Assassination by innuendo By now you’ve seen Tuesday’s bizarre press event in the Oval Office. The leader of the free world expounded at length on rooting out fraud and waste in the U.S. government while Donald Trump, his lieutenant, sat inert behind a large desk. REPORTER: If you have received billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon and the president is directing you to look into the DoD, does that present a conflicts of interest? MUSK: First of all, I'm not the filing the contract. It's people at SpaceX pic.twitter.com/JFQKHAQDvZ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 11, 2025 I don’t know what they teach in journalism schools these days, but insisting that political figures back up wild claims with checkable data and facts seems to have fallen out of the curriculum. After their shoddy work recently, headline writers at The New York Times this morning seem to have found a little backbone with Appearing With Trump, Musk Makes Broad Claims of Federal Fraud Without Proof: The billionaire Elon Musk said in an extraordinary Oval Office appearance on Tuesday that he was providing maximum transparency in his government cost-cutting initiative, but offered no evidence for his sweeping claims that the federal bureaucracy had been corrupted by cheats and officials who had approved money for “fraudsters.” […] Among Mr. Musk’s claims, which he offered without providing evidence, was that some officials at the now-gutted U.S. Agency for International Development had been taking “kickbacks.” He said that “quite a few people” in the…