Rolling Stone Warns DOGE Staffer’s Family ‘Has Ties’ to Russian Oligarch Activist journalism at its weakest. by Mark Tapson
In an exclusive report online, far-Left Rolling Stone magazine, which has arguably the worst track record of any journalism outlet for posting false and defamatory stories that suit its political bias, warns that there is a new staffer at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “seeking access to sensitive data at the IRS – and his family has ties to a sanctioned Russian oligarch”! [Emphasis added]
Drawing on stories from other Left-wing propaganda outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times, Rolling Stone (RS) reports that two DOGE representatives, Gavin Kliger and Sam Corcos, have been at the IRS “seeking private taxpayer information in unprecedented ways that would violate current IRS privacy law” in order to hunt down fraud.
Never mind that Rolling Stone couldn’t have cared less about the Democrat Party under both Barack Obama and Joe Biden violating taxpayers’ rights by weaponizing the IRS against conservatives. But when DOGE digs through IRS information exposing massive bureaucratic fraud, suddenly it’s an invasion of the average taxpayer’s privacy.
RS complains – as if it’s a bad thing – that Musk has led a “blitz” through federal agencies, firing thousands of federal workers, while “demanding sweeping access to sensitive personal data.” The former music magazine, which is fond of glorifying Islamic terrorists on its cover, also tries feebly to diminish DOGE staffers like Gavin Kliger, 25, as “young” and “inexperienced” – as if youth is a drawback in the tech world. As Musk has put it, “Judging an engineer by age is BS.”
The thrust of the “exclusive” investigation is this:
Corcos, 36, founded the health care start-up Levels in 2019 with a former SpaceX lead engineer Dr. Casey Means, a holistic doctor with “ties” (there’s that ominous word again) to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. RS does not elaborate on what those ties are, or on how RFK Jr. is a factor in this dark conspiracy. But it notes that Levels received seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm led by Trump donor (gasp!) Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, son of Freedom Center founder David Horowitz (gasp!).
Corcos’ wife Russkova, a Moscow native and investment advisor, spent three years (2016-2019) at GVA Capital, described as “a vehicle” for Russian oligarch Suleyman Kerimov to funnel $28 million of his estimated $10.9 billion into various American companies. The money flowed from a Delaware trust called Heritage Trust. The U.S. Treasury Department blocked Heritage and made its funds inaccessible in 2022, saying it was created to obscure Kerimov’s interests in U.S.-based assets.
“Heritage Trust was also how Kerimov invested in SpaceX in 2017,” RS reports, holding what was then 1 percent of the company, but by the time Treasury blocked the Heritage Trust, the SpaceX holding had already been disposed of.
Kerimov is considered close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, RS notes; he attended, for example, a February 2022 meeting of oligarchs at the Kremlin with Putin to discuss the effects of Western sanctions.
Russkova Corcos was also “involved,” as RS puts it without clarification, in another GVA-funded crypto venture in 2017 with a former business associate of Kerimov named Pavel Cherkashin.
That’s the extent of DOGE staffer Sam Corcos’ “ties” to Putin: his wife, whom he married “some time [sic] after 2020,” worked years ago with a couple of Putin-friendly billionaires. RS even covers its rear by admitting that there is “no evidence that Russkova Corcos committed any wrongdoing” while working with GVA Capital. Not only that, but RS also admits that in recent years, she “has posted critically about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and in support of late Russian dissident Alexei Navalany on Facebook.” And yet somehow RS wants us to believe that her husband is funneling “sensitive personal information” from the IRS to Putin, presumably with Elon Musk’s complicity or under his orders.
Rolling Stone and its comrades in the media are not objective, independent, truth-seeking journalists; today’s Left-dominated media are self-confessed activists openly functioning as a resistance movement against their arch-enemy Donald Trump, whom they hysterically demonize as a modern-day Mussolini.
The Left is hell-bent on promoting its relentless propaganda that Trump – and by extension everyone else in his administration – is a Putin operative (“stooge” or “puppet” are the Left’s preferred smear labels). Musk especially is despised and feared by the Left because they resent billionaires who aren’t George Soros, and because his DOGE is chainsawing its way through government corruption like it was hot butter and exposing programs like USAID as Democrat slush funds. So Musk too must be discredited by connecting him to Putin.
Exposing someone’s “ties” can be a valid journalistic endeavor when those ties demonstrate a solid and legitimate connection to criminal or illicit activity. But accusing someone of vague, indirect “ties” to this or that shady entity can also be the easiest way to smear a political opponent by loose association. In this “exclusive,” Rolling Stone clearly has no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Sam Corcos, his wife, DOGE, Musk, or Trump – or they would be bullhorn-ing it from the rooftops instead of burying its insinuations halfway down the page of their ”Politics” category.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
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