As last week got underway, one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top advisers, Dan Caldwell, was escorted from the Pentagon. Soon after, Darin Selnick, another top member of Hegseth’s team was out, too.
The same day, nearly every member of the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service — described as the department’s “fast-track tech development arm” — announced that they’re resigning. Soon after, Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was also removed from the Pentagon.
As the week progressed, so too did the turmoil. Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s chief of staff, wasn’t fired, but he was reassigned to a different role in the department. Around the same time, John Ullyot, the Pentagon’s former top spokesperson, was also asked to resign.
As the week came to an end, three of those who were ousted — Caldwell, Carroll and Selnick — issued a joint statement explaining that they were “incredibly disappointed” by how their service at the Pentagon ended, adding that “unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks.”
And just when it seemed things couldn’t get much worse, they got worse. NBC News reported:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used his personal phone to send information about U.S. military operations in Yemen to a 13-person Signal group chat, including his wife and his brother, two sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed to NBC News. He did so after an aide had warned him to be careful not to share sensitive information on an unsecure communications system before the Yemen operation, the sources said.
These allegations, of course, come on the heels of Hegseth’s prominent role in last month’s Signal chat scandal — the controversy some have labeled “Signalgate” — that’s currently under investigation by the Department of Defense’s inspector general’s office. (Hegseth continues to deny allegations that he shared classified information through unsecured channels. The White House echoed the denial.)
“You know, what a big surprise that a bunch of leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that pedaled the Russia hoax,” Hegseth told reporters at the White House on Monday when asked about the latest revelations. (The Russia scandal was quite real, no matter how many times Trump’s allies pretend otherwise.)
He added: “This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations. Not going to work with me.”
The New York Times was first to report on the existence of the second Signal chat, and it relied on four Pentagon sources — reinforcing the point that there are some key figures in the Pentagon who aren’t just aware of Hegseth’s failures and abuses, but who are also letting journalists know about his failures and abuses.
But wait, there’s more. As the public learned of these new allegations, Ullyot, who had been a top spokesman at the Defense Department before he left his job there last week, wrote a devastating piece for Politico describing the “total chaos” and “full-blown meltdown” at the Pentagon.
“The building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership,” Ullyot wrote. “The dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.” Ullyot, who worked on Donald Trump’s campaign and held prominent posts in the president’s first term, added, “President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.” Hegseth’s tenure as the secretary of defense was already a disaster before the Signal chat scandal broke last month, but conditions are spectacularly worse now. In a normal and healthy political environment, Hegseth would have no choice at this point but to start writing his resignation letter and putting his belongings in a cardboard box. Then again, in a normal and healthy political environment, a president wouldn’t have nominated a manifestly unqualified, scandal-plagued television personality to lead the Defense Department, and in a normal and healthy political environment, his nomination would’ve received zero confirmation votes in the Senate. Indeed, as the chaos intensifies at the Pentagon, I find myself looking anew at the roll call on Hegseth’s confirmation, when 50 Republican senators put aside everything they knew about the nominee and put him in an incredibly important and challenging position. As the scandal mounts, they bear as much responsibility as anyone. This story has been updated with additional information.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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