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Pete Hegseth: Programmed by His Wife, Challenged By His Generals, Promoted By Paid Influencers
Washington Post
New York Times
Charles: No Defense Secretary in recent memory has tried harder to prevent leaks than Pete Hegseth. Last year he launched investigations into at least nine separate stories, and threatened DOD personnel with polygraph tests. Last month he posted a video about a new joint investigation with the Pentagon to identify and prosecute leakers.
He has hollowed out the senior leadership of the Pentagon, purging the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Overall, he has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen general officers and admirals and blocked the promotion of 40 senior colonels or Navy captains who had been chosen for flag rank.
Last night Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced his resignation.
The Atlantic reported “Trump was surprised when Driscoll told him [last week] how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth and “Trump expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”
But if Trump really said that, he couldn’t possibly believe it. If Trump actually cared about the decimation of the armed forces, he would have replaced Hegseth with Driscoll, instead of accepting Driscoll’s resignation. As my partner Scott Horton pointed out here last week, Hegseth guarantees his invulnerability by steering millions of dollars of Pentagon contracts to companies affiliated with Trump’s two sons.
Incredibly, the officers and civilians who remain at the Pentagon are so disgusted with Hegseth’s supreme incompetence, last year’s stream of leaks has been supplanted by a river of disclosures, gushing with the power of the Mississippi.
The resulting journalism is a tribute to the courage of America’s men and women in uniform and the talent of a dozen brilliant reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Pete Hegseth
This week, through the efforts of Alex Horton and Tara Copp, assisted by their Washington Post colleagues Dan Lamothe, Noah Robertson and John Hudson, we learned that the prolonged catastrophe of America’s war with Iran had severely limited our capacity to defend ourselves everywhere else in the world.
Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere,
The warnings — detailed for Hegseth by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America — appear in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), these people said. They described the assessment to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because the document is classified.
The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary, and includes insights from the military’s top generals and admirals that inform the directives the Pentagon issues.
Leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with what is characterized in the SDOB as a “non-concur,” those familiar with the assessment said — meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless.
Adm. Daryl Caudle, the chief of Naval Operations, provided Hegseth with the dimmest picture, saying in the SDOB that the Navy cannot sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict because there is no anticipated end date, those familiar with the assessment said.
Two weeks ago John Ismay of The New York Times revealed that the reason the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier could not be properly resupplied was Iran’s almost total evisceration of a crucial American naval base in Bahrain, in retaliation for the U.S.-Israeli assault on Tehran.
And as it went up in smoke, so did a major logistics hub that the Navy has relied on for decades.
Yesterday, in another blockbuster story, Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp revealed in The Washington Post that the Pentagon has installed right wing influencers with large followings in government roles, refusing “to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.”
At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy…
Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever.
Those involved include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel, people familiar with the matter said. Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a “.civ” suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors.
Both served for decades in uniform and, since retiring, have turned from the military to conservative commentary. Maness has more than 135,000 followers on X, while Schlichter has nearly 620,000.
Another retired Army colonel and influencer, Thomas Anderson, was listed in Pentagon records earlier this year with a “.civ” email address and assigned to Tata’s office, according to people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Post. An attorney, he writes online under the pen name Cynical Publius and has more than 323,000 followers on X. He was no longer listed in Pentagon records late this past week, the people familiar with the issue said.
Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to comment to The Post about whether any of the three are drawing a taxpayer-funded salary, what roles they have or how long those jobs are expected to last. Tata did not respond to a request for comment.
Maness and Schlichter did not respond to emails or other messages requesting comment. Anderson declined to comment in a short phone call.
Dan Driscoll resigned last night as Secretary of the Army
Finally, in The New York Times last month, the redoubtable Elisabeth Bumiller published a superb 3300-word profile of Pete Hegseth’s wife Jennifer which actually had a headline worthy of its content: ‘It’s Bonkers’: Jennifer Hegseth’s Hands-On Role in Her Husband’s Pentagon.
With contributions from Bumiller’s colleagues Adam Entous, Greg Jaffe and Sharon LaFraniere and interviews with twenty current or former administration officials or people who worked with her in her previous job as a producer at Fox News, the story made it clear that Jennifer Hegseth is definitely the spouse who wears the pants in her family.
Elisabeth Bumiller
Mrs. Hegseth was for years Mr. Hegseth’s producer at Fox News as he built a broadcast career. Now, seven years into their marriage, she is his most influential adviser and his de facto producer at the Pentagon. She has prepped him for appearances, sat in on his meetings with journalists, interviewed potential members of his staff and brainstormed ideas for the Defense Department videos he — and sometimes she — appears in.
Mrs. Hegseth has also encouraged Mr. Hegseth’s adversarial relationship with the news media…and although she was a journalist for two decades, she has worked with her husband to bar reporters from the building.
Last year she was in a highly sensitive meeting with her husband and top British defense officials after the United States temporarily stopped sharing military intelligence with Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal first reported. In a previously undisclosed part of that meeting, a Trump administration official told The New York Times, the British indicated that they had officers on the ground in Ukraine and that without the U.S. intelligence, including early warnings of incoming missiles from Russia, the officers’ lives were at risk.
The British spoke in general terms, the official said, because the presence of Mrs. Hegseth made them uneasy. Later they had a smaller meeting, without her, to go into detail.
“It’s bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences,” said John Ullyot, who left the Pentagon as chief spokesman after three months working under Mr. Hegseth and has been critical of his leadership. “Any president deserves better judgment from his national security leaders.”
Naturally, in the face of all of these embarrassing disclosures, a Pentagon spokesman doubled down on Mrs. Hegseth’s role, calling her “an accomplished leader in her own right and a devoted military spouse” who “is a vital asset and a true force multiplier for our mission.” The Defense Department, he said, “not only welcomes her current leadership but actively plans to involve her even more deeply in the future.”
The New Mexico Defense Contractor that Funds Nigel Farage and Reform UK
The Guardian
Scott: Following the money that lands in the coffers of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK seems now to draw on two major sources, one a posh English aristocrat and convicted felon whose principal business is helping drug lords hide their money from the prying eyes of law enforcement. The other is a Thai-based crypto billionaire who holds a UK passport, who made his money finding aviation fuel from dodgy sources for the US Department of Defense. The vehicle he used to do all of this is based in Albuquerque, NM (note that New Mexico journalists haven’t figured out that the biggest political scandal in recent UK history sits quietly right under their noses—indeed, they’re oblivious to it). Tom Burgis takes us on a wonderful voyage of discovery.
As he struggles with questions about the millions he has received from the billionaire Christopher Harborne, Nigel Farage has made no secret of his enthusiastic support for the industry that made part of his benefactor’s fortune – cryptocurrency. The Reform UK leader even urged the governor of the Bank of England to drop a crypto policy that may be costly for Harborne.
But another element of Harborne’s business interests could prove still more consequential if it shapes Farage’s positions. There appears to be no precedent for a major UK donor who is so entwined with the military.
The Guardian’s ongoing investigation into the origins of Harborne’s riches and whether his donations inform Farage’s agenda has established the Thailand-based tycoon’s global web of commercial interests in the arms industry and military contracts. Among Harborne’s business collaborators are a striking number of former army officers, air force pilots, military officials and even, it seems, a former MI6 officer.
Described by his lawyers as an “intensely private” man, Harborne’s military interests reveal another side to the proprietor of a wellness sanctuary on a paradise island off Thailand.
A businessman who works with Harborne’s jet fuel venture describes it as a top supplier to US military operations worldwide, “strengthened by former US Department of Defense specialists and retired US military pilots, bringing decades of operational and strategic expertise to every mission”.
And Harborne is the biggest shareholder in what was once the research arm of the UK military, now a private company developing autonomous weapons.
At a moment when one of the biggest questions political leaders face is how much of the state’s resources to divert to military spending, Farage’s reliance on Harborne’s money presents a potential conflict of interest. Harborne has given Reform two-thirds of its funding, plus a £5m undeclared gift to Farage that the MPs’ watchdog is investigating.
Sam Power, a political funding expert at the University of Bristol, said: “It doesn’t necessarily follow that Reform will have policies that will benefit Harborne’s interests in the military-industrial complex. But it warrants a spotlight. It will be interesting if Reform’s policies start aligning with Christopher Harborne in this area as they have in cryptocurrency.”
Harborne’s lawyers at the London firm Schillings said: “The policies or positions Mr Farage may choose to adopt are a matter for Mr Farage and the Reform party. Our client’s commercial interests are unconnected in any way whatsoever with his political affiliations.”...
While Albuquerque, NM-based AML Global issues few statements, publicity material by its Northern Irish partner, Jet Assist, says no other company supplies the US military with jet fuel in more places beyond its borders – 62 by the end of 2025. The material trumpeted AML Global’s recruitment of US military personnel and envisaged its role in “future US, UK and allied military deployments into Europe”.
AML Global’s $140m from the Pentagon may not be a big share of the billions it spends each year on fuel but Harborne is trusted to supply the American armed forces in strategic locations, from Europe’s frontier with Russia, to the Middle East, a South Pacific outpost and Asian allies threatened by China.
“The government vets these companies,” says Jerry McGinn, a military procurement expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinktank in Washington. “They take this very seriously.”
According to documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, bankers filed an alert with US authorities in 2014 saying they had been “unable to identify the economic, business or lawful purpose” for large payments Harborne made related to crypto dealings under his Thai name, Chakrit Sakunkrit. But such suspicious activity reports are evidence of concern, not wrongdoing. Harborne denies any, and the Pentagon evidently sees him as a trusted supplier.
