Maggie Haberman Says Trump White House Not Happy With Hegseth’s Fox News Hit: ‘Not a Home Run’

CNN commentator and New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman told anchor Kaitlan Collins that President Donald Trump’s White House was not happy with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s damage control interview on Fox News.

This week, a second Signalgate bombshell report dropped, this time revealing Hegseth may have shared details of a sensitive attack against Yemen in a second Signal app group chat with his family last month.

As reports swirled that Hegseth is on the chopping block, the embattled Pentagon chief went to his old stomping grounds for a damage control interview on Fox & Friends.

On Tuesday night’s edition of CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Haberman — who is deeply-sourced in Trump World — told Collins the effort was not a hit in the White House:

KAITLAN COLLINS: Maggie, what’s your understanding of just how all of this is going down inside the White House, and how they’re seeing Secretary Hegseth, this evening?

MAGGIE HABERMAN: Right. As you said, the interview, this morning, was not seen as a home run. I mean, even among Hegseth’s allies outside the administration, it was seen as a little disorienting and a little disjointed.

It was also really striking to people that Hegseth was basically describing a process of frog-marching his own people out of the building, while then saying, And, you know, we’re doing an investigation now, and we’ll see where it leads. And so, that caught a lot of ears as well.

The President has been, in every conversation, I know, that he has had, he has been very, very supportive of Hegseth. He has talked about recruitment numbers. He has talked about morale for the rank-and-file.

Trump does not like bad headlines, as you know. And so, we will see how long this stays in the news. But this morning was not seen as quelling it.

Neither were on-the-record quotes from Joe Kasper, who has been Hegseth’s chief of staff at the Pentagon, to Ryan Grim, a journalist, a freelance journalist — or an independent journalist, basically talking about his own conduct and his relationship with these three people who were fired. None of this is making people in the White House happy.

Watch above via CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins.