White House Blocking Hegseth’s Hawkish Chief of Staff Pick Over Past Comments Attacking Trump and Vance: Report
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staffing chaos apparently will not be ending anytime soon as a new report says that the White House his blocking his pick to be his new chief of staff over past attacks on President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
The New York Post’s Steven Nelson dropped the scoop on Friday that “the White House has blocked” Ricky Buria, who is currently serving as Hegseth’s de facto chief of staff, from keeping the role permanently.
The report explains that Buria is a “Biden administration holdover” who is a critic of Vance’s “wackamamie crazy” and “isolationist” foreign policy views, which have long made headlines – particularly his comments regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Buria also sharply criticized Trump in the past, specifically Trump’s desire to use the military domestically to help with mass deportations, calling such a plan “dumb.”
Nelson notes that Buria’s critics in the Pentagon call him “Rasputin Ricky,” but adds that Hegseth values him for being “incredibly intelligent and hardworking” and for keeping his office operating efficiently – something Hegseth has lacked in his time at the Pentagon so far.
Hegseth’s last chief of staff, Joe Kasper, left his role in late April following the ouster of several other top aides, who were accused of leaking.
“Kasper did not like that those guys had the secretary’s ear. He did not like that they had walk-in and hanging-out privileges in the office. He wanted them out. It was a knife fight,” a source inside the Pentagon told Politico at the time. Hegseth, a former Fox News morning show host, has had a rocky start as a cabinet secretary, having been roiled by multiple scandals involving Signal messaging groups and staff purges.
Buria was tipped as Kasper’s likely replacement, given he had both Hegseth’s trust and years of experience managing high-level Pentagon operations.
A Pentagon insider described by the Post as a “Buria critic” told Nelson, “There is an ideological component to this. Hegseth is elevating a Democrat who does not share the vice president or the president’s worldview and who weaponized his position to push out internal rivals, including people who had very strong histories of being supporters of the MAGA agenda.”
Buria remains a top advisor to Hegseth despite not landing the chief of staff job, according to the Post, which spoke to eight different sources who all offered critical accounts of Buria’s “interventionist” worldview being opposed to Vance’s foreign policy.
