Natalie and Donald ... Sittin' in an UN-SAFE Flying Palace Gifted from Qatar ...

Hi there, it's Moss, and this is take three. Take three, because I keep getting off on tangents when I get this worked up, and this one had me worked up. So let me plant it before I lose it again: we have got ourselves a new Air Force One-ish plane. A 400 million dollar gift to the President of the United States from the Emir of Qatar, a man some of us would comfortably call a non-ally of America. And here is the thing about gifts from people who should not be handing us gifts. We have emoluments laws. We have this quaint old idea called conflict of interest. When the money starts flying in from a direction it should not be flying in from, you already know something is up.

And something was up. Qatar wanted something. Turns out he is not getting it, because Trump lied to him about what he was going to do, and now the Emir is standing there with egg on his face, having handed over a 400 million dollar jet to a man who reneged on the deal. Surprise, surprise. The man who demands loyalty from everyone around him has none of his own to give. But hold that, because it is only the appetizer. The real meal here is who they grounded, and who they did not.

Start with the people who got overruled

The harmed in this story are not abstract. They are the professionals whose entire job is to keep this president alive and his secrets sealed, and who looked at that flying palace and said, do not fly this. The Secret Service agent doing the threat math. The counterintelligence officer sweating over what is bolted inside a foreign-gifted airframe. And standing behind them, you. The taxpayer about to eat the bill, and the ordinary citizen who keeps getting told government information belongs to the public right up until somebody figures out how to sell it.

Nobody died. Nothing blew up. That is not the point, and do not let anyone move the goalposts to make it the point. The point is that the safety system got switched off by affection and vanity, and the people holding the risk are the pros who said don't, and the citizens who never got a vote.

The plane, and what it costs you

And it is not a vibe. It is a Senate letter. Senator Angus King and colleagues put it on Senate letterhead: securing this gifted jet to the standard a president actually needs would force the Defense Department into an accelerated, comprehensive upgrade, with the direct cost to the American taxpayer likely to exceed one billion dollars. They named the reason out loud too, the operational security and counterintelligence risks of using this aircraft for sensitive presidential travel. That is Senator Angus King's office. Read the letter.

And here is the kicker buried in that same letter. Taxpayers are already on the hook for at least 3.9 billion dollars for two Air Force One aircraft Boeing is already building. Already. So this man wants four presidential planes, and he wants them now, and every dollar of it comes out of your pocket. So do not sit there, you triple-down chumpers and trumpers, and tell me America is great again. America is not great. It has gotten worse every single day this man has been in charge, and the good news he feeds you is a lie, and the networks that echo it are getting stinky rich off the lie while you watch it like a drug you cannot put down. The plane is not really the story. The plane is the symbol.

The pros said do not fly it. This is the load-bearing receipt.

Here is the receipt that holds up the entire episode, so listen close. Per The Hill, reporting the New York Times, the Secret Service advised President Trump not to leave the NATO Summit in Turkey on the newer, Qatari-gifted Air Force One. Sources familiar with it said he flew out of Ankara on the older Air Force One instead, out of an abundance of caution over a potential Iran threat. And NewsNation independently confirmed it with a source who had direct knowledge. So this is not one outlet talking to itself. That is The Hill via the New York Times, backed by NewsNation.

So sit in that picture for a second. The government's own protective service looked at the fancy foreign flying palace and said, too risky, take the old bird. And you know what actually got him off that plane? Not principle. Not the retrofit. He got off because someone told him the unsecure plane might get shot down, that there was a threat, that he personally might get killed. That is the moment the wimpy little man moved. Fear for his own skin. That was the trigger.

What nobody told him, or what nobody could make stick, was this: Mr. President, that young woman traveling with you who has access to secrets only the president and cleared people should touch, she should not be on this plane either. That is not the sentence that grounded anything. And even if they had said it, would he have listened? You already know the answer.

The uncleared human in the loop

So let me introduce the human they did not ground. Natalie Harp, 35, executive assistant, the aide the newsrooms call the human printer, because she prints out news stories and social posts for Trump to read, and, per reporting and a fresh lawsuit, helps run his Truth Social account. Her access is total. Her vetting was not.

Per MS NOW, corroborated by Mediaite and Political Wire, Harp went more than a year without initiating the standard clearance process every West Wing employee is supposed to start. Concerns grew among White House counsel and security officials. That pressure prompted Trump to personally intervene, after which she finally submitted the forms, underwent a federal background investigation, and got a clearance in recent months. MS NOW also reported the Secret Service itself raised concerns about her, over both her access and her then-unfinished clearance.

Now here is where I keep myself honest, out loud, in the same breath, because that is the whole game on this show. The specific more-than-a-year figure is the shaky ten percent, and I am going to flag it instead of laundering it into a fact. Snopes looked at this exact claim and left it unrated. It rests on that MS NOW article citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, and Snopes could not speak to either source or independently confirm the year-plus timeline. So the exact length is not nailed to a filing, and I will say so plainly. What is solid, rock solid, is that the White House press secretary confirmed Harp has a security clearance, quote, like everyone else. That is a present-tense admission. And a present tense admits a past. If she has one now, there was a before. The access is documented across the New York Times and every outlet on the beat, and it is not in dispute. The gap is well-sourced but anonymously sourced. The access is not in question at all. That is the honest line, and I am holding it.

And because I am holding it honestly, I will also tell you what I personally suspect, and label it as my suspicion, not a receipt: I am betting the clearance got waved through in a hurry the second Trump said fix it, and I would love to see the actual proof it was done on the merits. Because this man lies like a rug. That is a Moss opinion. The paper above it is the news.

The line that made it literal

Now the image that fuses the whole thing. Senator Jon Ossoff, on record at an Atlanta rally, ripped Trump's priorities during the Iran war and said the man would rather build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their, quote, apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar. Newsweek reported it. The Independent reported it. And here is the detail that turns it from a jab into a fact: Harp was one of the few aides who joined Trump on the decoy jet, the plane he used because of the assassination threat aimed at Air Force One in Turkey.

Sit in that arithmetic. The Secret Service says the fancy plane is too dangerous to fly. The human they had flagged is right there on the decoy beside him. The plane deemed unsafe, the aide deemed a concern, and only one of them got benched. And when Ossoff, a rising star actually there for the working class, said this out loud, the right-wing news cycle detonated like he had called her a dirty name on national television. Which, for the record, is exactly the kind of language the President of the United States hurls at people all day long, echoed and amplified by the same media until their base is drilled full of it. He gets to say the vile thing. Ossoff says something tame by comparison and they lose their minds.

What the access actually is, and the freshest paper

And do not let anyone tell you this is a coffee-fetcher. Former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, on MS NOW, named and on the record, said Harp lavishes him with praise, feeds him tweets and articles, and is, quote, so obsessed with him that it alarms Secret Service. That is a former colleague putting her name to it.

And here is the newest piece of paper, a Monday court filing. Harp got name-dropped in a lawsuit by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, seeking to bar her and Trump from posting on Truth Social so long as, quote, Truth API is in operation. What is Truth API? A service that would sell early access to the president's posts for one hundred thousand dollars a month, handing Wall Street firms an early peek at what he is about to say on tariffs, on war, on policy. The Daily Beast reported it. The Wrap reported it.

Oh, and one small delight while we are here. This girl runs all his posts now, so the covfefe era is over. The misspellings are gone. She is 35 and she can spell, which is apparently a miracle in that building, and she still manages to land the all-caps exactly where he wants them, because she knows how he likes it. So we are getting a more literate grade of blasphemy. Congratulations to us all.

So put it together. The person operating the president's most direct pipe to the public, the pipe someone is now trying to monetize at six figures a month, is the same person the security pros flagged, and the same person who, per the reporting, spent a year-plus not filing the form the janitor of the West Wing files in week one.

The whole con in one frame

Here it is, the whole thing, one sentence: they will ground a plane, but they will not vet a person. What the actual hell is that about.

Think about the insulting selectivity of it. When it is a jet, oh, suddenly this White House discovers rigor. Suddenly the Secret Service gets a vote. Suddenly there is an abundance of caution, a billion-dollar retrofit, a decoy, an older bird warmed up on the tarmac just in case. When the risk is made of aluminum, they treat national security like it is national security.

But when the risk walks, talks, prints out his tweets, and tells him he is the greatest man who ever lived? Then the rulebook goes in the shredder. Then a year-plus with no background form is a scheduling quirk. Then counsel and the security people and the Secret Service can raise every concern they have got and get steamrolled by a president who would rather feel good than be safe. The plane that might have a bug in it gets a billion dollars of scrubbing. The human inside the actual information loop gets a hall pass signed with a heart over the i. Isn't that cute. We trust her. No, really, we trust her. She is Christian. She is totally Christian. Well, that settles it then.

That is not security. That is cosplay. It is the American government doing theater with a casting problem. You cannot vet the president, he is elected, and believe me, nobody bothered to vet him before they voted for him either, and the people who put him there do not care, because they are not protecting America, they are protecting a feeling. So the one lever a serious government has left is vetting who feeds him, and they did not pull it for over a year, and they only pulled it when the grownups forced his hand.

And then, cherry on the corruption sundae, the pipe she runs is for sale. A hundred grand a month for an early look at what the President of the United States is about to say about tariffs and war. The human printer is not just an unvetted funnel into the most powerful mind in the country. She is a turnstile on a toll road they are trying to build over information that is supposed to belong to all of us.

So here is my fuck-you-back

And it is earned by every receipt above. Do not lecture me about your enemies with their sights on the president. Do not call me your enemy. Do not retrofit a jet to Fort Knox and then hand an uncleared sycophant your eyes, your feed, and the secrets of this nation. Pick a standard. If the plane is too dangerous to fly unvetted, then so is the person. And if the person is fine unvetted, then quit pretending the whole security circus was ever about safety instead of about what makes the boss feel like a king. You flagged the aircraft and you waved through the human. That is not caution. That is a tell.

You, fake President Donald Trump, are a bitch, and you are making everybody else in America your bitch so you can get rich. And that is not going to fly well as your time comes to its close.

Peace out. Subscribe, like, and leave your comments on our website. We'll be back when the next Byte hits. This has been Byte This, I'm Moss.

---

Show notes and sources

• Senator Angus King's office, the senators' letter on the roughly 400 million dollar Qatari plane: taxpayer cost likely exceeding 1 billion dollars, the counterintelligence risk of sensitive presidential travel, and the existing 3.9 billion dollar Boeing contract for two Air Force One aircraft. (king.senate.gov)
• The Hill, reporting the New York Times: the Secret Service advised Trump not to fly the Qatari-gifted Air Force One out of Turkey, and he took the older jet out of caution over an Iran threat. Independently confirmed by NewsNation. (thehill.com, newsnationnow.com)
• MS NOW: Harp went more than a year without initiating routine clearance, White House counsel and security concerns, Trump personally intervened, clearance obtained in recent months, Secret Service raised concerns. Corroborated by Mediaite and Political Wire. (mediaite.com, politicalwire.com)
• Honesty flag: Snopes left the more-than-a-year claim UNRATED, resting on MS NOW's two unnamed sources and unable to be independently confirmed. The White House press secretary confirms Harp currently has a security clearance like everyone else. (snopes.com)
• Ossoff: the apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar line, Atlanta rally, and Harp among the few aides on the decoy jet during the Turkey assassination threat. (newsweek.com, The Independent via Yahoo)
• Sarah Matthews on MS NOW, named and on record: Harp is so obsessed with him that it alarms Secret Service, feeds him tweets and articles, controls social media. (mediaite.com, Yahoo News)
• Monday court filing: The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation name Harp in a suit seeking to bar Truth Social posts while Truth API, early access for 100,000 dollars a month, is in operation. (thedailybeast.com, thewrap.com)