Federal employees opened their inboxes in February 2025 to a simple request from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM): list five things you accomplished this week.
One FBI special agent read that message and proposed a criminal investigation.
The agent, Kevin Gounaud, put his idea in writing to a colleague.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, declassified the message during a Tuesday hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel.
Gounaud’s concern was Elon Musk. The billionaire had used his social media platform, X, to promote DOGE, his government efficiency initiative, and Gounaud treated that promotion as a potential crime.
He drew a direct comparison in the email. Gounaud likened Musk’s conduct to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to exchange classified intelligence.
Then he volunteered to do the paperwork. “Happy to write the case opening and find a prosecutor (or at least try),” he wrote.
Gounaud anticipated skepticism. “And no, I’m not kidding,” the agent added.
He did not immediately answer a request for comment sent through LinkedIn.
The email also named other potential targets.
“I would like to recommend the opening of a criminal 58 matter on the person(s) at OPM who approved the transmission of the earlier email,” Gounaud wrote.
According to the message, the OPM staffer conspired with Musk, who Gounaud noted was reportedly a Special Government Employee.
He wrote that the email consumed a huge amount of official time and reached thousands, if not tens of thousands, of government workers who had no strict need to know.
Gounaud pointed to two federal statutes. One bars personal enrichment, and he argued that X, a company Musk owns, may have been monetized.
The other covers blackmail. Gounaud cited Musk’s post stating that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Grassley’s office called the approach a double standard.
A congressional aide said the Justice Department declined to investigate Huma Abedin when she served as a Special Government Employee under Secretary Clinton while also working for the Clinton Foundation.
Grassley used his opening statement to place the email in a larger context.
“For almost a decade now, I’ve made records public showing how a number of now discredited law enforcement and intelligence officials schemed to take out Trump and other Republicans. And here we are, in 2026, still finding records from years ago showing even more evidence of targeting,” he said.
He went further.
“The overall sustained efforts by the Deep State in the dark corners of the bureaucracy is worse than anything Trump has been accused of. At least he’s upfront and open so people can judge,” Grassley said.
A 2004 law requires intelligence professionals to produce reporting “independent of political considerations.”
Grassley’s committee and the Trump administration have declassified a series of documents that they say show senior officials operating outside that standard.
Some of those records concern Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s sweeping probe into alleged ties between Donald Trump and Russia.
According to the Daily Caller News Foundation, the newly declassified evidence shows the investigation relied on raw intelligence reports that were spun, cherry-picked and, in some cases, fabricated.
The Steele dossier, an opposition research document Democrats commissioned during the 2016 campaign, was among them.
The documents also describe an operation codenamed “Round River.”
They show the FBI labeled more than two dozen members of Congress, journalists and senior Trump administration officials as conduits of Russian disinformation, and presented derogatory information about former President Joe Biden and Ukrainian corruption as a Russian psyop.
Other recently released records have raised questions about the depth of the FBI’s Clinton email investigation.
The Bureau recovered 600,000 missing emails from her private server in the final days of the 2016 presidential race.
An email from former FBI Director James Comey to Daniel Richman, his media liaison, adds to that record. The Justice Department released it as an exhibit in its 2025 case against Comey.
According to the Daily Caller News Foundation, it underscores the evidence available to the Bureau about Clinton’s apparent evasion of federal recordkeeping law, evidence that was never examined.
