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FOIA CASE UPDATE: So Judge Boasberg ordered the government to search DOGE records for Musk’s private phone number. The DoJ just responded with their results. Did they basically just search for messages that contain “Musk phone”? lol do I have that right @nationalsecuritylaw.org?

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The removal of family attachments from their review is another level of ridiculous here too. Basically, you could have an email saying, "attached is a screen shot showing Elon Musk's cell phone number," and their review would have included the email but not the attachment with the actual number.

Surely someone working for the government called him on their official government phone, so there would be a record of Mr. Musk's phone number in that device. Surely they got his contact information when he was hired on as a Special Government Employee. That would have included a phone number.

Looks like someone deliberately hacked the search terms to avoid any hits. Besides not searching just for his actual number(s), they also neglected to search for his initials, "E", "M", "EM", "E.M.", "ERM", or "E.R.M.". That's the way messages from frequent contacts are noted in the real world.

No, the "/3" is not a wildcard. The right wildcard ("!," IIRC) would pick up "Musk" as well as "Musk'" or "Musk's." The grammar of this search is "either of the two words, as spelled, preceding the "/3"] within three words of [any of the three words following the "/3"]."

*wow* That's a .... creative ... literal interpretation of the Judge's order pretty much guaranteed to produce a nonviable answer. I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict the judicial response is going to be nonfavorable.

They returned the results of the words "Musk", "Phone", and "Number". Literally. Obviously the judge was ordering them to search for a specific phone number like "555-234-4466" or whatever the actual number is. So, are they that stupid or are they trolling?

Judges need to be able to react to what is painfully obvious to all of us with a functioning analyzer; this regime is corrupt, unlawful, dishonest and morally bankrupt. Judges need to understand the contempt that this administration has for the co-equal Judiciary and repay them with equal contempt.

Pretty much. The boolean search was basically for records that contained elon or musk within 3 words of phone or number, so they were looking for someone saying "hey here's musk's phone number." Then they looked in Outlook contacts for a bunch of devices for his number (even though he used Signal).

The normal response here would surely be to search for Elon's actual number (with optional whitespace inbetween digits) since theu must know what his number is.

I don’t know how much they’ll unearth, but I can tell you that GAO is auditing every agency’s work done with DOGE, to include names, dates, and pay for every DOGE employee. So they won’t be able to hide once a new administration goes after them.

They should have used regex to search documents or wildcards with SQL in databases in case strings used abbreviations or nonstandard formats, e.g. 777.555.1212, 7775551212, ph:, cel:.