A high-ranking Trump administration official was widely mocked online Friday after being exposed for awarding an investigator a first look at government documents as a “gift” — only for the investigator to publicly release the private texts after concluding she was being “set up” by the “Deep State.”

In a now-deleted post on X, Jessica Pounds — an investigator and data scientist who assisted Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the cost-cutting initiative Musk led during the administration’s first year — claimed to “have never been more angry in my life,” alleging the “Deep State” had set her up “to commit a crime.” Pounds, who posts online as DataRepublican, built a following with data-driven analyses of federal spending before assisting DOGE’s work.

Pounds said a government source had sent her a trove of documents to “leak.” On further inspection, she said she believed leaking the documents would have gotten her “in big big trouble,” and she released a screengrab of a text exchange.

“The markings weren’t crossed out,” Pounds wrote on X. “I consulted people and if this were a sanctioned leak – they would have just sent over email. They tried to entrap me.”

Sarah B. Rogers, the under secretary for public diplomacy at the State Department — the office that oversees the department’s messaging to foreign audiences — took credit for being the individual texting Pounds in a dismissive response.

“lol, these are my text messages and documents,” Rogers wrote on X. “The ‘markings’ are [Freedom of Information Act] redactions required even for voluntary disclosure.”

Her reference was to the Freedom of Information Act, the decades-old statute that governs public access to federal records. Agencies routinely apply exemption markings to documents before release — including, as Rogers noted, when the disclosure is voluntary rather than formally requested.

The public exchange was quickly met with online ridicule from countless critics — and, beyond the mockery, drew attention to the mechanics it laid bare: a senior official privately offering a friendly researcher a first look at government records, and that researcher publicly mistaking routine redaction markings for a trap. Because both sides aired their messages openly on X, the back-and-forth offered readers a direct view of how the administration engages sympathetic online media figures.

“We should sincerely thank God that these folks are better at stepping on rakes than the villainous s--- they’re supposed to be doing,” wrote Charlie Collier, an editor at Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Right-wing journalist Eric Spracklen argued that the public blunder “inadvertently exposed” how Nick Shirley — the right-wing influencer best known for his controversial Minnesota daycare fraud investigation — “got his riveting Minnesota fraud story out of nowhere.”

Political writer Pedro Gonzalez issued a lengthy rebuke of the entire Trump administration over what he characterized as its incompetence.

“The Trump-Vance administration fed a scoop to DataRepublican, basically the other Nick Shirley and one of its fake journalist mouthpieces,” Gonzalez wrote in a post on X Friday night.

“But DR is such a moron that she thought it was a plot to ensnare her by getting her to leak classified information. These people are like inept movie villains, complete with brain-dead henchmen. If this had been written as a scene in One Battle After Another, people would have complained that it was too on the nose, too ridiculous.”

The real story here is that DataRepublican inadvertently just exposed how Nick Shirley got his riveting Minnesota fraud story out of nowhere. — Eric Spracklen 🇺🇸 (@EricSpracklen) August 22, 2026