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Musk lackey Edward Coristine would likely not pass security background checks, per new reporting [1]

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Date: 2025-02-06

Yesterday I wrote about Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, the inexperienced 19-year-old who is part of the gang of young co-conspirators in Elon Musk’s attempted coup of the US government — a group that some US officials are calling “Muskovites.” Today WIRED has new reporting on Coristine explaining how this high school graduate — who has wide access to sensitive government information and is judging whether federal employees are qualified for their positions — would not be likely to pass the background check typically required to obtain security clearances with the federal government.

One serious security concern for Coristine is that he founded a company — with the barfy and strange name of Tesla.Sexy LLC — that controls dozens of web domains, including at least two — surprise! — Russian-registered domains.

One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review. "Foreign connections, whether it's foreign contacts with friends or domain names registered in foreign countries, would be flagged by any agency during the security investigation process," Joseph Shelzi, a former US Army intelligence officer who held security clearance for a decade and managed the security clearance of other units under his command, tells WIRED. A longtime former US intelligence analyst, who requested anonymity to speak on sensitive topics, agrees. “There's little chance that he could have passed a background check for privileged access to government systems.”

Yet another security concern raised in Coristine’s background is that he worked for a time as a system engineer for a company called Path Network that employed several well-known cybercriminals, including Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec.

“If I was doing the background investigation on him, I would probably have recommended against hiring him for the work he’s doing,” says EJ Hilbert, a former FBI agent.

Other security red flags regarding Coristine include solid evidence that he was engaging in cyberattacks.

Archived Telegram messages shared with WIRED show that, in November 2022, a person using the handle “JoeyCrafter” posted to a Telegram channel focused on so-called distributed denial of service, or DDOS, cyberattacks that bombard victim sites with junk traffic to knock them offline. In his messages, JoeyCrafter—which records from Discord, Telegram, and the networking protocol BGP indicate was a handle used by Coristine—writes that he’s “looking for a capable, powerful and reliable L7” that accepts Bitcoin payments. That line, in the context of a DDOS-for-hire Telegram channel, suggests he was looking for someone who could carry out a layer 7 attack, a certain form of DDOS. A DDOS-for-hire service with the name Dstat.cc was seized in a multi-national law enforcement operation last year.

Shelzi explains that a secret security clearance could be completed in as little as 50 days while a top secret security clearance could take anywhere from 90 days to a year to complete. Yet within days of Trump taking office, Coristine has been accessing sensitive government information, sending emails to government workers from a gmail account, and barging into federal government offices with apparent reckless abandon.

Although Elon Musk and his DOGE lackeys are trying to act so quickly that nobody can stop them, I believe and hope that time will catch up with them and that they’ll eventually be held accountable for all the laws that they’ve already broken. Here’s hoping that Edward Coristine will eventually regret hitching his star to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. In the meantime, we need to document what they are doing and pushback in any way we can. Also, reporting here states that Coristine and his Muskovite cronies have been trying to hide their identities as they rampage through the federal government, in order to avoid online harassment. So let’s keep shining an appropriate spotlight on them.

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