During former Fox News host Pete Hegseth's months as defense secretary under President Donald Trump, the Pentagon has experienced a great deal of chaos — including the firing of three Hegseth aides.

Four months into Trump's second presidency, the chaos at the Pentagon continues as the Hegseth-era Pentagon faces — according to The Guardian's Hugo Lowell — involves allegations of illegal wiretapping.

Lowell, in an article published on May 27, reports, "The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap. The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks."

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Lowell continues, "But the advisers found the claim to be untrue and complained that they were being fed dubious information by Hegseth's personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who had been tasked with overseeing the investigation."

The three Pentagon aides Hegseth fired were Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll.

"The leak was first attributed internally to Hegseth’s senior adviser, Dan Caldwell…. But the illegal wiretap claim and Caldwell’s denials fueled a breakdown in trust between the Pentagon and the White House, where the Trump advisers tracking the investigation have privately suggested they no longer have any idea about who or what to believe," Lowell notes. "In particular, one Trump adviser recently told Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell — or any of the fired aides — had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff, Joe Kasper."

The Guardian reporter adds, "The fraught situation is sure to increase pressure on Hegseth ahead of a Senate hearing next month, and more broadly for his office, which has been roiled by the leak investigation that has now continued for nearly a month with no new evidence or referral to the FBI. The fallout has left Hegseth with no chief or deputy chief of staff, as he relies on six senior advisers to run his front office, which is involved in setting the direction of the defense department that has a budget of nearly $1tn and oversees more than two million troops."

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Read The Guardian's full article at this link.


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