UPDATED with Trump comment: Donald Trump said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “doing a great job,” even amid a new bombshell report and a scathing op-ed from a former top Pentagon spokesperson.
“Ask the Houthis how he’s doing,” Trump told reporters today, referring to the U.S. strikes on rebels in Yemen. He blamed the latest reports on “fake news” and “disgruntled employees.”
Earlier, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump “stands strongly” behind Hegseth.
“This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and against the monumental change you are trying to implement,” Leavitt said Monday on Fox & Friends.
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Hegseth, appearing at the White House Easter Egg Roll, himself said, “What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and a bunch of hit pieces come out.” He then went into an extended rant about the media, pointing at reporters and calling them “full of hoax-sters.”
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On Sunday, the New York Times and other outlets reported that Hegseth, the former co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend, shared details of U.S. attack plans on Houthi rebels on another Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer. Hegseth had shared those plans on another Signal group, that with top Trump administration officials and, mistakenly, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
Also on Sunday, John Ullyot, a Trump loyalist who served as chief Pentagon spokesperson, wrote in an op-ed in Politico that the “last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon — and it’s becoming a real problem for the administration.”
“There are very likely more shoes to drop in short order, with even bigger bombshell stories coming this week, key Pentagon reporters have been telling sources privately,” wrote Ullyot, while all but predicting that Hegseth’s days are numbered. Ullyot also gave credence to reports that the Pentagon was to give a top-secret briefing on China to Elon Musk. The meeting was called off after media revelations, and Trump then denied it had been planned.
On Friday, three senior aides — Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll — were fired, with media reports that they were involved in leaking sensitive information. But the next day, they released a statement saying that “unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.” Ullyot wrote that “Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.”
Trump himself has not yet commented, but Leavitt said blamed the situation on unnamed Pentagon officials. “They are leaking and they are lying to the mainstream media,” she said.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell attacked the Times for “enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article. They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda.”
“There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story,” Parnell said.
A Times spokesperson said they were “confident in the accuracy of our reporting,” while noting that the Pentagon has “not denied the existence of the chat, and its assertion that there was no classified information shared in any chat is beside the point when it comes to our story, which did not characterize the information as classified.”