This is an adapted excerpt from the April 22 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is doing an even worse job in one of the most important positions in government than I even thought he would — and that is really saying something. Remember all of the details that emerged during his confirmation fight? This is a guy who had more red flags than a May Day parade. It seemed like every past employee who ever worked for Hegseth came out of the woodwork to talk about how unfit he was to lead the Pentagon.
The Times characterizes Hegseth’s leadership as overseeing “a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department.”
There were, of course, as NBC News reported, allegations from several past and current Fox News employees of excessive drinking. (Hegseth has denied having a drinking problem, and he vowed to stop drinking if he was confirmed as defense secretary.)
Then there was the reporting from The New Yorker that Hegseth was allegedly forced out of two consecutive veterans organizations, where his tenures in charge ended in chaos amid allegations of mismanagement and misconduct, according to whistleblower reports, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues. (At the time, an adviser to Hegseth told The New Yorker the report was “outlandish” and attributed the allegations to “a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate.”)
And now, in real time, we are seeing how that happened — because Hegseth is running the U.S. military in the same way. Even before Tuesday’s exclusive reporting from NBC News about the origins of the highly sensitive information he was reportedly sending in a Signal chat, Hegseth’s Defense Department was unraveling.
Three employees Hegseth brought with him to the Pentagon said they were ousted from the department last week as part of a larger investigation into leaks from the department. A fourth employee, John Ullyot, a longtime MAGA national security guy dating back to Donald Trump’s first campaign, resigned in frustration.
Ullyot then wrote an op-ed for Politico describing what he calls his “Month from Hell” working for Hegseth, noting that it was hard to see the defense secretary “remaining in his role for much longer.”
We also learned this week that Hegseth’s chief of staff, a guy named Joe Kasper, has been reassigned within the Pentagon. CBS News reports that he will now handle “special projects” inside the Defense Department.
This comes as The New York Times reports new details about Kasper’s tenure as chief of staff: “One meeting Mr. Kasper led this month, with a group that works with veterans that was offering its services to the Pentagon, devolved into a recounting of an evening Mr. Kasper and a representative of the group spent at a Washington strip club,” a person who took part in the session told the Times.
In all, the Times characterizes Hegseth’s leadership as overseeing “a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department.”
Of course, the most egregious violation we learned about so far has been Hegseth’s use of the commercial messaging app Signal to allegedly share highly sensitive military attack plans. (Hegseth has denied that the information he shared was classified.)
According to reports, he did that multiple times. First, in a group chat that somehow included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic magazine and then again, in a separate chat with his wife and brother, among others.
Now, we should note Hegseth’s brother actually works for the Pentagon. He hired him, for some reason. Even though, as best as we can tell, his work experience up to this point has been producing podcasts. At any rate, there is no indication that Hegseth’s brother, a liaison for the Defense Department, needed to be on that group chat. To say nothing of Hegseth’s wife, who, as The Wall Street Journal has reported, has also been sitting in on sensitive government meetings with foreign leaders.
On Tuesday, we learned that other leaders at the Pentagon knew those attack plans were highly sensitive and should be sent only through the proper government channels. Two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges told NBC News that the head of U.S. Central Command used a secure U.S. government system to send detailed information about the operation to Hegseth.
As NBC News reports, that system was “specifically designed to safely transmit sensitive and classified information.” But then Hegseth used his personal phone to send some of that same information to at least two group text chats on Signal, three U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges told NBC News. This is just egregious malpractice from the guy running the largest bureaucracy in the world. And if you think that surely a secretary of defense of the United States would stand up and take some responsibility for his mistakes, well, not this one. On Monday, Hegseth dismissed the allegations and told reporters that 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 reputation,” Hegseth said from the White House. “It’s not going to work with me, because we’re changing the Defense Department, putting the Pentagon back in the hands of war fighters, and anonymous smears from disgruntled former employees on old news doesn’t matter.” The Atlantic “got a hold” of that information because Hegseth messaged it to a chat that included the magazine’s editor. These are allegations from disgruntled employees, we can agree on that. These are folks who were obviously fed up with the complete chaos that Hegseth has brought to the Pentagon. But Hegseth wasn’t finished. On Tuesday, he turned to his former colleagues on the “Fox & Friends” couch: “What was shared over Signal — then and now, however you characterize it — was informal, unclassified coordinations for media coordination and other things. That’s what I’ve said from the beginning. At the beginning, it was left-wing reporters from The Atlantic who got a hold of it and then wanted to create a problem for the president. This is what it’s all about — trying to get at President Trump and his agenda.” We should note that The Atlantic “got a hold” of that information because Hegseth messaged it to a chat that included the magazine’s editor. When Hegseth was confirmed by one single vote, I think some folks were hopeful that there would be enough pressure from Republicans in the Senate who care about the direction of the Defense Department to keep things on track. But that is clearly not the case. So far, there is exactly one Republican in Congress on the record that Hegseth is unfit: Rep. Don Bacon, who represents a Nebraska district that Kamala Harris won by 4.5 points in November. Trump, meanwhile, is standing by Hegseth, for now at least. That means we will continue to watch what happens when a guy who was run out of two separate nonprofits amid allegations of mismanagement is given the keys to the most powerful army in human history.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
Latest Post
Recommended
