Pete Hegseth in ‘Full Paranoia’ Mode, White House Officials ‘Troubled’ by Pentagon Chaos: CNN
CNN is reporting that while White House officials are “troubled by disarray” in the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense and former Fox News host Pete Hegseth is unlikely to be dismissed by President Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, Hegseth is reportedly troubled by the alleged “total chaos” reported by his former spokesperson and is “in full paranoia, back-against-the-wall mode,” according to a source familiar with Hegseth’s state of mind over the last month, per CNN’s report.
The report is bylined by CNN’s heaviest hitters, including Jake Tapper, Kaitlan Collins, Natasha Bertrand, and Kevin Liptak, all of whom are remarkably well-sourced in the Trump administration. They report that while Hegseth is seemingly struggling to keep his stature in the White House, Trump is, at least so far, backing him. They write:
Several West Wing staffers had grown frustrated about what they described to others as Kasper’s lack of responsiveness, often complaining about the difficulty in getting Hegseth’s chief of staff on the phone or to respond to their requests. At one point toward the beginning of Hegseth’s tenure, the White House was trying to reach Kasper to get Hegseth to sign a memo kickstarting the process of developing Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield, but the memo went unsigned for three weeks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
In another example of the disorderly nature of the front office, at one point in March, Hegseth directly asked the director of DoD’s special access programs – which are among the most highly classified programs within the DoD – to read Elon Musk into more than two dozen programs having to do with China, according to multiple people familiar with the episode. But Hegseth did not first run the idea through a policy process that included lawyers, the people said, and ultimately, DoD ethics lawyers in the Standards of Conduct office said it would not be appropriate. The idea died. The people familiar with the matter said it might have succeeded if a more standard policy process had been followed.
Given the access that these CNN journalists have with this White House, perhaps the larger story here is that some Trump officials are now actively leaking negative stories about Hegseth to the media in a callback to the notoriously undisciplined first Trump administration.
It has been, by any objective account, a terrible, horrible, no-good, and very bad few days for Hegseth, starting with a purge of three of his closest allies whom he brought with him to the Pentagon after his appointment. A former spokesperson then published a damning column in Politico alleging “total chaos” in the Defense Department under Hegseth’s leadership. And on Sunday, The New York Times reported on a second Signal group chat Hegseth allegedly shared classified information about a planned attack on Yemen’s Houthi rebels in that included his wife, brother, and lawyer, Tim Parlatore.
Hegseth appeared defiant during a Tuesday morning interview with Fox & Friends, blaming the media and claiming victim status in an appearance cynics may see as an appeal to another person who claims he is victim to “fake news media,” his boss, President Trump.
