Trump on Hegseth: ‘Fake News’ From ‘Disgruntled’ Pentagon Employees

At least one aspect of politics has improved: the “confidence” statement. In days gone by, any necessity for a president or a press secretary to declare his “confidence” in a subordinate usually meant an office was just about to open up. It might have even been interpreted as a signal to the underling in question to discover reasons to spend more time with one’s family — as just attracting that much attention would be reason enough to dump someone. 

These days, though, a statement of confidence appears much more literal. And that has to do with the media environment every bit as much as it has to do with Donald Trump’s ideas on how to effect institutional change. Trump tasked Pete Hegseth to deliver on that agenda at the Pentagon, and yesterday affirmed that media hyperventilation hadn’t impacted his confidence in the Defense Secretary:

A person familiar with the conversation said both Trump and Hegseth were on the same page following their discussion.

That understanding was on full display as Trump at the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday said Hegseth was “doing a great job.”

“It’s just fake news,” the president added. “Sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing. You don’t always have friends when you do that.”

What’s the issue this time? It’s another Signal chat story, apparently, involving information on strikes against the Houthis. NBC News reports this morning that “three US officials with direct knowledge” claim that Hegseth took information from a classified system and discussed it in a Signal chat:

Minutes before U.S. fighter jets took off to begin strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen last month, Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, who leads U.S. Central Command, used a secure U.S. government system to send detailed information about the operation to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The material Kurilla sent included details about when U.S. fighters would take off and when they would hit their targets — details that could, if they fell into the wrong hands, put the pilots of those fighters in grave danger. But he was doing exactly what he was supposed to: providing Hegseth, his superior, with information he needed to know and using a system specifically designed to safely transmit sensitive and classified information.

But then Hegseth used his personal phone to send some of the same information Kurilla had given him to at least two group text chats on the Signal messaging app, three U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges told NBC News.

“Some of the same information” is doing a heavy lift here. Was anything in that “some” actually classified? The NBC report never actually makes that specific allegation. And it turns out that this is basically a regurgitation of the previous Signal chat “scandal” rather than a separate incident:

The sequence of events, which has not previously been reported, could raise new questions about Hegseth’s handling of the information, which he and the government have denied was classified. In all, according to the two sources, less than 10 minutes elapsed between Kurilla’s giving Hegseth the information and Hegseth’s sending it to the two group chats, one of which included other Cabinet-level officials and their designees — and, inadvertently, the editor of The Atlantic magazine.

So this is just the same Signal “scandal” dressed up again for a re-run in April. Yawn.

That’s not to say that these were good practices by the nat-sec team at the White House. Hopefully they learned a lesson about using chat platforms for sensitive discussions, especially after letting Jeffrey Goldberg into the room. However, this is hardly the stuff of dismissals, especially lately, and especially at the DoD. 

Did anyone in the media or the DoD demand the firing of Lloyd Austin when he went AWOL at the same time his deputy was on vacation? Did Austin and others get fired for botching the Kabul withdrawal, a sequence that actually did cost the lives of 13 service members and probably hundreds or thousands of Afghans? Did the media ever press Joe Biden to account for the 14,000 Americans abandoned by his nat-sec team to the Taliban in the summer of 2021? Are the media demanding these answers at all, even today?

Color me unimpressed with their deep concern over comms security in this moment until they do. 

This looks very much like gripes coming from within the DoD over the coming changes that Hegseth plans to implement. A lot of rice bowls will get kicked over in that process, and that provides a lot of motive for attempting to kneecap the man who will run it. Hegseth chalks it up to “disgruntled former employees,” although I’d be suspicious about the “former” part:

Hegseth also blamed former staffers he fired over alleged leaks of information for running to reporters.

“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,” said Hegseth. “Not going to work with me.”

This is what the media does to officials they don’t like. They didn’t do it to Austin, even though he eminently deserved it for Afghanistan and his inexplicable disappearance without notice. The media didn’t bother to wonder why Austin didn’t get cashiered for either of those debacles, so their interest isn’t in national security or military readiness, and not even in government accountability. They simply want to dismantle the Trump administration by any means necessary. And Trump won’t play that game with them.