A newly released FBI email shows a former special agent proposed opening a criminal matter involving Elon Musk and Office of Personnel Management officials over the 2025 “five things” workforce initiative, though the document does not show that the FBI approved or opened such an investigation.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
A former FBI special agent proposed opening a criminal investigation involving Elon Musk after the billionaire Trump adviser publicly backed a government-wide effort requiring federal employees to report five accomplishments from the previous week, according to a newly declassified internal FBI email.
Former Special Agent Kevin Gounaud raised the idea in a Feb. 22, 2025, message to an FBI colleague, arguing that Musk and officials at the Office of Personnel Management may have violated federal law through the workforce initiative, according to the newly disclosed FBI email.
The document was made public by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, during Tuesday’s FBI oversight hearing with Director Kash Patel, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation report. The Senate Judiciary Committee listed its annual FBI oversight hearing with Patel for Sept. 15.
The email shows Gounaud recommending an investigative opening; it does not establish that FBI supervisors approved his proposal, that prosecutors accepted his legal theory or that a criminal investigation of Musk was ultimately opened.
“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. “That person in conspiracy with Elon Musk (who is reportedly an [Special Government Employee]), in addition to wasting a colossal amount of official time, encouraged, abetted, aided, etc. thousands if not tens of thousands of government employees outside of a strict need to know.”
Gounaud also objected to Musk discussing the workforce initiative through X, the social media company Musk owns.
“Furthermore, Musk used a non government system (twitter) to relate information that allegedly was for official purposes,” Gounaud wrote. “In doing so, because he is monetized (he is a majority owner of twitter) he likely generated income for himself based on Twitter’s monetization model and/or advertising revenues.”
He compared Musk’s conduct conceptually with Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state and suggested Musk may have violated the federal conflict-of-interest statute, 18 U.S.C. § 208.
The statute generally restricts executive branch employees from personally and substantially participating in particular government matters in which they have certain financial interests. Gounaud’s email represented his legal theory; the disclosed document does not contain a determination by prosecutors or a court that Musk violated the statute.
The agent also pointed to Musk’s public statement that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” suggesting it might implicate the federal blackmail statute.
“Reading Musk’s message even in the most positive light, that message threatened persons with firing if they did not participate in an act that violated policy,” Gounaud wrote. “This potentially violates 18 USC 873.”
“Happy to write the case opening and find a prosecutor (or at least try),” he added.
“And no, I’m not kidding.”
The dispute began earlier that day when OPM sent an email to federal employees with the subject line “What did you do last week?” Employees were instructed to respond with approximately five bullet points describing what they had accomplished and to copy their managers.
OPM expressly told employees not to include classified information, links or attachments. Its subsequent guidance said agency heads could exempt personnel and that individual agencies would decide what action, if any, to take against employees who did not respond.
The initiative caused immediate confusion across the federal government.
Some departments instructed their employees to respond, while agencies handling sensitive national-security or law-enforcement information told personnel not to participate or to wait for further guidance. The FBI was among the agencies that initially instructed workers not to respond to the OPM request.
Musk, who was serving as a special government employee while leading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, publicly took a harder line than OPM’s initial message, saying failure to answer would be considered a resignation.
OPM subsequently clarified that agencies had discretion over enforcement and exclusions. The government eventually abandoned the centralized “five things” process in August 2025, with OPM Director Scott Kupor saying managers already had other ways to monitor employees’ work and that the agency would no longer maintain the government-wide system.
Grassley presented the Gounaud email as part of his broader investigation into what he describes as political bias and selective enforcement inside federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies.
“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,” Grassley said, according to the reporting.
“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.
Those statements represent Grassley’s assessment of the records and the conduct of past FBI officials.
Federal law does require national intelligence to be objective and independent of political considerations. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 states that national intelligence should be “timely, objective, independent of political considerations,” and establishes safeguards intended to protect analytical integrity. That provision governs intelligence analysis and does not itself establish that Gounaud’s proposed criminal inquiry violated federal law.
Grassley has spent several years releasing FBI and Justice Department records involving Crossfire Hurricane, Arctic Frost, Round River and other politically sensitive investigations.
Crossfire Hurricane, launched in 2016, examined possible connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Justice Department Inspector General and special counsel John Durham reviews later documented serious errors and shortcomings in portions of the FBI’s work, particularly its surveillance applications involving former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Durham also examined intelligence concerning a reported Clinton campaign plan to link Trump to Russia but explicitly noted that ordinary opposition research itself is not criminal conduct.
The Steele dossier, which contained a series of allegations about Trump and Russia, was funded through opposition-research work ultimately paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign. The Justice Department inspector general found the dossier played a significant role in the FBI’s applications to surveil Page and documented numerous errors and omissions in those applications.
Grassley has also released records concerning an FBI effort known as Round River and has argued that federal investigators improperly treated derogatory information involving the Biden family and Ukraine as potential Russian disinformation. Those characterizations remain part of an ongoing political and congressional dispute over how the FBI handled foreign-influence concerns and politically sensitive information.
The Gounaud email adds a different example to that debate because it shows an individual FBI agent actively proposing a criminal theory involving one of the Trump administration’s most prominent outside advisers.
Grassley’s office has also pointed to what it sees as inconsistent treatment of special government employees, contrasting Gounaud’s proposed scrutiny of Musk with the Justice Department’s previous handling of Huma Abedin, who held special-government-employee status while serving Hillary Clinton. That comparison is an argument advanced by Grassley’s staff; the newly released Musk email itself does not address Abedin or document a formal FBI policy requiring the two situations to be treated alike.
Gounaud’s comparison to Clinton is nevertheless explicit in the email.
His message came years after the FBI investigated Clinton’s use of a private email system for official State Department business. Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch accepted the FBI and career prosecutors’ recommendation in July 2016 that no criminal charges be filed.
Later that year, investigators discovered a large volume of emails on a laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner, then the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin. A subsequently released email from former FBI Director James Comey stated that the FBI team told him there were “over 600,000 emails” on the computer, including years of Abedin correspondence and messages involving Clinton.
A later Justice Department inspector general review found investigators initially encountered more than 300,000 emails on the laptop and subsequently extracted hundreds of thousands of email and BlackBerry backup files. The FBI reviewed material relevant to the Clinton inquiry and announced shortly before the 2016 election that its earlier decision not to recommend charges remained unchanged.
The newly released Gounaud message does not show that the FBI launched a comparable investigation of Musk.
Instead, it documents one agent’s recommendation, his proposed statutes and his willingness to draft the paperwork and seek a prosecutor.
That distinction leaves two separate questions: why an FBI agent believed Musk’s involvement in the OPM initiative potentially warranted criminal investigation, and whether anyone higher in the bureau agreed.
The document released by Grassley answers the first.
So far, it does not answer the second.
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