Musk falsely accuses Jewish former ambassador suing DOGE of heading ‘crime family’
Former Czech ambassador Norm Eisen and his daughter were the victims of Musk’s erroneous smear
Norm Eisen during the Trump impeachment proceedings in 2019. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
By Louis Keene March 3, 2025
Elon Musk amplified a conspiracy theory about a Jewish former ambassador, calling him the head of a “crime family,” in a post on the social network X (formerly Twitter) viewed more than 13 million times as of Monday.
The post Musk re-shared Feb. 27, initially posted by the MAGA influencer Mila Joy, claimed that Norman Eisen, the former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic — who today is at the forefront of efforts to stop Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in court — was involved in a scheme to funnel money from the U.S. Agency for International Development to an agency where his daughter is employed.
Musk, whose platform’s artificial intelligence tool recently rated him as the biggest spreader of misinformation, added the comment, “The Eisen crime family.”
The conspiracy theory should have been dead on arrival: Eisen’s daughter, Tamar, shares a name with an employee at the USAID-funded National Democratic Institute, but it’s a different Tamar Eisen, MSNBC’s Sam Stein reported.
X Community Notes users proposed several corrections debunking the smear, but as of Monday — more than 72 hours after Musk’s post — no correction was being shown to X users, and Musk’s post remained up.
Eisen, 64, who has not commented publicly on the Musk post, did not respond to an inquiry from the Forward sent through the Brookings Institution, where he is a senior fellow in governance studies.
The son of a Czech Holocaust survivor, Eisen was appointed in 2011 by former President Barack Obama — his former Harvard Law School classmate — to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the country his mother had fled.
Eisen, who is Orthodox, said he hung mezuzahs on the doors of the U.S. embassy in Prague, made its kitchens kosher and observed the Sabbath there.
“Every time I ate a kosher lambchop there, I would say, ‘Take that, Hitler!’” he recalled in a 2016 interview.
He had previously served as the White House ethics adviser under Obama, when he earned the moniker “Mr. No” for rejecting proposals on ethics grounds.
“Sometimes my job is to scare the bejesus out of everybody,” Eisen told The Washington Post in a 2009 profile. “That’s part of my function. That’s what I do.”
After President Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Eisen became one of his primary legal antagonists. He filed the first lawsuit against Trump under the emoluments clause, and served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee majority during Trump’s impeachment proceedings and trial in 2019 and 2020.
After Trump’s reelection last year, Eisen co-founded State Democracy Defenders to oppose Republican election-related policy efforts.
That organization has sued to stop Musk from firing thousands of federal employees, with Eisen arguing that Musk does not have constitutional authority to dictate federal policy as he has not been confirmed as a member of the president’s cabinet.
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