Pete Hegseth’s ‘Bawdy’ Top Lieutenant Reportedly Derailed Veterans Group Meeting With Strip Club Story

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Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News weekend morning show host turned Trump Defense Secretary, remained defiant this week as yet another scandal broke related to him sharing sensitive military details in a Signal group chat – this time with his wife and brother involved.

Hegseth has fired several people in his inner circle as both he and President Donald Trump have blamed the report on angry staffers with an “axe to grind.” Of course, the finger-pointing hasn’t landed quite as well as Hegseth may have hoped, given that the “disgruntled staffers” are not career holdovers, but instead new hires he brought in.

The New York Times took a deep dive into the people around Hegseth on Tuesday as Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper reported that “chaos prevails at the Pentagon.” The Times report dropped a day after Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), a former Air Force general, slammed Hegseth as an “amateur person” whose behavior should not be tolerated in one of the most critical roles for national security in the U.S. government.

The report offered some color on the dynamics in Hegseth’s office, writing, “Mr. Hegseth’s inner circle of close advisers — military veterans who, like him, had little experience running large, complex organizations — is in shambles. Three members of the team he brought with him into the Pentagon were accused last week of leaking unauthorized information and escorted from the building.”

John Ullyot, Hegseth’s recently ousted top spokesperson, took to Politico over the weekend and hammered him in an essay, writing, “The building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”

While many in the media and the pundit class warned that Hegseth, who is a decorated former soldier, lacked the managerial experience to run the government’s largest department, Trump and the Republicans in the Senate who pushed through his confirmation expressed confidence he would rise to the job.

The report also highlighted the behavior of Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper. The Times wrote that meetings run by Kasper often “meander or take pointlessly bawdy turns,” adding:

The battles that have roiled Mr. Hegseth’s inner office, though, have focused more on often petty bureaucratic disputes than policy issues, said current and former defense officials….

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, said a person who took part in the session.

Jaffe and Cooper also detailed moments of frustration from the White House at Hegseth’s inability to push through Trump’s agenda items. They wrote:

The discord, according to current and former defense officials, includes: screaming matches in his inner office among aides; a growing distrust of the thousands of military and civilian personnel who staff the building; and bureaucratic logjams that have slowed down progress on some of President Trump’s key priorities, such as an “Iron Dome for America” missile-defense shield. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business.

The report noted that Elon Musk’s DOGE may make things even worse, as the government cutting group is looking to axe some 200,000 jobs from the Pentagon’s 750,000-person civilian workforce, a move even Hegseth has warned against.

Officials who spoke to the Times noted that Hegseth and Kasper “had been unable to establish a process to ensure that basic, but essential, matters move swiftly through Mr. Hegseth’s office. In late January, Mr. Trump issued an executive order calling for the fielding and deployment of a missile shield to protect the United States from attacks by adversaries such as North Korea and Iran.” Jaffe and Cooper added:

At the White House’s urging, Pentagon officials scrambled over the course of a few days to put together a “package” directing the Pentagon’s vast bureaucracy to begin moving forward on the complex project. The document sat unsigned in the defense secretary’s office for nearly three weeks while White House officials called almost daily to check on its status, current and former defense officials said.”

The report concluded that Hegseth is “aware of the problems” and is even considering replacing Kasper “with Marine Corps Col. Ricky Buria, according to senior defense officials.”