Downwind of Truth with Kait Justice

03/31/2026

Today, Peter Thiel, the man who co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, co-founded the data surveillance company that processes intelligence for the CIA and the Pentagon, and whose money put the current Vice President of the United States in office, has a protégé network running through the executive branch of the American government.

JD Vance, who worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital and received $15 million in campaign backing from Thiel, is Vice President. David Sacks, Thiel’s Stanford Review co-founder and PayPal colleague, is AI and Crypto Czar. Michael Kratsios, former chief of staff at Thiel Capital, is Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Jacob Helberg, a Palantir adviser, was nominated as Under Secretary of State. Clark Minor, who worked at Palantir for 13 years, became Chief Information Officer at HHS. Jim O’Neill, former CEO of the Thiel Foundation, was confirmed as Deputy Secretary of HHS and then installed as acting CDC director.

Since Trump took office in January 2025, Palantir received $113 million in new contracts from DHS and the Pentagon. Palantir, the company Thiel built with venture funding from the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel, which processes data for intelligence agencies and law enforcement across the federal government, is now what Bloomberg has called the operating system for significant portions of American government.

And DOGE, which by mid-2025 had dissolved itself eight months before its scheduled end date, with OPM Director Scott Kupor confirming to Reuters that it was “no longer a centralized entity,” did something before it disappeared. Its personnel stayed, seemingly seeded permanently throughout the agencies they had accessed.

The man who helped dismantle USAID now oversees foreign assistance at the State Department. The person granted access to government health systems is now Chief Technology Officer at HHS. Another is now Chief at the Office of Naval Research. A fourth is developing AI tools to identify and eliminate federal regulations. The organization dissolved, and the footprint it had carved into those agencies remained after it. The oversight infrastructure and the financial investigation infrastructure are the same infrastructure.

The Suspicious Activity Reports at Treasury are how financial crimes get traced. The compliance systems at federal financial agencies are how transactions connecting Epstein, Deutsche Bank, Kushner, and sovereign wealth channels get flagged and investigated. DOGE accessed those systems, then embedded its people permanently inside the agencies that run them, then dissolved so that the footprint continues with no central entity anyone can subpoena or hold accountable.