The U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. — Ed Martin, who was appointed by President Donald Trump — has launched an inquiry into a critical comment Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Long Beach, recently made about Elon Musk.
Garcia, formerly Long Beach’s mayor and currently the representative for the 42nd Congressional District, has been a staunch anti-Trump advocate since he took office. But now, he is apparently being investigated for criticizing Musk during a CNN interview, which some have apparently viewed as threatening toward the Trump ally, according to a letter from Martin.
Garcia, for his part, said the comment in question — in which weapons and a bar fight are mentioned — was figurative.
The U.S. attorney’s office and the White House did not return requests for comment.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX, Tesla and X (formerly Twitter), was recently tapped by Trump to head up the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency. (SpaceX has long been based in Hawthorne, though Musk said last year that the headquarters would move to Texas.) DOGE is intended to aid the administration’s efforts to reduce government spending, partially through layoffs.
Since the president took office for his second term in January, DOGE, under Musk’s leadership, has threatened to cut off trillions of dollars in federal funding and announced large-scale layoffs across federal departments.
There isn’t currently an official figure for the number of people impacted by layoffs, which are ongoing and have already happened at numerous agencies — from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the National Parks Service.
Legal battles against Musk and his department’s layoffs are already getting underway. A federal judge on Tuesday, Feb. 18, refused to block the layoffs or prevent the department from accessing government data systems.
That decision stemmed from a lawsuit filed by 14 Democratic states — including California — that challenged DOGE’s authority to access sensitive government data, with the attorneys general arguing Musk is wielding the kind of power that the Constitution says can be held only by those elected or confirmed by the Senate.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan found that there are legitimate questions about Musk’s authority, but also said there isn’t enough evidence of grave legal harm to justify a temporary restraining order.
“DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion,” Chutkan wrote.
Questions about Musk’s apparently “unchecked authority” and lack of congressional oversight for DOGE are legitimate and the plaintiffs may be able to successfully argue them later, she said.
Still, at this point, it remains unclear exactly how DOGE’s work will affect the states, and judges can only issue orders to block specific, immediate harms, she found.
Musk’s team, meanwhile, has roamed from agency to agency, tapping into computer systems, digging into budgets and searching for what he calls waste, fraud and abuse, while lawsuits pile up arguing Trump and DOGE are violating the law.
“One of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out,” Musk said in a recent interview with Trump on the “Sean Hannity Show.” “Because the president is the elected representative of the people, so he’s representing the will of the people. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.
Garcia, meanwhile, has been among the most outwardly critical of both Musk and Trump.
The representative appeared on CNN on Feb. 12 to further discuss the House of Representatives’ first DOGE subcommittee hearing, during which he called Musk a “dick.”
During the CNN interview, Garcia was asked whether name-calling Musk was “effective messaging” for the crisis facing the Democratic Party.
In his response, Garcia doubled down on the insult and said Musk is “harming the American public in enormous ways.”
“What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight,” Garcia added. “This is an actual fight for democracy.”
Martin’s letter to Garcia informing him about the inquiry, which was sent on Monday, Feb. 17, said Garcia’s comments sound “to some like a threat to Mr. Musk.” Martin wrote that his office “takes threats against public officials very seriously.”
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina, also introduced a censure against Garcia on Feb. 13, which has since been referred to the Committee on Ethics.
Garcia, on X, previously said his comments were a figure of speech. He also called out his Republican counterparts for their inappropriate behavior, including Mace’s own suggestion that she and a fellow Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, “take it outside” during a hearing last month.
“Ironic coming from you,” Garcia said in his post directed at Mace about her censure. “Violence is never the answer.”
Garcia’s office, in a Thursday statement, also said that the letter is “part of an effort to silence individuals willing to oppose Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s overreach.”
“No reasonable person would view my comments as a threat,” Garcia said in a Thursday, Feb. 20, statement. “We are living in a dangerous time, and elected members of Congress must have the right to forcefully oppose the Trump administration.”
“We will not be silenced.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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