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PRO-TRUMP INTERNET SLEUTH Jennica Pounds—better known as “Data Republican” to her nearly one million followers on X—made a grim announcement on Friday. Deep-state operatives embedded within the Trump administration had tried to entrap her into committing treason.
“It’s not okay when the Deep State sets you up to commit a crime,” she wrote in a now-deleted thread. “I have never been more angry in my life.”
In Pounds’s portentous telling, an unnamed official—soon after revealed to be Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department—had offered to leak her government documents about Cuba to publish as an “exclusive.” While Pounds was initially enthusiastic, markings on the documents prompted her to panic that she was being set up. Had she published the documents, Pounds felt, she would’ve exposed herself to criminal prosecution. She took the news of her supposed entrapment directly to her audience.
The idea that Trump administration officials would conspire to send Pounds to prison is bizarre on its face. After all, Pounds is an administration favorite. Her tweets claiming to have data to justify Elon Musk’s cuts aimed at USAID and other government agencies made her an out-of-nowhere star during the DOGE era, even though she didn’t seem to have a solid grasp of how government spending actually worked.¹
Pounds’s accusations against Rogers—who is also beloved in the MAGA movement for her efforts to support free speech for far-right extremists in Europe—confounded right-wing media figures. Was Rogers really
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