Elon Musk falsely accused prominent lawyer and CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen of leading a “crime family” after he discovered a woman with the same last name who worked for an organization that accepted funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The only problem? The woman, Tamar Eisen, is of no relation to Norm Eisen.
On X, Musk amplified a post which falsely stated that Tamar, an employee of the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, was the CNN personality’s daughter.
The post took aim at the elder Eisen for being “the mastermind behind a slew of lawsuits” that seek to stifle the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s gutting of USAID.
Tamar Eisen, the post alleged, “was strutting her stuff as a Program Officer for the NDI’s Gender, Women and Democracy team for almost three years.”
Musk wrote in response Thursday afternoon: “The Eisen crime family.”
Yet the two have no familial connection, a source familiar told the Daily Beast.
Eisen, founder of the State Democracy Defenders Fund, is a central figure in several lawsuits targeting the Trump administration as DOGE continues to gut the federal government.
“Every time Trump and Musk flood the zone, we do two cases,” he told The New Republic recently. “It’s called rule of law shock and awe.”
Thursday’s mishap by the billionaire de-facto cabinet member comes on the heels of another Musk-involved case of mistaken identity.
The group Building America’s Future, which Musk funds, ran an ad earlier this week targeting the liberal candidate in the race for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, Susan M. Crawford. But the image of the woman in the ad was instead of Susan P. Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor.
As noted first by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that image appears to be same photograph as the one on Crawford’s Wikipedia page.
