Elon Musk sent one email asking federal workers what they accomplished last week, and Washington panicked.
Senator Chuck Grassley just revealed what one FBI agent wanted done to the person who sent it.
That agent wasn't after an apology – he wanted something far more permanent for the colleague who hit send.
Gounaud Wanted a Colleague Charged for Sending Musk's Email
Kevin Gounaud worked public corruption cases inside the FBI's CR-15 squad.
That's the unit built to catch crooked officials abusing their power.
On February 22, 2025, DOGE emailed every federal worker asking for five bullet points on what they'd done that week.
Gounaud didn't file a complaint about it.
He reportedly tried to open a criminal case.
His email, obtained by Grassley's committee, recommended "the opening of a criminal 58 matter on the person(s) at OPM who approved the transmission of the earlier email."
He accused Musk of conspiring with OPM to make "thousands if not tens of thousands" of federal employees violate government-wide security policy – by answering a work email about their job.
Then he added the line that's now attached to his name forever: "And no, I'm not kidding."
A sitting FBI agent wanted a federal bureaucrat criminally charged for approving a routine productivity email.
Nobody hacked a classified system.
Nobody leaked a source's identity.
Somebody hit forward on a message asking what employees did at work.
Kash Patel had been confirmed by the Senate to run the FBI just two days before Gounaud wrote that memo.
Eight months later, in October 2025, Patel dismantled the CR-15 squad Gounaud worked in.
The Same Agent Compared Musk's Tweets to Hillary Clinton's Private Server
Gounaud didn't stop at the OPM email.
He also went after Musk's use of X to talk about DOGE's work, claiming it violated 18 U.S.C. 208 and the terms of Musk's status as a Special Government Employee.
He wrote that Musk's posts were "conceptually similar to Hillary Clinton's misuse of a private email server."
Clinton ran a secret server out of her house specifically to hide 33,000 government emails from federal records law.
Musk posted on a public platform, in real time, where every reporter in Washington could read it instantly.
Comparing those two things isn't a legal argument.
It's a confession about what Gounaud actually believed his job was.
Grassley Has Caught This FBI Pattern Before
This isn't the first time Grassley has pulled back the curtain on this exact behavior.
He spent last year exposing Arctic Frost, the FBI operation that swept 92 Republican targets into its net – including the Republican National Committee and Turning Point USA – under the cover of an unrelated investigation.
Gounaud's memo belongs in that same file.
Grassley's committee has spent two years cataloguing how often that bureau treated ordinary conservative activity as worthy of federal scrutiny while the bureaucrats slow-walking DOGE got nothing but cover from their colleagues.
The law was never really the point.
Whose side you were on was.
Musk was never charged with anything.
Gounaud is gone from the bureau and now runs his own private security consulting firm.
Kash Patel's FBI confirmed no investigation was ever opened and told reporters that Patel "has made it a top priority to expose and eliminate the deep-rooted corruption that took hold over decades at the FBI."
Sources:
- Rusty Weiss, "'I'm Not Kidding': FBI Agent Tried to Prosecute Musk for Asking Gov't Workers What They Did All Week," RedState, September 15, 2026.
- Brooke Singman, "FBI Agent Urged Criminal Probe of Elon Musk's X Use, Likened It to Clinton Email Scandal," Fox News, February 3, 2026.
- Emily Kopp, "FBI Agent Wanted To Investigate Elon Musk For Asking Federal Employees What They Did That Week," The Daily Caller, September 15, 2026.
