The discovery of a second unauthorized Signal chat and a staff purge leaves the secretary of defense on shaky ground.

Ever since he became Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth has been sending out strange signals. Between purging the military of its top generals, he’s also been participating in a variety of Signal chats that pose a threat to national security. The Atlantic made waves earlier this month when it reported that Hegseth had shared top secret information about an impending American military strike on Yemen with a Signal chat group that somehow included its editor Jeffrey Goldberg. 

In response, the White House sought to smear Goldberg. Now comes the revelation that Hegseth also shared the same information with another dozen or so people, including his brother and personal lawyer. 

Once again, the White House is defending Hegeseth as the “victim” of a murky “plot.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox and Friends that “the president stands strongly behind Pete Hegseth.” That is, until he doesn’t.

Leavitt claimed that deep-state bureaucrats in the Pentagon were working overtime to subvert the overdue reforms that Hegseth is trying to institute: “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and the monumental change you are trying to implement,” Leavitt said. “Unfortunately there have been people at that building who don’t like the change the secretary is bringing and they are leaking and lying to mainstream media, we have seen this game played before.” 

The fall guys are supposed to be three Pentagon officials who were recently fired by Hegseth—Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll. Their defenestration is the mirror image of the bizarre firings that took place on the national security council, when the conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer convinced Trump that a neocon cabal had infiltrated his administration.

The notion that Caldwell was trying to undermine Trump’s America-First agenda could hardly seem more implausible. Caldwell, a former Marine who served in Iraq and went on to work at the Charles Koch Network, has been a longtime proponent of a restraint-oriented foreign policy, particularly when it comes to the Middle East and arresting the Iranian nuclear program through military intervention. If anything, Caldwell would be a more responsible and effective appointment to serve as Defense Secretary than the likes of Hegseth.

On X, all three former officials issued an extraordinary joint statement in which they complained that they were being calumniated: 

At this time, we still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with. While this experience has been unconscionable, we remain supportive of the Trump-Vance Administration’s mission to make the Pentagon great again and achieve peace through strength. We hope in the future to support those efforts in different capacities.

Hegseth’s former spokesperson, John Ullyot, also spoke out in a fiery essay in Politico. He discerns a “full-blown meltdown” at the Pentagon. According to Ullyot, “From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president—who deserves better from his senior leadership.”

Will Trump sack Hegseth? National security adviser Mike Waltz, whose reputation was dinged during the first round of “Signalgate,” is starting to look like a paragon of statesmanship next to Hegseth. According to NPR, the White House is already looking to replace him (although this has been officially—and predictably—denied). Hegseth claimed that he was going to restore a “war-fighting mentality” at the Pentagon, but the only thing he has done is to undermine it.

About the Author: Jacob Heilbrunn

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel.

Image: Joshua Sukoff / Shutterstock.com.

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