By any fair measure, last week was an unpleasant one at the Pentagon. It began when one of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top advisers was escorted from the building. Another top member of Hegseth’s team soon followed. It wasn’t long before yet another top Defense Department official was also removed, while a fourth official was reassigned and a fifth was asked to resign.

One member of the quintet — a longtime Trump loyalist — wrote a devastating piece for Politico describing the “total chaos” and “full-blown meltdown” at the Pentagon, all of which he attributed to Hegseth’s failed leadership. Three others issued a joint statement saying they’d been “slandered” with “baseless attacks.”

For his part, the beleaguered Cabinet secretary leaned on a specific word while pushing back against those he’d ousted from their posts.

“Once a leaker, always a leaker — often a leaker,” Hegseth told Fox News (his employer before he officially joined Donald Trump’s team). “We look for leakers because we take it very seriously. … I don’t have time for leakers.”

As part of the same on-air appearance, however, the secretary went on to tell viewers, in reference to the former officials he’d accused of leaking, “We’ll do the investigation, and if those people are exonerated, fantastic. We don’t think, based on what we understand, that it’s going to be a good day for a number of those individuals because of what was found in the investigation.”

That was on Tuesday. One day later, NBC News reported that two of the senior aides who were marched out of the Pentagon were, in fact, exonerated.

Senior aides Darin Selnick and Dan Caldwell were escorted from the Pentagon last week and placed on administrative leave in connection with what a Pentagon official at the time said were ‘unauthorized disclosures’ of classified information. They were formally fired days later. But within days, government officials had exonerated both men completely, according to four individuals, including three government officials familiar with the matter.

As best as I can tell, Hegseth hasn’t commented on the exonerations, which he said appeared unlikely literally one day earlier.

The developments won’t do the hapless secretary any favors, but complicating matters further is the related point that Hegseth has also failed to acknowledge: The more he’s complained about “leakers,” the more we’re reminded of one of the most notorious national security leaks in modern history.

Indeed, it was just last month when Americans learned about the original Signal chat scandal, in which Hegseth expressed certainty that he and his colleagues — while chatting on a free platform that has never been approved for chats about national security and classified intelligence — had locked everything down and created a secure channel of communications while discussing a potentially dangerous foreign military operation, but he was spectacularly wrong.

That was soon followed this week by a second Signal chat scandal, in which Hegseth ignored warnings and used his personal phone to send sensitive operational details to a group chat — which included his wife, who did not have the necessary security clearance.

If the secretary wants to have a public debate about leakers, fantastic — but he might not like where this conversation ends up.