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Saturday, August 02, 2025
ANNALS OF TRUMPI$TAN' Hegseth team lashes out at Pentagon’s internal ‘Signalgate’ review. (Dan Lamothe, WaPo, July 29, 2025)
SecDef PETER HEGSETH seems to lacks trustworthiness. If he runs for Governor of Tennessee, it would free up the Secretary of Defense position for a qualified leader who could restore public confidence.This matters. From The Washington Post:
Hegseth team lashes out at Pentagon’s internal ‘Signalgate’ review
The attack on the Defense Department inspector general appears designed to undermine the inquiry’s legitimacy — even before its findings are made public.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Capitol Hill in June. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s team on Tuesday denounced the Pentagon’s internal review of his actions in the “Signalgate” affair, calling the independent inquiry “clearly a political witch hunt” and asserting without evidence that details of the nonpartisan review were leaked to the news media by “Biden administration holdovers.”
The remarks appeared in a written statement by Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, who also acknowledged for the first time publicly that Hegseth has provided a statement to the Defense Department inspector general’s team that makes clear his belief that “this entire exercise is a sham, conducted in bad faith and with extreme bias.”
The choice of words — “witch hunt” — borrows from language invoked by President Donald Trump when his actions have faced scrutiny and appears to be a preemptive strike designed to undermine the review’s legitimacy even before the inspector general’s findings are released publicly. That could happen within weeks.
The inspector general review, requested on a bipartisan basis by Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s top Democrat, is expected to dissect the degree to which Hegseth and his team followed Defense Department policy while using unclassified, commercial messaging applications, especially Signal, for official business.
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The controversy, which has dogged the former Fox News personality for much of his tenure at the Pentagon, erupted in March when an editor from the Atlantic magazine was accidentally added to a Signal group chat in which Hegseth and other top Trump administration officials coordinated a forthcoming U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen. Hegseth’s role in the group chat has come under especially close scrutiny, because his Signal account shared sensitive, advance details about the military strikes before they occurred.
Mollie Halpern, a spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office, declined to comment, citing long-standing policy barring the independent internal watchdog from doing so while a case remains open.
Wicker, the Armed Services Committee’s Republican chairman, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Reed, in a statement, criticized Hegseth’s team for the allegation.
“The civilian leadership of the Department of Defense is not above the law,” he said. “To suggest that the nonpartisan Inspector General is doing anything other than their impartial duties is simply wrong. Taxpayers and military personnel deserve to know the truth, and the Inspector General’s office has a responsibility to follow all evidence and report its independent findings.”
The Washington Post wants to hear from Defense Department civilians and service members about changes within the Pentagon and throughout theU.S. military. You can contact our reporters by email or Signal encrypted message:
Parnell’s statement was first reported Tuesday by the New York Times within an article examining Trump’s desire to meet personally with senior military officers who are nominated for prestigious assignments. It follows a report last week by The Washington Post that revealed the inspector general’s team was in receipt of evidence indicating the messages disseminated through Hegseth’s account on the unclassified chat app originated from a classified email sent to senior Pentagon officials by the top officer overseeing U.S. operations in the Middle East, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla.
The email was labeled “SECRET/NOFORN,” a classification level at which unauthorized disclosure could be expected to cause serious damage to U.S. national security. The “NOFORN” label means it also was not meant for anyone who is a foreign national, including senior officials of close allies of the United States.
Hegseth’s account on Signal shared similarly sensitive details with at least one other group chat that included his wife, Jennifer; his brother, Phil; and a personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, people familiar with the matter have said previously.
The situation could mark a test of whether Hegseth will follow through on past promises to allow the inspector general’s office to carry out its work independently. During his bruising confirmation process, Hegseth promised Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) that, if confirmed, he would commit to “protecting the DoD IG’s independence,” according to a copy of the questionnaire reviewed by The Post.
Days after Trump returned to office, he fired the Defense Department inspector general, Robert Storch, and at least 14 other leaders with similar watchdog responsibilities at other government agencies in a purge. Steven A. Stebbins, who took up the case against Hegseth, was selected as Storch’s replacement on an acting basis. A onetime Army officer like Hegseth, Stebbins retired from the military in 2015 and joined the inspector general’s office later that year, according to his official biography.
The inspector general’s findings are expected as people who know Hegseth increasingly question what his long-term plans are. He has discussed seeking political office in his adopted home state of Tennessee, including running for governor, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
It is not clear how quickly he would be interested in doing so. Tennessee requires that people live in the state for seven years before running for office — far longer than Hegseth has. The development was first reported Tuesday by NBC News.
1 comment:
Anonymous
said...
Trump clown car occupant foaming at the mouth over his own Incompetence? Won't be the first or last. Hopefully the Congress will be taken back and Trump will be impeached. He's already responsible for the worsening of healthcare accessibility. Gonna become even more of a luxury service.
1 comment:
Trump clown car occupant foaming at the mouth over his own Incompetence? Won't be the first or last. Hopefully the Congress will be taken back and Trump will be impeached. He's already responsible for the worsening of healthcare accessibility. Gonna become even more of a luxury service.
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