A high-ranking Trump administration official was widely mocked Friday after being exposed for awarding an investigator a first look at government documents as a “gift” – only for the investigator to publicly release private texts after believing they were being “set up” by the “Deep State.”
In a now-deleted online post on X, Jessica Pounds – an investigator and data scientist who assisted Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE – claimed to “have never been more angry in my life” after alleging the “Deep State” had set her up “to commit a crime.”
Pounds claimed that she was sent a trove of documents to “leak” by a government source. Upon further inspection, Pounds said she believed leaking said documents would have gotten her “in big big trouble.” She also released a screengrab of a text exchange.
“The markings weren’t crossed out,” Pounds wrote in a social media post on X. “I consulted people and if this were a sanctioned leak – they would have just sent over email. They tried to entrap me.”
Sarah B. Rogers, the under secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, took credit for being the individual texting Pounds in a dismissive response.
“lol, these are my text messages and documents,” Rogers wrote in a social media post on X. “The ‘markings’ are [Freedom of Information Act] redactions required even for voluntary disclosure.”
The public exchange was soon met with online ridicule from countless critics.
“We should sincerely thank God that these folks are better at stepping on rakes than the villainous s— they’re supposed to be doing,” wrote Charlie Collier, an editor at Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Right-wing journalist Eric Spracklen argued that the public blunder “inadvertently exposed” how Nick Shirley – the right-wing influencer best known for his controversial Minnesota daycare fraud investigation – “got his riveting Minnesota fraud story out of nowhere.”
And political writer Pedro Gonzalez issued a lengthy rebuke of the entire Trump administration over what he characterized as its incompetence.
“The Trump-Vance administration fed a scoop to DataRepublican, basically the other Nick Shirley and one of its fake journalist mouthpieces,” Gonzalez wrote in a social media post on X Friday night.
“But DR is such a moron that she thought it was a plot to ensnare her by getting her to leak classified information. These people are like inept movie villains, complete with brain-dead henchmen. If this had been written as a scene in One Battle After Another, people would have complained that it was too on the nose, too ridiculous.”
The real story here is that DataRepublican inadvertently just exposed how Nick Shirley got his riveting Minnesota fraud story out of nowhere. https://t.co/HrUC9UUChs — Eric Spracklen
(@EricSpracklen) August 22, 2026
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