The Car in the Driveway

Dan Berulis works in IT. He did, anyway.

In April 2025, he filed a congressional whistleblower complaint against DOGE. His complaint was specific and documented. DOGE operatives had accessed the National Labor Relations Board's data systems without authorization. Minutes after they left, login attempts came in from a Russian IP address. The data appeared to be leaving the building entirely.

The next day he went public. NPR ran the story. Within hours, Elon Musk reposted a message on his own social media platform calling the complaint deliberately false and naming Berulis directly. The replies included calls for prosecution. Some were worse than that.

That night, someone cut his brake lines.

Not metaphorically. His car was parked in his own driveway. A mechanic later confirmed the brake lines had been physically tampered with. The airbag sensor had also been removed and the wires spliced back together in a way specifically designed to prevent the car from detecting the missing component, triggering any safety warnings, or engaging limp mode. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. Berulis found out when he couldn't stop at a stop sign and drove off the road into the sign itself to avoid a collision.

A threatening note arrived at his house the same day. He fled to a hotel. He never went back. He canceled his lease.

The police report is filed. Fingerprints were found on the car. The case is now inactive due to lack of a specific suspect.

He filed a defamation lawsuit against Elon Musk this week. The lawsuit is why the story is public. The lawsuit is also, as Berulis told Wired, "kicking the hornet's nest." He knows what it might bring. He filed it anyway.

That is the story everyone is not talking about today.

Here is what everyone is talking about.

The president signed an AI executive order Tuesday. In private, no ceremony, no tech CEOs at the podium. The order asks companies developing the most powerful AI systems to voluntarily share their models with the government for up to 30 days before public release. It also asks companies to collaborate with the administration to select "trusted partners" that will receive early access to frontier models to "promote secure innovation."

Trusted partners. Selected by the administration. With 30-day advance access to the most powerful AI systems in the world before anyone else sees them.

The order doesn't name any companies. It doesn't have to.

Palantir Technologies held its annual shareholder meeting today. Yesterday was the AI executive order. Today was the earnings confirmation. First quarter 2026 U.S. revenue up 104% year over year. Total revenue growth of 85%. Full year guidance raised to 71% growth. The company that co-founder Peter Thiel built with CIA seed money, that processes five billion phone records a day, that built ImmigrationOS for ICE using Medicaid enrollment records as deportation targeting data, that the Pentagon designated as its core AI military system in March -- that company just reported the fastest growth in its history. The day after the president signed an executive order creating a formal framework for exactly the kind of exclusive government AI access Palantir already sells.

Thiel is in Argentina. The architecture is here.

Now here is the part that connects these two stories into one.

The DOGE whistleblower said Russian IP addresses accessed NLRB data through DOGE systems. The case went inactive. The president just appointed the man who used mortgage databases to build political dossiers on the president's enemies to run all eighteen U.S. intelligence agencies. That man now has authority over the agencies that would investigate Russian access to federal systems. The AI executive order gives the administration a 30-day window and trusted partner access to frontier AI models before public release.

The man who had his brakes cut blew the whistle on unauthorized data access with possible Russian fingerprints. The man who would now investigate that is under a GAO investigation for doing something similar with different databases. The administration that cut federal whistleblower protections is now asking AI companies for early access to their most powerful systems through a trusted partner framework it controls.

The car in the driveway is the story. Everything else is the driveway.

Category I flag: The AI executive order creating a "trusted partner" early access framework for frontier AI models, signed privately and without ceremony, directly benefits Palantir -- a company with $13.7 billion in active government contracts and 104% U.S. revenue growth -- meeting the abuse of power standard for use of federal regulatory authority for the financial benefit of an administration-connected entity whose co-founder helped install the administration.

Category I flag: Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners receiving a tax-free development deal on reclassified protected coastal land from the Albanian government, which is actively seeking U.S. favor and EU membership, with the Albanian government underwriting all public infrastructure costs, meets the foreign emoluments clause standard -- a thing of value received by the president's family from a foreign state without congressional consent.

Two flags. One Tuesday. Neither one on the front page.

-- Barron St. John | The Decoder Ring on Substack