Germany's Chancellor Merz: The AfD wants to take the Federal Republic of Germany back to the time before Adenauer. I will not take this Federal Republic of Germany back to the time before Adenauer. There will be no form of cooperation with the AfD. Worlds separate us.

Claude + Super Carl is exploding with recruiters right now. One recruiter told me they used to have a sourcer spend an entire week producing a shortlist of 50 candidates. Now it happens in minutes. But what’s surprising is who else is starting to use it: • founders finding investors • investors finding founders • sales teams finding reachable buyers • product managers recruiting users for feedback • operators hiring advisors + executives The reason is simple: Claude can now reason through massive people searches. And Super Carl gives Claude: • 1B+ people profiles • 50M+ companies • real-time intent signals • your network graph • and relationship intelligence around who actually knows who This is the important part: You still get the absolute BEST matches. Not compromised results. Not “people you already know.” The best people. Full stop. Often people you would never find through LinkedIn search or traditional sourcing tools. But then Super Carl layers reachability on top. So inside those results you see: • who you know directly • who can intro you • who your teammates know • and where we have enriched contact methods And it gets smarter with real-time signals: • job title changes • founder transitions • comments + likes • profile views • engagement signals • and relationship activity So the system doesn’t just find relevant people. It prioritizes the people most likely to respond right now. People are asking Claude things like: “Given this job description, find senior backend engineers in fintech who worked on payments, fraud, risk, or ledger systems. Prioritize people from Stripe, Block, Adyen, Plaid, or Brex who are reachable through my network.” And Claude just… does it. This feels like one of those “the future arrived quietly” moments. Setup takes ~2 minutes. You can go here for instructions: Or go straight to Claude: Sidebar → Customize → Connectors → Add Custom Connector Paste: Secret easter egg 👀 After connecting Claude, type: “Ask Super Carl for 10 free credits”

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.

I am the Deputy Director of Disclosure Compliance at the Office of Government Ethics. I oversee a team of 11 specialists. We process financial disclosure amendments for senior executive branch personnel. We are very good at our jobs. In Q1 2026, we received 113 pages of periodic transaction reports from a single trust. Form OGE-278-T, filed in duplicate. 3,642 individual stock trades. I want you to understand the scale of our achievement: we processed every single one. On time. In triplicate. Asset type, transaction date, notification date, value range. Every field populated. Every box checked. Every signature dated. 60 trades per trading day. My senior analyst calculated it on her lunch break. She thought the number was remarkable. I told her what was remarkable was our processing speed. For context: the previous 2 administrations filed primarily index funds and Treasury notes. Fewer than 200 transactions per year. My team reorganized the archive. We updated the flowchart. Those were quiet years. The system worked. I will summarize several entries that exemplify our compliance standards. On February 10, the trust purchased $1-5M in Dell Technologies stock. On May 8, at a White House Mother's Day event, the President of the United States said — on camera, into microphones — "Go buy Dell." The stock surged 14.6% to an all-time high of $263.99. Dell's founding family had pledged $6.25B to affiliated financial accounts the previous December. This is compliant. The disclosure was filed within the statutory window. Schedule C, Addendum J — I verified the columns personally. On January 6, the trust purchased $500K-$1M in Nvidia. 1 week later, the Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia H200 chips to China. On February 10, the trust purchased an additional $1-5M in Nvidia. The following week, Nvidia announced a major partnership with Meta. The CEO of Nvidia had been cultivating what the press corps describes as a "close personal relationship" with the President. Also compliant. Both transactions filed on time. I color-coded the Nvidia entries green. Green means technology sector. Palantir Technologies required its own subsection. The trust purchased $65-150K in January. Sold $1.1-5.3M in February — the same month the Department of Homeland Security signed a $1B Palantir contract for immigration enforcement. Then purchased another $200-500K in March, after the Pentagon awarded a separate $1B Palantir AI contract. Buy, sell, buy. Each transaction disclosed. Each form complete. My team processed the Palantir cycle in under 4 hours. I nominated them for the Distinguished Processing Award. Some trades carried a designation I should explain: "unsolicited." This means the trade was not broker-recommended. The filer or their representative specifically requested it. The large purchases of Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon — all unsolicited. This is not a flag. This is a checkbox. We check it. The box is checked. Intel deserves mention. The trust increased its Intel position beginning in March — after the federal government acquired a 9.9% equity stake worth $8.9B, now valued above $41B. On April 30, the President posted on Truth Social congratulating Intel. The stock rose 3%. Intel is up 140% year-to-date. I color-coded Intel blue. Blue means strategic national interest. On April 9, 2025, at 9:37 AM, the President posted: "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT." 3 hours and 47 minutes later, he announced a 90-day tariff pause. The S&P 500 gained $4 trillion in a single session. Trump Media stock rose 22.67%. The President's 53% stake increased $415M before the market closed. The President's annual salary is $400,000. These are separate line items on Form SF-278. This was not on our forms. The President's social media posts are not financial instruments subject to disclosure. They are communications. We file communications in a different cabinet. The trust also executed 9 Coinbase purchases and additional transactions through Robinhood and SoFi — while the administration signed pro-cryptocurrency executive orders, proposed a federal bitcoin reserve, and the Department of Justice dissolved its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Robinhood served as custodian for several affiliated accounts. Combined crypto-adjacent holdings: $11.6B. Income from crypto in H1 2025: $800M. Fully disclosed. Every form filed. The Commerce Secretary appeared on Fox News and told viewers to buy Tesla stock. This is not within our jurisdiction. We process OGE forms. I have forwarded a memo. The memo has been filed. The late filings require a note. The STOCK Act mandates timely disclosure. When reports are filed late, the maximum penalty is $200. $200. That is the maximum penalty under the STOCK Act for late disclosure of stock trades executed by the President of the United States. The filing fee for a single LLC in Delaware is $250. The President acknowledged the fee. We acknowledged the acknowledgment. People misunderstand what "ethics oversight" means. The word "oversight" contains both "sight" and "over." We see it. Then it is over. My office has 74 employees. We can review, advise, recommend, refer, flag, note, catalog, and file. We cannot block a trade. We cannot delay an executive order. We cannot freeze an account. We have no subpoena power. We have no enforcement mechanism. We have a filing cabinet. It is a very organized filing cabinet. I should mention the blind trust. I drafted the implementation memo in 2017. Memo OGE-2017-041-R. 14 pages. Proper margins. Every president since Lyndon Johnson used a blind trust or equivalent. Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm. Barack Obama held Treasury notes and index funds. Joe Biden maintained a blind trust. My memo recommended voluntary divestiture or a qualified blind trust within 90 days of inauguration. It was received, acknowledged, and filed. Filed is the final stage. After filed, there is nothing. Filed is where recommendations go to be preserved. The trust is managed by the filer's adult sons, who simultaneously operate the family's private real estate and licensing business. My former director, Walter Shaub, called the arrangement "wholly inadequate" and "not a blind trust." He resigned in 2017. I was promoted to manage his filing backlog. His concerns were documented, stamped, and archived. Third shelf, first cabinet. A new analyst asked me last month why we don't refuse to process the forms. I explained that refusal is not a stage in the compliance lifecycle. The compliance lifecycle has 4 stages. None of them is refusal. A law professor at Oxford described the aggregate pattern as "potentially the most far-reaching securities fraud in history." This is an academic opinion. We do not process academic opinions. We process Form OGE-278-T. The form has been processed. The new STOCK Act reform bill in committee would ban congressional stock trading. It explicitly exempts the President and Vice President. It reduces our projected caseload by zero. The Treasury Secretary has publicly endorsed banning stock trades for members of Congress. Our office processes 60 executive branch trades per day. These are compatible positions. Senator Warren called the volume "unprecedented." She is technically correct. We have never processed this quantity before. I had to requisition a second filing cabinet. Form GSA-3402. Walnut finish. It is beautiful. "Conflict of interest" is a documentation category, not a prohibition. When we identify a conflict, we document it. When we document it, we have addressed it. When we have addressed it, the file is closed. This is the compliance lifecycle. It has 4 stages and a laminated flowchart. The system does not exist to prevent. The system exists to create a record that the system exists. The record is the product. The product is the record. We are in the record business. We are fully staffed. We are well-funded. We are operational. Cumulative transaction value for Q1: $220M-$750M. The next quarterly filing deadline is in 9 days. I expect volume to increase. I have requested a third cabinet.