shocking because we spend a lot of money on defense. If that just keeps going, we're essentially going to bank up the country. What I really would say is it's not optional for us to reduce the federal expenses. It's essential. It's essential for America to remain solvent as a country, and it's essential for America to have the resources necessary to provide things to its citizens and not simply be servicing vast amounts of debt.
Also, could you mention some of the things that your your team has found some of the crazy numbers, including the woman that walked away with about 30 million, et cetera?
We do find it rather odd that there are quite a few people in the bureaucracy who have ostensibly a salary of a few hundred thousand dollars, but somehow managed to accrue tens of millions of dollars in networth while they are in that position, which is what happened at USA We're just curious as to where it came from. Maybe they're very good at investing, in which case we should take their investment advice, perhaps. But they seem to be mysteriously, they get wealthy. Why? Where does it come from? I think the reality is that they're getting wealthier to transfer expense. That's the honest truth of it. If you look at, say, Treasury, for example, basic controls that should be in place, that are in place in any company, such as making sure that any given payment has a payment categorization code, that there is a comment field that describes the payment, and that if a payment is on the do not pay list that you don't actually pay it. None of those things are true currently. The reason that departments can't pass audits is because the payments don't have a categorization code. It's like just a massive number of blank checks just to sign out the building.
So you can't reconcile blank checks. You've got comment fields that are also blanks. You don't know why the payment was made. Then we've got this truly absurd, a do not pay list, which can take up to a year for an organization to get on the do not the list. We're talking about terrorist organizations. We're talking about known fraudsters, known aspects of waste, known things that do not match any congressional appropriation, can take up to a year to get on the list. And even what's on the list, the list is not used. It's mind-blowing. What we're talking here, we're really just talking about adding common sense controls that should be present, that haven't been present. So you say, Well, how could such a thing arise? That seems crazy. When you understand that really everything is geared towards complaint minimization, then you understand the motivations. If people receive money, they They don't complain, obviously. But if people don't receive money, they do complain. The fraudsters complain the loudest and the fastest. Then when you understand that, then it makes sense. Oh, that's why everything Everything just they approve all the payments at Treasury, because if you approve all the payments, you don't get complaints.
But now we're saying that, no, actually, we are going to complain. If money is spent badly, if your taxpayer dollars are not in a sensible and frugal manner, then that's not okay. Your tax dollars need to be spent wisely on things that matter to the people. I mean, these things, it's just common sense. It's not draconian or radical, I think. It's really just saying, let's look at each of these expenditures and say, is this actually in the best interest of the people? And if it is, it's proved. If it's not, we should think about it. So There's crazy things, just cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old. Now, do you know anyone that's 150? I don't know. They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records. They're messing So that's a case where I think they're probably dead. It's my guess. Or they should be very famous, one of the two. Then there's a whole bunch of Social Security payments where there's no identifying information. Why is there no identifying information? Obviously, we want to make sure that people who deserve to receive Social Security do receive it, and that they receive it quickly and accurately.
Also, another crazy thing. One of the things is we are trying to rightsize the federal bureaucracy, just make sure that there needs to be a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently. We're saying, Okay, if people can retire with If there were full benefits, everything, that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything. Then we were told, this is actually, I think, a great anecdote, because we were told the most number of people that could retire, possibly in a month, is 10,000. We're like, Well, why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It's manually calculated, then it's written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine. I'm like, What do you mean a mine? Like, Yeah, there's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork. You look at a picture of this mine. We'll post some pictures afterwards. This mine looks like something out of the '50s because it was started in 1955. It looks like it's like a time warp. And then the speed, then the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government.
And the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy? There's like a thousand people that work on this. I think if we take those people and say, You know what? Instead of working in a mine shaft and carrying vanilla envelopes to boxes in a mineshaft, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way. Anyway, so I think that's an example At a high level, if you say, How do we increase prosperity? Is we get people to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles. And so you increase the total output of goods and services, which means that there's a higher standard of living available for everyone. That's the actual goal. Everyone's very quiet. Nobody is quiet?
You're detractors, Mr. Musk. What? Including a lot of Democrats.
I have detractors? You do, sir. I don't believe it.
Say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non-transparent way. What's your response to that criticism?
Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted. We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate. The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The President spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for. And a lot of times people that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about.
Mr. Musk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are in effect policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?
Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our We post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been... I don't know of a case where an organization has more transparent than the Doge organization. The things we're doing are, I think, very simple and basic. What I mentioned, for example, about treasury, just making sure that payments that go out, taxpayer money that goes out, is categorized correctly, that the payment is explained, that organizations on the do not pay list, which takes a lot to get there, that actually are not paid, which currently they are paid. These These are not individual judgment decisions. These are about simply having sensible checks and balances in the system itself to ensure that that taxpayer money is spent well. So it's got nothing to do with, say, a contract for some company of mine at all.
But if there is a conflict of interest when it comes to you yourself. For instance, you've received billions of dollars in federal contracts when it comes to the Pentagon, for instance, which the President, I know, has directed you to look into. Are you policing yourself in that? Is there any accountability check and balance in place that would to provide any transparency for the American people?
Well, all of our actions are fully public. So if you see anything, you say, Wait a second. Hey, that seems like maybe there's a conflict there. I don't feel like people are going to be shy about saying that. They'll say it immediately.
Including you yourself.
Yes. But transparency is what builds trust, not simply somebody asserting trust, not somebody saying they're trustworthy, but transparency. So you can see everything that's going on. And Then you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not? It's totally obvious.
And if we thought that we would not let him do that segment or look in that area, if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest We watch that also. He's a big businessman. He's a successful guy. That's why we want him doing this. We don't want an unsuccessful guy doing this. Now, one thing also that Elon hasn't really mentioned are groups of people that are getting some of these payments. They're ridiculous. We're talking about billions of dollars that we've already found. We found fraud and abuse. I would say those two words as opposed to the third word that I usually use, but in this is fraud and abuse. It's abusive because most of these things are virtually made up, or certainly money shouldn't be sent to them. You know what I'm talking about. It's crazy. But we're talking about tens of billions of dollars that we've already found. Now a judge who's an activist judge wants to try and stop us from doing this. Why would they want to do that? I campaigned on this. I campaigned on the fact that I said government is corrupt, and it is very corrupt.
It's also foolish. As an example, a man has a contract for three months, and the contract ends, but they keep paying him for the next 20 years because nobody ends a contract. You got a lot of that. You have a contract that's a three-month contract. Now, normally, if you're in a small... In all fairness, it's the size of this thing is so big. But if you have a contract and you're in a regular business, you end the contract in three months. It's a consultant. Here's a contract for three months, but it goes on for 20 years. The guy doesn't say that he got money for 20 years. They don't say it. They just keep getting checks month after month, and you have very various things like that, and even much worse than that, actually, much worse. I guess you call that incompetence, maybe. It could be corruption. It could be a deals made on both sides. The guy gets some money. I think he has a lot of kickback here. I see a lot of kickback here. He has a lot of kickbacks. A tremendous kickback because nobody could be so stupid to give out some of these contracts, so he has to get a kickback.
That's what I got elected for, that and borders and military, a lot of things, but this is a big part of it. I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to, among other things, find all of this fraud, abuse, all of this horrible stuff going on. We've already found billions of dollars, not like a little bit, billions, many billions of dollars. When you get down to it, it's going to be probably close to a trillion dollars. It could be close to a trillion dollars that we're going to find. That will have quite an impact on the budget. You'll go to a judge where they handpick a judge and he has certain leanings. I'm not knocking anybody for that, but he has certain leanings, and he wants us to stop looking. How do you stop looking? We've already found it. We have a case in New York where a hotel has paid $59 million because it's housing illegal migrants. All illegal Well, I believe.
They were being paid twice the normal room rate at 100% occupancy. Unbelievable. So it's a racket.
That's the most important question.
If I may just go into the President's comments. At a high level, what are the two ingredients that are really necessary in order to cut the budget deficit in half from 2 trillion to 1 trillion? And it's really two things: competence and caring. If you If you add competence and caring, you'll cut the budget deficit in half. I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, basically. Might as well just camp out there. It's not like I think I can get away with something. I'll be scrutinized nonstop. But with the support of the President, we can cut the budget deficit in half from $2 trillion to $1, and then with deregulation, because there's a lot of regulations that don't ultimately serve the public good. We need to free the builders of America to build. If we do that, that means you get the economic growth to be maybe 3, 4%, maybe 5%. That means if you can get a trillion dollars of economic growth and you can cut the budget deficit by a trillion, between now and next year, there is no inflation. There's no inflation at 26. If the government is not borrowing as much, it means that interest costs decline.
So everyone's to mortgage their car payment, their credit card bills, their student debt, their monthly payments brought. That's a fantastic scenario for the average American. Imagine they When you're putting down the grocery aisle and the prices from one year to the next are the same and all their debt payments dropped. How great is that for the average American?
We had no idea we were going to find this much. And it's open. It's not complicated. It's simple stuff.
It's not that complicated.
It's a lot of work. We can't believe it. A lot of work, a lot of smart people involved. Very, very smart people. But you're talking about, maybe 500 billion. It's crazy the numbers you're talking about. It is really crazy. Normally, when you're looking at something, you're looking for one out of 100. Here, you're almost reversing it. You look for The one that's good, and you can look at the title and you say, Why are we doing this? Why are we doing that? And the public gets it. The public gets it. You've seen the pulse. The public is saying, Why are we paying all this money? This for years, this has gone on. Mr. Mons, You're going to drop it. Yeah, go ahead. Wait. Go ahead.
Senator Rampal today said that DOGE cuts will ultimately need a vote in Congress. Do you agree with that?
Is that the plan? I really don't know. I know this. We're finding tremendous fraud and tremendous abuse. If I need the vote of Congress to find fraud and abuse. It's fine with me. I think we'll get the vote, although there'll be some people that wouldn't vote. How could a judge want to hold us back from finding all of this fraud and finding all of this incompetence? Why would that happen? Why would even Congress want to do that? Now, Congress, if we do need a vote, I think we'd get a very easy vote because we have a track record now. We've already found billions of dollars of abuse, incompetence, and corruption. A lot of corruption. If a judge does block one of your policies, part of your agenda, will you abide by that ruling?
Will you comply with that?
I always abide by the courts, and then I'll have to appeal it. But then what he's done is he slowed down the momentum, and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books. If a person is crooked and they get caught, other people see that, and all of a sudden it becomes harder later on. The answer is, I always abide by the courts, always abide by them, and will appeal. But appeals take a long time. I would hope that a judge, if you go into a judge and you show them, Here's a corrupt situation. We have a check to be sent, but we found it to be corrupt. Do you want us to send this corrupt check to a person, or do you want us not to give it and give it back to the taxpayer? I would hope a judge would say, Don't send it, give it back to the taxpayer.
If I can add to that, what we're finding is that a bunch of the fraud is not even going to Americans. I think we all agree that if there's going to be a fraud, it should at least go to Americans. But a bunch of the fraud rings that are operating in the United States and taking advantage of the federal government, especially in the entitlements programs, are actually foreign fraud rings. They're operating in other countries and actually exporting money to other countries. We should stop that. This is big numbers. We're talking about $100-$200 billion a year. Sure. Serious.
Mr. Musk, you said on X that an example of the fraud that you have cited was 50 million of condoms were sent to Gaza. But after fact check this, it apparently Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. Can you correct this statement? It wasn't sent to Hamas, actually. It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms were sent there. How can we make sure that all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say?
Well, first of all, some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody's going to bat a thousand. We will make mistakes, but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes. I'm not sure we should be sending $15 million with the condoms to anywhere, frankly. I'm not sure that's something Americans would be really excited about. That is really an enormous number of condoms, if you think about it. But if it went to Mozambique instead of Gaza, I'm like, Okay, that's not as bad, but still, why are we doing that?
That's Can you talk a little bit about how closely you're working with agency heads as you're directing these cuts?
How much input do agency heads have when you're making these decisions?
Yeah, we work closely with the agency heads, and Yeah. There are checks in place. It's not us just going in and doing things willy-nilly. It's in partnership with the agency heads. I check with the President to make sure that this is what the President wants to happen. We talk almost every day, and I double-check things to make sure. Is this something, Mr. President, you want us to do this? Then we'll do it.
Usaid has been one of your main targets. Are you concerned at all that some of the cuts or that shutting that agency altogether may lead to diseases or other bigger problems starting in other countries that then come to the United States?
Yeah. That's an interesting example. That's something where we closely with the State Department and Secretary Rubio. We have, for example, turned on funding for Ebola prevention and for HIV prevention. He left that, he said. Yes, correct. We are moving fast, so we all make mistakes, but we also fix the mistakes very quickly.
Do you think that's a worthy cause, USAID?
I think that there are some worthy things, but overall, if you say what does the bank for the buck? I would say it was not very good. There was far too much of what USAID was doing was influencing elections in ways that I think were dubious and do not stand the light of day.
Are you going to have to follow up to the Pentagon contracts? If you have received billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon and the President's directing you to look into the Department of Defense, is that a conflict of interest?
Yes, which we definitely need to do and are going to do at the President's request.
Does that present a conflict of interest for you?
No, because you'd have to look at the individual contract and say, First of I'm not the one filing the contract. It's people at SpaceX or someone that we'll be putting for the contract. I'd like to say, if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn't by far the best value of money for the taxpayer, let me know, because every one of them was.
The President said the other day that you might look at treasuries. Could you explain that a little bit? What fraud, and that question goes to both of you, what fraud are you expecting to see or do you see right now in US Treasuries.
I think you mean the Treasury Department as opposed to Treasury bills? You also referenced treasuries on Air Force One the other night.
Go ahead.
As I mentioned earlier, really, the first order business is to make sure we're actually collecting I'm sorry for this. Although my son might enjoy this, but he's sticking his fingers in my ears still. It's been hard to hear sometimes. Hey, stop that. The stuff we're doing with The Treasury Department is so basic that you can't believe it doesn't exist already. For example, like I mentioned, just making sure that when a payment goes out, it has to have a payment categorization code. It's like, what type of payment is this? You can't just leave the field blank. Currently, many payments, the field is left blank, and you have to describe what's the payment for, some basic rationalization. That also is left blank. This is why the Pentagon... When's the last time the I haven't passed an audit. I mean, a decade ago, maybe? Or ever, really? In order to actually pass audits, you have to have financial information that allows you to trace the payments. Once in a while, the Treasury has to pass payments if it thinks the payment is going to a fraudulent organization. If a company or an organization is on it, do a paylist, we should not pay it.
I'm sure you would agree. If it's quite hard to get on that payment, the general paylist, it means that this is someone that is dead people, terrorists, known fraudsters, that thing, we should not pay them. But currently we do, which is crazy. We should stop that.
And by the way, hundreds, thousands of transactions like that. We have a big team. And for the sake of the country, I hope that the person that's in charge and the other people that report to me that are in charge are allowed to do the right thing, namely make sure everything's honest, legitimate, and competent. But we're looking at just when you look at USAID, that's one. We're going to look at the military. We're going to look at education. They're much bigger areas. But the USAID is really corrupt. I'll tell you, it's corrupt. It's incompetent and it's really corrupt. I can't imagine a judge saying, well, it may be corrupt, but you don't have the right. You got elected to look over the country and to, as we say, make America great again, but you don't have the right to go and look and see whether or not things are right that they're paying or that things are honest that they're paying. Nobody can even believe this. Other people, law professors, they've been saying, How can you take that person's right away? You're supposed to be running the country, but we're not allowed to look at who they're paying it to and what they're paying.
We have massive amounts of fraud that we caught. I think we probably caught way over a lot of billions of dollars already in what, two weeks? Yes. It's going to go to numbers that you're not going to believe. As I said, much is incompetence and much is dishonesty. We have to catch it. The only way we're going to catch it is to look for it. If a judge is going to say you're not allowed to look for it, that's pretty sad for country. I don't understand how it could even work.
Can you personally guarantee that the buyout program, the offer to federal workers, can you personally guarantee that the workers who opt in to resign now will be paid through September?
They'll get their money, but they're getting a good deal. They're getting a big buyout. And what we're trying to do is reduce government. We have too many people. We have office space. It's occupied by 4%. Nobody's showing up to work because they were told not to. And then Biden gave them a five-year pass, some of them, 48,000 of them, gave them a five-year pass that for five years, you don't have to show up to work. Let me tell you, this is largely, much of this stuff is because of Biden. It's his fault. He allowed this country what he did on our border What he did on our border is almost not as bad as what he did with all of these contracts that have come out. It's a very sad day when we look at it. I can't even believe it, but many contracts just extend, and they just keep extending, and there was nobody there to correct it. I can't imagine that could be held up by the court. Any court that would say that the President or his representatives, like Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, whatever, doesn't have the right to go over their books and make sure everything's honest.
How can you have a country? You can't have anything that way. You can't have a business that way. You can't have a country that way. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.
Thank you, Chris.
.
We'll be at the White House tonight at about 10: 00. If you want to come over, you can say hello to Omar.
Did the US give anything in return?
Not much. No, they were very nice. We We were treated very nicely by Russia, actually. I hope that's the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war and millions of people can stop being killed. They've lost millions of people. They lost, in terms of soldiers, probably 1. 5 million soldiers in a short period of time. We got to stop that war. I'm interested primarily from the standpoint of death. We're losing all those soldiers. They're not American soldiers, they're Ukrainian and Russian soldiers But you're probably talking about a million and a half. I think we got to bring that one to an end.
Okay? Aaron Gilchrist is live for us at the White House. Aaron, what was so interesting to watch in this dynamic was President Trump, it seemed very comfortably turning over the spotlight to Elon Musk in the oval office, in the center of power in Washington and in this country.
Very unusual in so many ways, right? Typically in a setting like this, you have President Trump do all of the talking. In this case, you saw him more than once defer to Elon Musk to explain what he's been doing. He's had this team at Doge, which is an office inside the White House, not a department or an agency. But he's had this team going into all of the agencies and taken a look around. We heard him explain what they've been doing. He said that they are being maximally transparent. That was the term that he used in talking about putting information on the Doge website and on the Doge X account, for example. Although when you go and look at some of those places, it doesn't necessarily explain in great detail the work that they've been doing. He did, though, talk about things like going into the Treasury Department and looking at payment systems that he believes were not operating in the most effective way in in terms of tracking where the money is going in the Treasury Department. He talked about taking a cursory look at Social Security payments and seeing that there were people who were 150 years old receiving Social Security benefits.
That is really the first time we've gotten any indication of what his team has been finding, really, although some of that is not stuff that we can verify, to be perfectly honest with you. We need to see the receipts, as the saying goes. I do want you to hear a little bit of what Elon Musk had to say, though, about this idea of transparency and conflicts of interest that Questions were asked about him having personal conflicts of interest with his businesses, doing business with the federal government while he's doing these searches.
I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam, basically. Might as well just camp out there. It's not like I think I can get away with something. I'll be scrutinized nonstop.
He says that checks and balances are in place, and he's not just doing things willy-nilly. You heard President Trump there, Halley, seem to back him up.
There's also, the President did speak. One of the things he was asked about that he talked about were what we talked about just a moment ago, the courts putting a pause temporarily or in some cases, blocking indefinitely some of his policies that he's been wanting to put in place. Let me play that here.
I always abide by the courts, always abide by them, and will appeal. But appeals take a long time. I would hope that a judge, if you go into a judge and you show him, Here's a corrupt situation. We have a check to be sent, but we found it to be corrupt. Do you want us to send this corrupt check to a person, or do you want us not to give it and give it back to the taxpayer?
Aaron, there had been some concern among, and there remained some concern among Trump critiques that the President is essentially, in his administration, planting the seeds to potentially defy a court order here. What are you hearing on your end from sources?
We have been hearing about frustration inside the Trump team about the fact that there have been so many challenges in the courts to the executive orders and actions that the President has taken in these last couple of weeks here. At the same time, there are other officials who say that they expected that there would be challenges. They expected they would end up in court. They do express some discomfort with the fact that it's going to have to move slowly through the courts. We heard the President reference that in his remarks tonight, that he wants to abide by court rulings, but he was frustrated that it would mean having to appeal and appeal and appeal potentially all the way up to the Supreme Court, Halley. In some of these cases, that is exactly what it appears is going to have to happen. The question when some of these holds are put in place, these temporary restraining orders, for example, will they be followed to the letter of the law? There have been some instances already where plaintiffs have come back to the courts and said, no, they're not being followed to the letter.
Aaron Gilchrist, live for us there outside the White House. Aaron, thank you.
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