Residents of a tiny North Carolina town that was almost totally destroyed by Hurricane Helene fending for themselves after FEMA told them that a “road closed” sign is an insurmountable obstacle for the agency to navigate.
“FEMA called me and told me they wanted to inspect my house then called me back to say they couldn’t drive around the ‘road closed’ sign. They weren’t allowed,” local Chelsea Atkins, 38, told The Post.
The Broad River, which segments the tiny North Carolina Town, was widened by Hurricane Helene to nearly 10 times its original size.Ben Hendren
“You can drive it by car for sure, it’s not that bad, you just have to drive around the ‘road closed sign’. I explained that to them. They said they couldn’t,” she said, recounting her maddening exchange with the embattled federal agency.
Left to fend for themselves, Bat Cave residents banded together — opening the roads and starting the arduous work of cleanup and recovery. Residents told The Post that they don’t need FEMA now — and at this point, they don’t even want the disaster relief agency to come.
While the sick and elderly residents of Bat Cave were airlifted to safety a week ago, those left behind have seen virtually no sign of government agencies, save for a handful of Louisiana State Police troopers “keeping an eye on everything,” who locals say haven’t done much of anything.
The Bat Cave post office was destroyed by the hurricane.Ben Hendren
The intermittent whir of military chinook helicopters buzzing over the town serves as a reminder that people in the devastated west of the state are getting help — just not in Bat Cave.
Here, apple orchard workers armed with chainsaws worked with a local grading contractor to clear the roadways well before the Department of Transportation arrived to help, although they were grateful for the assist when it finally arrived.
The few remaining locals have scavenged building supplies to shore up homes teetering on the edge of the Broad River, which is now ten times wider than it was before Helene carved its path of destruction.
When floodwaters started to deluge their makeshift refuge, the displaced locals next made their way to empty houses on higher ground, trudging up the side of a mountain in a desperate attempt to reach safety. The first home they tried had a gas leak, and the ground beneath the porch of a second slipped out from under them.
Residents scavenged for building materials in an attempt to save their homes from collapsing, but fear FEMA showing up late will only interfere in the home-spun recovery efforts.Ben Hendren
“At first we thought we’d be fine waiting out the storm in the post office for a couple of hours and then walk back home. With every minute that went by, the situation got more and more dire,” she said.
“The post office flooded and that’s when we realized the s—t was really hitting the fan.”
Atkins says she’s not usually frightened by weather, but admits at this point she genuinely feared for her life.
“I’m not very ruffled by nature, I can really handle a lot, but I looked at my neighbor and asked ‘are we going to die?’, like real talk ‘are we going to die?’.
The next cabin the group tried had a screened-in porch and provided them with the shelter they had sought.
Mark Staton inside his building that he leases to the US Postal Service in Bat Cave.Ben Hendren
Atkins said FEMA called her to arrange an inspection of her house on the Broad River rendered uninhabitable by the storm, but that they never showed up because the road was closed — the very same road The Post successfully traversed on its way to Bat Cave.
The road is treacherous, but navigable. It’s littered with downed power lines, and whole sections have collapsed. One portion of Highway 9 is entirely washed away, forcing traffic to navigate a huge chasm through someone’s front yard.
Lynn Staton inside her destroyed antique shop in Bat Cave.Ben Hendren
“The DOT’s been here, and random fire departments, like Kannapolis. They were great. But nobody’s been bringing in supplies except civilians,” she shared.
At this late stage in the recovery effort, Atkins said there are concerns FEMA showing up at this point could do more harm than good.
“It’s been a civilian-run operation since day one. You can’t ask the authorities for help — they’ll say you need to leave,” she said, calling Bat Cave a “country-boy can survive” kind of place.
“We’re handling it. Leave it to us and we’ll get it covered.”
Damaged homes and roads in Bat Cave after the region was hit by Helene.Ben Hendren
Her neighbor Curtis McCart, a retired Los Angeles fire department captain and paramedic, estimates a dozen houses along his stretch of the winding Highway 64 were washed away in the storm.
The town itself has been ripped in half — a 15-foot segment of bridge connecting the two halves of the town was destroyed. Though the gap is now spanned with pieces of sheet metal, it can’t support a car’s weight, forcing residents to traverse the span exclusively on foot.
The Broad River was only 10 yards wide in front of McCart’s home before the hurricane. Now it’s a 100-yard-wide riverbed strewn with trees, concrete slabs, twisted tin and powerlines with their transformers still connected.
“We had huge 60-feet tall sycamores in front of the house, which must have been 100-and-something years old, that are all gone. Because of their age, they must have been here in the 1916 flood which I heard was 27-30 feet. This flood must have been worse, I heard this flood was 40-feet,” he said.
McCart hasn’t seen anyone in Bat Cave wearing a FEMA uniform, and like Atkins, he also worries about what will happen if they show up as he works to buttress the third floor of his home to stop the attic roof from toppling.
“At this point I don’t care if FEMA comes by. I don’t want somebody to pull me out of here, saying I’m working in an unsafe spot,” he said. “I’m wondering if Big Brother is going to allow us to rebuild.”
As the Iran-Israel conflict intensifies, Tehran is roiling the West with a wave of attempted hits and kidnappings against targets in Europe and the United States.
Washington and its allies have reported a sharp rise in such plots linked to the Islamic Republic in recent years. Since 2020, there have been at least 33 assassination or abduction attempts in the West in which local or Israeli authorities allege an Iran link, Reuters found in an examination of court documents and public statements by government officials.
Among recent alleged targets: a building that houses a Jewish center and kosher restaurant in downtown Athens.
From his perch in Iran, a Pakistani named Sayed Fakhar Abbas recruited an old acquaintance living in Greece and directed him to attack the site, investigators allege in documents submitted to judicial authorities in the case and viewed by Reuters. Abbas told his contact that he was working for a group that would pay some 15,000 euros per kill.
In a January 2023 WhatsApp exchange detailed in the documents, the two men discussed whether to use explosives or arson in the attack. Abbas stressed the need to provide proof of casualties after the strike. “There are secret agencies” involved, he said, without naming names. “Do the job in a way that does not leave any room for complaints by them.”
The previously unreported documents include hundreds of pages of evidence gathered during Greece’s pre-trial probe, including witness testimony, police statements and details of WhatsApp messages. They purport to show how Abbas groomed his contact, a slim-built fellow Pakistani named Syed Irtaza Haider, as the two drifted between prosaic talk of life back home and plotting attacks.
Greek authorities arrested Haider and another Pakistani last year, saying police helped dismantle a terrorist network directed from abroad that intended to inflict “human loss.” The two men face terrorism-related charges. They deny wrongdoing.
Haider, released from pre-trial detention this spring with restrictions, says he’s innocent. In an interview, the 28-year-old told Reuters he sent Abbas images of the building but intentionally stalled on carrying out any attack, hoping to get paid without harming anyone.
“It was all talk but no action,” he said. His lawyer, Zacharias Kesses, said Haider “never participated substantially” in illegal activity.
Alleged ringleader Abbas also faces terrorism-related charges. Back home in Pakistan, he is wanted on suspicion of murder, a Pakistani police official said. Abbas remains at large and couldn’t be reached for comment. The third suspect also couldn’t be reached. That man has denied wrongdoing, according to Iraklis Stavaris, a lawyer who represented him when he was charged.
Greek police declined to comment. The case awaits a decision by judicial authorities about whether to proceed to trial, according to Haider’s lawyer.
Israeli intelligence service Mossad, which assisted the Greek probe, has said the planned attack was orchestrated by Iran as part of a multinational network operated from the Islamic Republic. The Israeli government declined to comment on the case or on other Mossad activities.
Iran denies Mossad’s claim. The operational techniques fit patterns seen in some other alleged Iranian plots, however. That includes the type of target – Israeli or Jewish civilians – and the use of hired non-Iranian assassins. At least two other cases tallied by Reuters allegedly involved Pakistani nationals.
Targets of other recent alleged plots include senior U.S. officials as well as Iranian journalists and others in the diaspora. Former President Donald Trump was briefed by U.S. intelligence on “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him,” his campaign recently said. Tehran has publicly denied involvement in some alleged plots in the U.S.
The shadow war is also playing out in Europe, site of the majority of the alleged plots tallied by Reuters.
“Since 2020, Iran has dramatically intensified lethal plotting against former U.S. officials, Iranian dissidents and Jewish and Israeli interests in the United States and abroad,” said acting director Brett Holmgren of the National Counterterrorism Center, a U.S. intelligence-coordinating agency.
Tehran has in turn accused its rivals of terrorist acts, pointing to killings of senior members of its security forces by Israel and the U.S.
The Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York told Reuters that the Islamic Republic “harbors neither the intent nor the plan to engage in assassination or abduction operations, whether in the West or any other country.” It called such allegations “fabrications” meant “to divert attention from the atrocities committed by the Israeli regime" in the conflict in Gaza.
The recent rise in alleged hit attempts comes amid escalating tensions between the Islamic Republic and Israel. Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel on Tuesday in response to an Israeli air and ground offensive against Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon that killed the armed group's chief Hassan Nasrallah, among other leaders. Israel also recently said it thwarted an Iranian-backed assassination plot targeting prominent people.
Hired assassins
The Reuters tally of Iranian plots includes incidents that were alleged or found to have been orchestrated by the Iranian state, conducted on its behalf, or directed by someone in Iran or with close ties to it.
It is likely an undercount, because it captures only cases in which authorities have publicly alleged an Iran connection. Some governments are wary of publicly calling out Iran due to diplomatic considerations, said Matthew Levitt, director of the counterterrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank.
Mossad director David Barnea last year said that over the previous year, Israeli intelligence had worked with international partners to disrupt 27 teams that tried to mount attacks abroad that were “orchestrated, masterminded, and directed by Iran.” Israel declined to provide details.
One key trend among the alleged plots reviewed by Reuters is the use of hired hit men, including organized criminals and gang members. Washington and its allies say the outsourcing is an attempt to obscure links to the Islamic Republic.
In December, a German court sentenced a German-Iranian man to two years and nine months in prison for planning an arson attack on a synagogue on behalf of the Iranian state. After learning of the security measures around the synagogue in Bochum, he threw a Molotov cocktail at a building next door, the Higher Regional Court in Dusseldorf found. The man admitted throwing the device at the building, according to the court's ruling.
In echoes of the Greek case, he was recruited by a man living in Iran, another German-Iranian who is being investigated in Germany for two unrelated murders there, the court found. It said the Iran-based man was following orders by Iranian “government agencies.” Tehran has called the allegation “baseless.”
In the United States, there have been at least five alleged Iran-linked assassination or abduction cases brought by prosecutors since 2020. Three involved murder-for-hire plots.
Prosecutors recently charged a Pakistani man who they say had close ties to Iran in connection with a foiled attempt to assassinate a U.S. politician or government official in retaliation for the U.S. killing in January 2020 of Tehran’s most prominent military commander, Qassem Soleimani.
Former President Trump was discussed by the suspect as a potential target, but the 2024 scheme wasn’t conceived as a plot to assassinate him, according to a person familiar with the matter, as Reuters previously reported.
After spending time in Iran, the suspect, Asif Merchant, flew from Pakistan to the United States to recruit hit men for the plot, according to a July criminal complaint. Merchant was indicted last month for allegedly attempting to commit terrorism and murder-for-hire. Merchant has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
After Soleimani’s death, Iran’s Khamenei said harsh revenge awaited the “criminals” responsible. Iran’s UN mission told Reuters that Tehran’s policy is to lawfully prosecute those responsible for killing Soleimani.
'Lethal operations'
The target of another murder-for-hire plot in the U.S. was an Iranian-American journalist and prominent critic of the Islamic Republic.
Prosecutors allege members of an Eastern European crime group attempted to assassinate the journalist under the direction of a man in Iran. An Azeri living in the U.S. allegedly received instructions and a $30,000 payment from the Iran-based man. The Azeri turned up at the journalist’s Brooklyn home with an AK-47-style assault rifle, prosecutors say.
The target, Masih Alinejad, told Reuters she was shocked when U.S. authorities informed her the armed man had come to her house. She said she had heard someone at the door but hadn’t answered because she was engrossed in a video call.
Alinejad, 48, said she was forced to abandon her home, leaving behind friends and neighbors for a series of temporary hideouts. She said she’s had to relocate nearly 20 times in recent years under U.S. law-enforcement protection. In one long stint, she and her husband were separated from her stepchildren.
“We don’t feel safe anymore,” Alinejad said of Iranian dissidents living in the U.S.
U.S. prosecutors have charged three men in the murder plot. A fourth – the Azeri man, Khalid Mehdiyev – was named as a co-conspirator in an indictment filed last month. The Justice Department had no comment; Mehdiyev’s lawyer didn’t respond to comment requests.
Two of the other men have pleaded not guilty in the case. The third man faces charges of aiding murder and other crimes in his home country of Georgia, according to Czech authorities, who arrested him last year.
Matthew Olsen, the U.S. assistant attorney general for national security, said Tehran has failed to hide its hand in the wave of plots on American soil. “We’ve managed in a number of these cases to identify the malicious actors who are part of these proxy groups, but also to expose their direct ties back to the Iranian regime,” Olsen said in an interview.
Among the Iranian officials named by Washington as responsible for directing attack planning is Mohammad Reza Ansari. The U.S. says he is part of a Revolutionary Guards unit focused on “lethal operations” in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
Ansari tried to kill two top former U.S. government officials beginning in late 2021 with the help of another Iranian, Shahram Poursafi, according to Washington. U.S. prosecutors have charged Poursafi, who they say is a Revolutionary Guards member, with plotting to murder former National Security Adviser John Bolton and another unnamed individual. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo identified himself as the second target in one of his books.
Bolton, in an interview, said he believes he remains a target of Iran. “I think this is the most unprecedented campaign of attempted assassinations against American officials and former officials in our history,” he said.
Iran has called the allegations “ridiculous and baseless.” Poursafi remains at large. He, Ansari and the Revolutionary Guards didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Heightened tensions
At least six of the plots tallied by Reuters in Europe since 2020 involve Israeli or Jewish targets. Nearly all of those allegedly involve hired hit men.
It was during this time that Abbas contacted Haider from Iran. Haider was living in Greece as an undocumented migrant, according to the legal records Reuters viewed. Haider told Reuters that the two knew each other from back home. Both came from the same town of Alipur in Punjab province, eastern Pakistan. Both are Shi'ite Muslims, the faith of Iran's theocracy, he told Greek authorities.
Haider studied engineering in Pakistan and arrived in Greece in 2019, he told Reuters. He settled on the island of Zakynthos, a popular tourist destination. He lived in an apartment building with other Pakistani nationals and found work in an olive grove and other seasonal jobs.
Abbas also came from Pakistan. Authorities there suspect him of masterminding an October 2021 abduction and murder, according to a police official who works in Punjab province. Greek police identified an Instagram account in the documents under the name Shani Shah Sherazi that they say belongs to Abbas. The last post to the account was in mid-October 2021.
Abbas, a married father of two, crossed into Iran by road in February 2022 and hasn’t returned, a Punjab intelligence official told Reuters.
It was after arriving in Iran that Abbas recruited Haider. By April 2022, the two were in contact via WhatsApp, according to Haider’s testimony to the investigative magistrate and messages detailed in the legal documents.
In a November 2022 WhatsApp exchange, the two men discussed targets and methods of lethal attacks. Abbas told Haider to emphasize to other potential recruits what the group was willing to pay: “The reward per head is five million rupees” – roughly 16,000 euros at the time.
The men frequently discussed money. Haider badgered Abbas to send funds, according to the WhatsApp records. Abbas complained in December 2022 that he couldn’t pay his rent and had to borrow cash. “When the job is done, for the rest of our lives, we won't want money again,” Abbas wrote to Haider that month.
A staged murder
As 2022 drew to a close, Abbas pressed Haider to obtain images of the Chabad of Athens. The two-storey building, on a side street in a bustling part of the capital, houses the Jewish center, which has a prayer area and a Kosher restaurant.
Haider enlisted the help of the third suspect to supply photos and video of the building in December 2022, the man testified to the magistrate. The third suspect also told authorities he was unaware the building was a Jewish center. The third man said it was only later that Haider relayed Abbas’ proposal to pay for killings, whereupon he immediately refused.
In early January 2023, Haider traveled to Athens and recorded videos of the Chabad of Athens and surrounding area, he testified. In forwarding the footage to Abbas, Haider described the area as full of shops and tourists. Abbas responded by saying “good job.”
Their methods were amateurish at times.
Haider staged a fake murder in an apparent effort to hoodwink Abbas and his bosses. While in Athens, Haider convinced a Nepalese-born man to play the part of the victim in a mock execution, promising to pay him 2,500 euros, according to testimony by the Nepalese man contained in the documents. Haider dressed him in clothes stained in what he said was blood from a slaughtered goat, then told him to lie on the floor and play dead so Haider could video him, the man testified. The Nepalese man couldn’t be reached for comment.
Haider told the investigating magistrate that he staged the ruse because Abbas was pressuring him to kill people.
Mounting pressure
By the second week of January 2023, Abbas and Haider were focused on the Chabad of Athens restaurant, investigators allege in the documents. Abbas suggested arson, the messages indicate.
“Anything you can, do it quickly, I won’t be given much time,” Abbas wrote on January 9.
"It will be done, I promise,” Haider responded.
Within weeks, authorities swooped in. Acting on an anonymous tip, Greek police searched Haider’s apartment and detained him for possessing fake identity papers. Prosecutors filed terrorism-related charges the next month. In testimony after his arrest, Haider described the group Abbas recruited him into as a large but unnamed Iran-based organization.
As he awaits trial, Haider says he is working two jobs on Zakynthos – in a restaurant kitchen and as a security watchman. He has trouble sleeping. He faces prison in Greece, but if he beats the charges, home isn’t an option, he said, because he fears retribution from Abbas or his circle.
“I am afraid because I don’t know what will happen here,” he said, “and I cannot go back to Pakistan.”
(Reporting by Cassell Bryan-Low in London, Renee Maltezou and Yannis Souliotis in Athens, and Phil Stewart in Washington; Additional reporting by Mubasher Bukhari in Lahore, Pakistan, Luc Cohen in New York, Maayan Lubell in Jerusalem, Jason Hovet in Prague, Sabine Wollrab in Frankfurt, Simon Lewis and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington, Michele Kambas in Nicosia, Felix Light in Tbilisi, Niklas Pollard in Stockholm, and Marco Aquino in LimaEdited by Michael Williams)
Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose government is trying to stop a sports bets craze consuming household incomes, said on Sunday he will ban online betting if regulation does not cure "addiction" by bettors.
Soccer-mad and bet-loving Brazilians have fallen hard for sports betting since it was legalized in 2018 and bank studies show that bets are hitting household incomes, reducing consumer spending and bankrupting families.
"If regulation doesn't work, I won't hesitate in putting an end to (betting) definitively," the told reporters after casting his vote in municipal elections in Sao Paulo.
Lula said it was unacceptable that low-income families that receive social security transfers through Brazil's Bolsa Familia program should be spending the money on bets.
Brazil's Secretariat of Prizes and Bets (SPA) published a list last week of sports betting companies licensed to operate some 200 brands of fixed-odds sports betting in what has rapidly become one of the fifth-largest betting markets in the world.
They include the biggest names in the betting world, such as Flutter Entertainment plc, the Entain group that owns Ladbrokes and Sweden's Betsson AB that operates from Malta.
The companies have to open offices in Brazil and associate with a local partner. Under new regulations, credit cards will not be allowed for use in betting. Hundreds of companies were rejected for not fulfilling Brazil's conditions.
Still, damage to household incomes, and mainly to poorer families, has worried the government and its concerns increased after the central bank reported that 3 billion reais ($550 million) was spent on bets in August by recipients of the Bolsa Familia program.
Lula called a cabinet meeting on Thursday to discuss whether to ban Bolsa Familia beneficiaries from betting, but no decision was taken.
Lula does not want to stop betting because Brazilians will bet anyway, he said, pointing out that bans have not stopped illegal cockfighting and the clandestine betting on numbers, a form of gambling called "jogo do bicho" that has existed since the 19th Century.
"Everyone knows that the person going to buy bread in the morning will make a small bet using the bread money," Lula said. "But what I cannot allow is betting to turn into a disease, an addiction, and for people to become dependent on it, because I know people who lost their house and car."
Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille embarked on a trip to the United Arab Emirates and Kenya on Saturday to seek security assistance in the aftermath of one of deadliest gang attacks in the Caribbean nation in recent years.
Haiti is reeling after members of the Gran Grif gang stormed through the town of Pont-Sonde in the western Artibonite region early on Thursday, killing at least 70 people, including infants, and forcing over 6,000 residents to flee.
The massacre caused widespread shock even in a country that has grown accustomed to outbreaks of violence, and where the national police force is outgunned and understaffed.
"As you can see, we are being attacked on several fronts," Conille said in a press conference before the trip.
Last week, the U.N. Security Council authorized for another year an international security force that is intended to help local police fight gangs and provide law and order.
So far, the mission has made little progress helping Haiti restore order with only about 400 mostly Kenyan police officers on the ground.
"One of the aims of this trip is to go to Kenya to discuss with President Ruto how we can speed up the deployment of remnants of the Kenyan troops as quickly as possible to continue supporting the national police force," Conille said.
Conille said he would discuss with his counterpart in the United Arab Emirates "how we can find regular flows to help the Haitian national police to combat security."
On Friday, Conille, flanked by heavily armed police, visited patients at a hospital who were being treated for injuries from Thursday's attack. He promised reinforcements were en route from the capital, Port-au-Prince.
A spokesperson for Haiti's national police told Reuters on Friday evening that the director of police in charge of the Artibonite department had been replaced.
Gran Grif is the largest gang in Haiti's Artibonite department, according to security analysts. The region is home to many of Haiti's rice fields.
The gang's leader Luckson Elan said the attack was in retaliation for civilians remaining passive while police and vigilante groups killed his soldiers.
This week's killings were the latest sign of a worsening conflict in Haiti, where armed gangs control most of Port-au-Prince and are expanding to nearby regions, fueling hunger and making hundreds of thousands homeless. Promised international support still lags and nearby nations have deported migrants back to the country.
The number of people internally displaced by the conflict has meanwhile surged past 700,000, nearly doubling in six months.
An influential conservative think tank has asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to disclose what employees are discussing internally about billionaire Elon Musk and former President Donald Trump, according to federal records reviewed by Reuters.
The effort, involving scores of Freedom of Information requests filed by the Heritage Foundation, is part of that organization's ongoing push to help Trump weed out uncooperative civil servants if he is reelected to the White House in November, one of its executives told Reuters.
It is also meant to determine, in the conservative group's view, whether agencies like NASA are thwarting progress for private companies like SpaceX, Musk's rocket and satellite venture. In an interview, Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation's investigative unit, argued that NASA and other regulators obstruct innovation because they are distracted by cultural and identity politics.
"Instead of cool things in space," Howell said, NASA is "doing all this woke stuff on the ground."
Specialists in government administration said the requests are a partisan attempt to identify civil servants who oppose Trump's stated plan to appoint the business mogul, and frequent critic of regulatory bureaucracy, as a government efficiency czar. In that position, they added, Musk could help the former president reintroduce a plan from his first term to replace federal employees deemed ideologically contrary to his administration.
"This is clearly part of the Heritage Foundation's endeavor to find people who are critical of Trump and Musk and put them on an undesirables list," said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer and specialist on federal employment. "To install loyalists, they have to figure out who to get rid of."
There's no indication that Musk or the Trump campaign have a hand in the Heritage Foundation's quest for NASA records.
Neither NASA nor Musk responded to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Trump's campaign didn't respond to Reuters' questions about the information requests, but said that only the former president and his advisors, "NOT any other organization," represent his proposals for a second term.
"MISTREATING" MUSK
Since Sept 3, according to records reviewed by Reuters, the Heritage Foundation has filed at least 192 open records requests with NASA. The filings include requests for employee communications that reference either of the two men or Musk companies, including carmaker Tesla and SpaceX, a business that has earned more than $11.8 billion in contract work with the space agency.
Howell said he's unsure how many responses NASA has supplied in response to the filings. The requests, he added, are part of a broader campaign of more than 65,000 requests by the Heritage Foundation in recent years seeking internal discussions about Trump and issues of import to the group. On Wednesday, ProPublica reported about that effort.
The Heritage Foundation, based in Washington, has cheered Musk's high-profile business activities, including his 2022 acquisition of X, the social media site then known as Twitter. Howell said the foundation has also filed information requests with federal law enforcement agencies to determine if they are "mistreating" Musk. "We want to make sure that the weaponized government is not being pointed at him," he said.
A White House spokesperson didn't respond to requests for comment.
The Heritage Foundation has had close ties with the former president since at least 2016, when it advised Trump's transition team ahead of his move into the White House.
More recently, it has gained attention as the source of "Project 2025," an initiative seen by political insiders as a playbook for a conservative overhaul of the federal government during a second Trump term. Trump has sought to distance his campaign from the project, although he still touts some of its proposals.
As part of Project 2025, the foundation compiled a roster of thousands of conservatives Trump could put into federal positions by reviving an executive order, known as "Schedule F," he introduced near the end of his presidency. The order, later rescinded by President Joe Biden, would have stripped many civil servants of longstanding job protections.
The records reviewed by Reuters show that "Heritage Foundation," "Schedule F" and "Project 2025" are also among the terms included in the NASA communications requests.
Musk has endorsed Trump and is financing a political action committee supporting Republican causes. The tycoon has grown increasingly critical of federal bureaucracy, especially the agencies that regulate SpaceX and his other businesses. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Musk has been financing another conservative political group since at least 2022.
In recent months, Trump has repeatedly said he will appoint Musk to head a government efficiency commission. Last month on X, Musk wrote: "I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises."
The federal government is the country's largest employer, with more than 2 million federal civilian employees, according to the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.
When lawyers for Richard Glossip argue before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to vacate his conviction for a 1997 murder, the Oklahoma death row inmate will have an unlikely ally: Gentner Drummond, the state's Republican attorney general.
Although Drummond has taken conservative stances on issues from immigration to abortion to environmental regulation, the decorated former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot broke with fellow Republican state attorneys general in Glossip's case after concluding prosecutors hid evidence that might have led to an acquittal.
"If he is executed, I believe that it will be a travesty of justice," Drummond said in an interview.
Glossip, now 61, was convicted in 1998 of a murder-for-hire scheme. After an appeals court overturned that conviction based on ineffective defense counsel, Glossip again was found guilty of first-degree murder in a 2004 retrial. Glossip is asking the Supreme Court to grant him a new trial after an Oklahoma court refused to overturn his conviction despite potentially exculpatory evidence being recently uncovered.
The decision by the Supreme Court, which begins its new term on Monday, is expected by the end of June.
Glossip was convicted of commissioning the murder of Barry Van Treese, owner of the Best Budget Inn motel in Oklahoma City where Glossip was a manager. All parties agree Van Treese was beaten to death with a baseball bat by maintenance worker Justin Sneed. Sneed confessed to the murder but avoided capital punishment by accepting a plea deal that involved testifying that Glossip paid him $10,000 to do it.
The victim's family, represented by former federal judge Paul Cassell, filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying, "The truth here is that no evidence was suppressed and Glossip commissioned the murder of Barry Van Treese."
After taking office last year, Drummond began reviewing each of Oklahoma's 28 then-pending death row cases. The veteran trial attorney saw hallmarks of a rock solid prosecution in nearly all these convictions: direct witnesses, corroborating witnesses and what he called "facts galore" indicating a defendant's guilt.
But what he saw in Glossip's case troubled him.
Securing a murder conviction against Glossip hinged on the testimony of Sneed, who was a methamphetamine addict, and the reliability of his account. Glossip admitted to helping Sneed cover up the murder after it occurred, but denied knowing that Sneed planned to kill Van Treese or encouraging him to do so.
"The state's witness was the murderer, and he was endorsed for the death penalty until he turned state's evidence and said, 'Oh, not me, but Mr. Glossip - he's the mastermind,'" Drummond said. "That struck me as very odd."
INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION
Drummond commissioned an independent investigation and disclosed information - including a prosecutor's hand-written notes from a meeting with Sneed - that had been withheld from Glossip's lawyers.
The new information cast doubt on Sneed's credibility, Glossip's lawyers said. They contend they were kept in the dark about Sneed receiving psychiatric treatment for bipolar disorder immediately after his arrest, and that prosecutors failed to correct a false statement Sneed made about his prescription for the medication lithium.
These revelations led Drummond to reach a momentous conclusion: If prosecutors had given defense lawyers all the exculpatory evidence they possessed, as required by law, then Glossip might have been acquitted.
"I don't believe Mr. Glossip was given a fair trial," Drummond said.
Glossip's case is not the first time Drummond has pushed back against an order to kill.
In 1991, while flying an F-15 Eagle in a nighttime operation during the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War against Iraq, Drummond disobeyed three direct orders to fire a missile at an aircraft that had been identified as hostile. Facing anti-aircraft artillery fire and low fuel, then-Captain Drummond insisted on personally confirming that the aircraft was an enemy before shooting it down.
Drummond was later awarded the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross for identifying the jet as an allied Saudi aircraft and withholding fire. His 1991 military citation said his actions had "prevented the tragic loss" of allied forces' lives.
In Glossip's case, Drummond showed "an unusual amount of courage" by asking the Supreme Court to halt Glossip's execution and grant him a new trial, said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center nonprofit group.
"It's impossible to overstate just how extraordinary it is," Maher said.
Drummond's support, Maher added, may be the reason why the Supreme Court chose to halt Glossip's execution and hear his case rather than reject it, as typically happens when death row inmates appeal.
Because Oklahoma's attorney general is supporting Glossip's appeal, the Supreme Court had to take the rare step of tapping an outside lawyer - private attorney Christopher Michel - to argue that Glossip's conviction should be upheld.
Michel in his Supreme Court brief, among other things, sought to rebut the claim by Glossip's lawyers that the newly disclosed information undermined Sneed's credibility or the prosecution's handling of the case.
Drummond's maverick streak has put him at odds with Republican attorneys general from eight states who urged the justices to clear the way for Glossip's execution. He previously bucked fellow Republicans in Oklahoma by successfully suing on constitutional grounds to block the first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in the United States.
Drummond said he did not weigh any possible political risks for backing Glossip, such as being painted by opponents as soft on crime.
"If that means I'm never elected again, then I can go to my grave being satisfied that I did the right thing," Drummond said.
Drummond believes Glossip's role in covering up Van Treese's murder makes him at least an "accessory after the fact," justifying a long prison sentence. But Glossip's murder conviction was too flawed for Drummond to defend.
"Oklahomans deserve to have absolute faith that the death penalty is administered fairly and with certainty," Drummond said.
Drummond said he feels duty-bound to attend executions to honor victims and their families, and the memory of those put to death. Seven times as attorney general he has sat four feet (1.2 meters) away as an inmate strapped to a gurney was administered a lethal injection.
Drummond said he will enforce whatever judgment the Supreme Court makes concerning Glossip, even if it means supervising an execution he believes to be wrong.
"I feel strongly that my position is correct," Drummond said. "But if a majority on the Supreme Court says otherwise, I will be in the death chamber with Mr. Glossip."
Republican U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson sidestepped a question on Sunday on whether he accepted that Donald Trump lost to Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, giving a response similar to that from the former president's running mate in the vice-presidential debate.
Trump, who allegedly lost to Biden in 2020 and claimed the elections were unfair, is once again the Republican Party's presidential candidate and faces Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 elections. Polls show a tight race.
"You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we are talking about the future," Johnson said in a confrontational interview on ABC News on Sunday.
"We are not going to talk about what happened in 2020, we are going to talk about 2024," Johnson said.
He added: "Joe Biden has been the president for almost four years. Everybody needs to get over this and move forward."
When pressed further, he said: "This is a gotcha game that's played, and I'm not playing it."
In Tuesday's vice-presidential debate, Senator JD Vance, Trump's running mate, also sidestepped the question.
Johnson also refused to condemn the former president's suggestion that the Republican presidential candidate's political opponents may be behind attempts to have him killed.
Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13. He also escaped an assassination attempt in September that was thwarted by a U.S. Secret Service agent patrolling Trump's Florida golf course. Investigators have found no evidence of the involvement of Trump's political opponents in the ongoing probes.
Johnson was also asked if he would help in certifying the 2024 election results if Trump lost.
"I'm going to follow the Constitution. ... Congress has a very specific role and we must fulfill it," he said.
