'Chaos at the Pentagon': Memo authorizing defense missile 'went unsigned for 3 weeks'

Between reports of discussing a U.S. military operation in Yemen in two separate chats on the messaging app Signal and clashes with Pentagon officials, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is facing numerous calls for him to resign or be fired. But President Donald Trump, so far, is sticking by Hegseth, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is declaring that he remains in good standing with Trump's administration.

According to CNN reporters Kaitlan Collins, Natasha Bertrand, Jake Tapper and Kevin Liptak, Trump is unlikely to fire Hegseth. Yet some Trump Administration officials are worried about "chaos" at the Pentagon.

In an article published by CNN on April 23, the journalists explain, "Trump has…. been soliciting feedback from people around him about Hegseth's performance during conversations, according to two people familiar with the comments. So far, most, if not all, has been positive about the Pentagon chief. Trump is extremely hesitant to fire any Cabinet official at this point in his term, much less Hegseth, given how hard his team fought to get him confirmed in the first place. Yet the state of affairs in his inner circle has troubled some senior officials who want to see changes made to how the secretary's team in the front office of the Pentagon operates."

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Collins, Bertrand, Tapper and Liptak add, "The chaos prevailing at the Pentagon has not been lost on the White House, where officials have watched with concern as Hegseth struggles to contain the dysfunction and as his inner circle implodes."

One example of that "chaos" at the Pentagon, according to the journalists, involved Joe Kasper, Hegseth's former chief of staff at the Pentagon.

Kasper, they report, "clashed, in recent months, with" three Pentagon staffers Hegseth fired.

"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," Collins, Bertrand, Tapper and Liptak explain. "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."

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The CNN reporters continue, "In another example of the disorderly nature of the front office, at one point in March, Hegseth directly asked the director of (the U.S. Department of Defense'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."

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Read the full CNN article at this link.