The Trump administration said it won’t help French authorities to investigate Elon Musk and his scandal-plagued social media platform, X.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on a letter, which hasn’t been reviewed by MS NOW, in which the Trump Department of Justice told French officials it isn’t going to get involved in their efforts to investigate Musk and X. Per the Journal:
‘This investigation seeks to use the criminal legal system in France to regulate a public square for the free expression of ideas and opinions in a manner contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution,’ said the letter, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The letter also said France’s requests for U.S. assistance ‘constitute an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a social media platform.’
The department confirmed to the Journal it sent the letter.
France launched an investigation into X last fall after the platform’s chatbot, Grok, responded to users by promoting holocaust denial. At the time, French investigators also raised concerns about foreign influence campaigns on the platform. And in February, following a scandal in which users prompted Grok to generate nonconsensual pornographic images, including images appearing to depict children, French authorities raided X’s offices and summoned Musk for questioning.
Trump’s administration has previously threatened British investigators for its own probe into the Grok porn scandal.
The administration has given itself a pretext to insulate Musk and his platform from accountability by portraying them as integral to the projection of democracy abroad. Trump’s State Department has touted Musk’s platform as a tool to combat what it calls “anti-American propaganda,” even as X continues to platform hate speech and disinformation. The administration itself uses X to push its own propaganda, inflected with white supremacist rhetoric and imagery.
Trump and his allies would seem to have a vested interest in helping the president’s largest 2024 campaign donor. On the campaign trail that year, Trump told his supporters that his goal as president would be to “make life good” for people like Musk. And it’s apparent his administration’s refusal to assist France’s request is a boon for Musk and xAI, which owns X. More from the Journal:
‘We are grateful to the Justice Department for rejecting this effort by a prosecutor in Paris to compel our CEO and several employees to sit for interviews,’ an xAI official said. ‘We hope the Parisian authorities will now come to their senses, recognize that there is no wrongdoing here, and terminate their baseless investigation.’
It’s not clear whether or how the U.S. refusal will influence France’s probe. The European Union has faced threats from the Trump administration over its probe into X and Grok, but investigators have continued their work nonetheless.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.