Ranking Members Raskin, Garcia Demand White House Preserve Trump’s AI Chatbot Conversations After Reports He Consulted Elon Musk’s Grok on Venezuela Military Operation
Ranking Members Raskin, Garcia Demand White House Preserve Trump’s AI Chatbot Conversations After Reports He Consulted Elon Musk’s Grok on Venezuela Military Operation
Washington, D.C. (October 29, 2026)—Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called on President Donald Trump to preserve his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots after reports that he sought advice from Elon Musk’s Grok concerning U.S. military actions in Venezuela. In a letter to President Trump, the Ranking Members also request a briefing on the President’s use of AI and the White House’s policies for preserving AI prompts and responses as presidential records.
According to public reports, President Trump spent hours talking to Grok during an Oval Office meeting with Musk in December 2025, including asking the chatbot how Venezuelans would react to Maduro’s capture. Weeks later, President Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack Venezuela and capture Maduro without congressional authorization. After Venezuelans in the United States celebrated Maduro’s arrest, President Trump reportedly “came away thinking Grok was ingenious.”
“If the American President is relying on the policy advice of a Musk-designed, Hitler-friendly chatbot with a predilection for child pornography in order to carry out his official duties, Americans have a right to know. If the United States military killed dozens of innocent schoolchildren based on the faulty advice of an AI chatbot, we have a right to know that too. And if an unelected oligarch is influencing U.S. policy through his AI-generated alter ego, Americans have a right to know how governmental decisions are being reached,” wrote the Ranking Members.
President Trump’s reckless use of Grok to inform and influence his decision-making raises a host of serious concerns. AI tools are demonstrably unreliable, as evidenced by a recent incident in which a chatbot generated a faulty intelligence report that nearly precipitated a military confrontation between the United States and China. AI chatbots also present acute national security concerns, particularly if White House personnel’s prompts and the advice they receive are being stored on the servers of private companies with substantial business interests abroad. Just as critically, AI chatbots are proven to be susceptible to manipulation by their creators, as highlighted by Elon Musk tinkering with Grok’s algorithm to generate sexual and anti-woke content, with predictably catastrophic results.
The Presidential Records Act establishes public ownership of records created or received by the President and his staff in the course of their official duties. AI prompts submitted by the President and his staff, and the responses they receive, fall within the definition of presidential records and must be preserved.
To ensure those records are protected, Ranking Members Raskin and Garcia requested a closed-door briefing on President Trump’s use of AI chatbots and White House policies governing the preservation, security and monitoring of AI prompts and responses.
Click here to read the letter.
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