Politics
Inside Pete Hegseth’s Rocky First Months at the Pentagon
Even before he disclosed secret battle plans for Yemen in a group chat, information that could have endangered American fighter pilots, it had been a rocky two months for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and Fox News weekend host, started his job at the Pentagon determined to out-Trump President Trump, Defense Department officials and aides said.
The president is skeptical about the value of NATO and European alliances, so the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth considered plans in which the United States would give up its command role overseeing NATO troops. After Mr. Trump issued executive orders targeting transgender people, Mr. Hegseth ordered a ban on transgender troops.
Mr. Trump has embraced Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla. The Pentagon planned a sensitive briefing to give Mr. Musk a firsthand look at how the military would fight a war with China, a potentially valuable step for any businessman with interests there.
In all of those endeavors, Mr. Hegseth was pulled back, by congressional Republicans, the courts or even Mr. Trump.
The president made clear last Friday that he had been caught by surprise by a report in The New York Times on the Pentagon’s briefing for Mr. Musk, who oversees an effort to shrink the government, but also denied that the meeting had been planned.
“I don’t want to show that to anybody, but certainly you wouldn’t show it to a businessman who is helping us so much,” Mr. Trump said.
But Mr. Hegseth’s latest mistake could have led to catastrophic consequences.
On Monday, the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote that he had been inadvertently included in an encrypted group chat in which Mr. Hegseth discussed plans for targeting the Houthi militia in Yemen two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the group.
The White House confirmed Mr. Goldberg’s account. But Mr. Hegseth later denied that he put war plans in the group chat, which apparently included other senior members of Mr. Trump’s national security team.
In disclosing the aircraft, targets and timing for hitting Houthi militia sites in Yemen on the commercial messaging app Signal, Mr. Hegseth risked the lives of American war fighters.
Across the military on Monday and Tuesday, current and retired troops and officers expressed dismay and anger in social media posts, secret chat groups and the hallways of the Pentagon.
“My father was killed in action flying night-trail interdiction over the Ho Chi Minh Trail” after a North Vietnamese strike, said the retired Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who served in the Iraq war. “And now, you have Hegseth. He has released information that could have directly led to the death of an American fighter pilot.”
It was unclear on Tuesday whether anyone involved in the Signal group chat would lose their jobs. Republicans in Congress have been wary of running afoul of Mr. Trump. But Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, indicated on Monday that there would be some kind of investigation.
John R. Bolton, a national security adviser in the first Trump administration, said on social media that he doubted that “anyone will be held to account for events described by The Atlantic unless Donald Trump himself feels the heat.”
In his article, Mr. Goldberg said he was added to the chat by Michael Waltz, Mr. Trump’s current national security adviser.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump defended Mr. Waltz. “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Mr. Trump said in an interview on NBC.
The president added that Mr. Goldberg’s presence in the group chat had “no impact at all” and that the Houthi attacks were “perfectly successful.”
To be sure, some of Mr. Hegseth’s stumbles have been part of the learning process of a high-profile job leading a department with an $850-billion-a-year budget.
“Secretary Hegseth is trying to figure out where the president’s headed, and to run there ahead of him,” said Kori Schake, a national security expert at the American Enterprise Institute. But, she added, “he’s doing performative activities. He’s not yet demonstrated that he’s running the department.”
Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who has studied the military for decades, said the Signal chat disclosure “raises serious questions about how a new accountability standard might apply: How would he handle a situation like this if it involved one of his subordinates?”
On Monday, Mr. Hegseth left for Asia, his first trip abroad since a foray to Europe last month in which he was roundly criticized for going further on Ukraine than his boss had at the time. He posted a video on social media of himself guarded by two female airmen in full combat gear as he boarded the plane at Joint Base Andrews. The show of security was remarkable. Not even the president is guarded that way as he boards Air Force One.
When he landed in Hawaii several hours later, Mr. Hegseth criticized Mr. Goldberg as a “so-called journalist” and asserted that “nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.”
Mr. Hegseth’s stumbles started soon after he was sworn in to lead the Pentagon on Jan. 25.
In his debut on the world stage in mid-February, he told NATO and Ukrainian ministers that a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders, before Russia’s first invasion, was “an unrealistic objective” and ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine. A few hours later, Mr. Trump backed him up while announcing a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to begin peace negotiations.
Facing blowback the next day from European allies and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Hegseth denied that either he or Mr. Trump had sold out Ukraine. “There is no betrayal there,” Mr. Hegseth said.
That was not how even Republican supporters of Mr. Hegseth saw it. “He made a rookie mistake in Brussels,” Mr. Wicker said about the secretary’s comment on Ukraine’s borders.
“I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool,” Mr. Wicker said, referring to the conservative media personality and former Fox News host.
Mr. Hegseth sought to recover later in the week, saying he had simply been trying to “introduce realism into the expectations of our NATO allies.” How much territory Ukraine may cede to Russia would be decided in talks between Mr. Trump and the presidents of the warring countries, he said.
Last week, Mr. Hegseth again got crosswise with Mr. Wicker over reports that the Trump administration was planning to withdraw from NATO’s military command and reduce the number of troops deployed overseas in addition to other changes to the military’s combatant commands.
Mr. Wicker and Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Alabama and the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that they were concerned about reports that the Defense Department might be planning changes “absent coordination with the White House and Congress.”
Other signs point to a dysfunctional Pentagon on Mr. Hegseth’s watch.
Last week, the Defense Department removed an online article about the military background of Jackie Robinson, who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in 1947, after serving in the Army.
The article — which reappeared after a furor — was one in a series of government web pages on Black figures that have vanished under the Trump administration’s efforts to purge government websites of references to diversity and inclusion.
In response to questions about the article, John Ullyot, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that “D.E.I. is dead at the Defense Department,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. He added that he was pleased with the department’s “rapid compliance” with a directive ordering that diversity-related content be removed from all platforms.
Mr. Ullyot was removed from his position shortly afterward.
Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said in a video that the screening of Defense Department content for “D.E.I. content” was “an incredibly important undertaking,” but he acknowledged mistakes were made.
The Pentagon leadership under Mr. Trump expressed its disdain for the military’s decades-long efforts to diversify its ranks. Last month, Mr. Hegseth said that the “single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength.’”
Mr. Hegseth also came under sharp critique from the federal judge handling a lawsuit against his efforts to ban transgender troops. “The military ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext,” Judge Ana C. Reyes of U.S. District Court in Washington wrote in a scathing ruling last week.
“Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit and its conclusions bear no relation to fact,” she wrote in her decision temporarily blocking the ban. “Seriously? These were not off-the-cuff remarks at a cocktail party.”
Greg Jaffe contributed reporting.
A splintered Supreme Court on Thursday declined to rule in a case dealing with how states should assess the intellectual disabilities of capital defendants to determine if they should be spared the death penalty.
Two decades ago, the court barred the execution of people with mental disabilities as a violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
That ruling, in Atkins v. Virginia, gave states leeway to determine their own processes for deciding who was intellectually disabled. It led to follow-up cases from Florida and Texas in which the court further limited capital punishment.
Twenty-seven states permit the death penalty, but they differ in how they determine intellectual disability.
On Thursday, a majority of justices took a pass on deciding how states and lower courts should resolve cases in which defendants had taken I.Q. tests multiple times and received varying results, as well as the extent to which states must consider a broader evaluation of evidence beyond I.Q. test scores in deciding if a person is disabled.
The case involved Joseph Clifton Smith, an Alabama man, who was sentenced to death after being convicted of murdering a man he planned to rob in 1997. In the years before and after the murder, Mr. Smith took five I.Q. tests with scores ranging from 72 to 78.
The state sought to execute Mr. Smith, noting that the key part of Alabama’s law on mental disability turned on whether defendants had scored 70 or lower on the test. But a lower court found Mr. Smith was intellectually disabled, in part because the tests had a margin of error. Alabama asked the Supreme Court to weigh in.
The court’s brief unsigned order dismissed the case as “improvidently granted,” meaning the justices punted, and sent the matter back to the lower courts.
As a result, Mr. Smith will be spared the death penalty and resentenced, his lawyer said on Thursday.
“The District Court listened carefully to experts on all sides and concluded that Mr. Smith is intellectually disabled. The Supreme Court declined to disturb that finding,” his attorney Kacey L. Keeton, of the Federal Defender office for the Middle District of Alabama, said in a statement. “For Mr. Smith and his family, today brings profound relief.”
The Alabama attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although the Supreme Court did not resolve the key question in Mr. Smith’s case, it prompted several separate opinions.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the record in Mr. Smith’s case was incomplete and the court could not use it to “provide any meaningful guidance” on how lower courts should assess multiple I.Q. scores.
“Proceeding without a more developed record or lower court opinions is especially perilous. That is because the differences between methods used to assess multiple I.Q. scores raise complicated questions on which even experts may disagree,” she wrote, joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Four justices dissented, saying the court had failed to address a recurring question that has “led to confusion and unsound analysis in lower courts.”
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the majority “shies away from its obligation to provide workable rules for capital cases,” doing a disservice to state criminal justice systems and “victims of horrific murders.”
Without clear rules, court hearings over multiple I.Q. scores will be “little more than battles of experts” and “whether a defendant lives or dies will hinge on which expert a judge finds more credible,” he wrote, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.
Writing only for himself, Justice Thomas said the court should go even further and overturn its decision in the landmark Atkins case — a move that would significantly scale back protections against executing the mentally disabled.
Nothing in the nation’s history, he wrote, “suggests that there is anything unlawful about executing murderers now protected by Atkins — let alone one such as Smith who reads at an 11th-grade level and has never scored below 71 on a single I.Q. test.”
Medical and disability groups have warned that a narrow, test-focused approach conflicts with previous Supreme Court rulings and could increase the risk that people with intellectual disabilities are executed.
The Trump administration, which lifted a moratorium on the federal death penalty last January, supported the state’s position in part. D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said states had discretion to determine whether a defendant was intellectually disabled and urged the court to defer to Alabama’s assessment.
Under Alabama law, to avoid execution, defendants like Mr. Smith are required to show “significant subaverage intellectual functioning at the time the crime was committed, to show significant deficits in adaptive behavior at the time the crime was committed, and to show that these problems manifested themselves before the defendant reached the age of 18.”
After lengthy litigation in state and federal court, a district court judge found in 2021 that Mr. Smith should have the opportunity to show he was intellectually disabled. When a score is close to but higher than 70, the judge said he “must be allowed to present additional evidence of intellectual disability.”
The judge noted that even one score of 72 could mean Mr. Smith’s I.Q. was actually as low as 69 because of the standard error of measurement. The district court judge also found Mr. Smith deficient in social and interpersonal skills, self-direction, independent living and academics.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit affirmed the ruling, citing two Supreme Court decisions that said that when a test score, adjusted for the margin of error, is 70 or less, the defendant must be able to provide additional evidence of intellectual disability.
In response to an earlier request from the Supreme Court in the matter, the 11th Circuit said its finding was based on a “holistic approach” and review of evidence, not just a single low score.
Politics
Senate GOP erupts over Trump DOJ ‘anti-weaponization’ fund, punts ICE, Border Patrol funding
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Senate Republicans are pressing pause on their push to fund immigration enforcement after a tense, closed-door meeting.
But it’s not over internal divisions. This time, the fury is directed toward the Trump administration and the surprise “anti-weaponization” fund created by the Department of Justice (DOJ). It comes as Republicans were near the finish line for their $72 billion package to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.
For now, Republicans are calling it a day and leaving Washington, D.C.
“We will pick up where we left off,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said.
REPUBLICANS RECOIL AS TRUMP’S BILLION-DOLLAR DOJ ‘SLUSH FUND’ FOR ALLIES THREATENS ICE, BORDER PATROL PLAN
Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate GOP leaders are pushing forward with budget reconciliation to fund the final piece of government that had been shut down by Senate Democrats’ opposition to President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu)
That makes President Donald Trump’s June 1 deadline effectively impossible to meet, but Republicans contend that it’s the administration’s actions that have further complicated an already rocky process.
“The message to the administration is this: we were on a glide path to passing this bill until these announcements,” a top Republican aide told Fox News Digital.
The timing of the settlement between Trump and his family and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the subsequent creation of the fund derailed Republicans’ sprint to the finish line.
“We don’t know where the votes are on reconciliation right now,” Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., said.
SENATE REPUBLICAN THREATENS TO DERAIL ICE, BORDER PATROL PACKAGE OVER TRUMP’S BILLION-DOLLAR REQUEST
The White House referred Fox News Digital to Trump’s comments Thursday when asked if he would be amenable to no ballroom security funding and restrictions on the DOJ’s nearly $1.8 billion fund, or veto the package outright.
“I don’t need money from the ballroom,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, and touted that the actual construction was being done through private funding.
“But this is being made as a gift from me and other people that are great patriots that spent a lot of money,” he continued. “We’re building what will be the finest ballroom anywhere in the world. If they want to spend money on securing the White House, I think it would be very — very much a good expenditure. But the ballroom is being built.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was dispatched to the Hill Thursday morning to tamp down lawmakers’ concerns over the “anti-weaponization” fund, which several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have dubbed a “slush fund.” But instead, he was berated behind closed doors.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department told Fox News Digital that Blanche had a “healthy discussion on the settlement.”
“He made clear that the Anti-Weaponization Fund announced Monday has nothing to do with reconciliation. Indeed, not a single dime from the money the president is seeking in reconciliation would go toward anything having to do with the fund,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue to work with the Senate to get critical reconciliation funds approved.”
TRUMP DEMANDS SENATE PARLIAMENTARIAN’S OUSTER FOR AXING BALLROOM SECURITY FUNDING
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was dispatched to the Hill Thursday morning to tamp down lawmakers’ concerns over the “anti-weaponization” fund. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Sources told Fox News Digital that over two dozen Republicans demanded answers from Blanche on what kind of guardrails could be put into the fund, and specifically if those convicted for assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots could be excluded.
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., erupted at Blanche, and Thune was uncharacteristically frustrated by the situation.
Several Republicans leaving the meeting had little to say about what happened inside, while others reiterated that they were focused on funding ICE and Border Patrol and nothing else.
Those concerns were validated with several people who were pardoned by Trump earlier this year, including former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who declared that he would make a claim this week.
There have been discussions of including those guardrails into the reconciliation package, given that the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the DOJ, is a major part of the process.
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“I did raise that issue, and that seemed to be what [Blanche] was saying, but you know, we haven’t seen language,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said.
Further complicating matters are plans Senate Democrats had for the package with their flurry of amendment votes.
Sources told Fox News Digital that one of the first amendments in the pipeline would have prevented any of the DOJ’s funds from going to convicted rapists and forced the package to be sent back to committee, sending the GOP back to square one on a politically perilous vote.
“This was all 100% avoidable,” a senior Republican aide told Fox News Digital.
President Trump, it’s well known, is into gold. Every day brings new evidence that he’s thoroughly enjoying the “golden age” he pronounced in his inaugural address — as few other Americans are — with stock trades, crypto profiteering and much more, even a new taxpayer-financed slush fund to reward his allies.
As for me, I’ve gone into silver. That is, I constantly look for the silver linings in Trump’s heinous acts.
One silver lining, of course, is his cratering job-approval numbers in the polls, especially among the young and Latino voters who made his reelection possible. But here’s another: By his humiliating failure to bring Iran to heel, nearly three months after starting a war that he said would last weeks at most, Trump has brought new, more positive attention to what he again this week derided as “Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” (The emphasis on “Hussein” is Trump’s, always.)
The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired.
That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck. Call it JCPOA Lite.
If he were able to get Iran’s sign-off on the sort of detailed, restrictive agreement that Obama and other world leaders won 11 years ago, he’d be trumpeting himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker. (He does that anyway, but his record proves otherwise.) Instead, by his own failure to date, Trump has invited reconsideration of the very agreement he decried as the “worst deal ever” on his march to election and reelection.
No sooner was the 2015 deal signed than Trump and Republicans succeeded in defining it as a giveaway to Iran that assured, not hindered, its development of a nuclear weapon to threaten Israel and the world. Opponents condemned the agreement for not addressing Iran’s other threats, notably its support for militant proxies throughout the Mideast. Some Democrats, notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, were among the foes. Other Democrats, cowed by opposition to the agreement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and pro-Israel lobbyists, were all but mute in the pact’s defense.
Now some Democrats are belatedly finding their voice (and, post-Gaza, some willingness to defy Israel). Along with nonpartisan experts, those Democrats are drawing comparisons between the 2015 agreement, flawed yet successful, and Trump’s promised yet ever-elusive alternative. What’s ironic for Israel and Netanyahu, still implacably against negotiating with Tehran, is that they could end up, under Trump, with a nuclear deal that gives Iran more leeway than the hated JCPOA did.
As Americans are being reminded, the 2015 deal wasn’t just between Iran and Obama, as Trump has long suggested; other signatories were China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the 27-nation European Union. Reconstituting that group would be all but impossible today.
The pact’s 159 highly technical pages and five appendices — a far cry from the short-lived one-pager that Trump officials teased earlier this month — required Iran for 15 years to limit its nuclear program to civilian purposes, forfeit more than 97% of its enriched uranium and submit to intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure compliance. In return, Iran gradually got relief from some, but not all, international economic sanctions and access to Iranian funds that were frozen after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Presumably, after 15 years, the agreement would have been extended somehow.
By all accounts, including those of Trump’s first-term intelligence and national security officials, Iran was complying when he abandoned the deal. Its “breakout time” for building a nuclear weapon was about a year — time enough for the world to intervene — instead of two to three months. Now, though the president boasts he barred Iran from having that weapon by breaking the Iran nuclear deal, he incessantly tells Americans that he went to war against Iran on Feb. 28 because it was on the brink of a bomb — never mind that he also said he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer, a program that was in a well-monitored box until he first took office.
If you’re confused, you’re paying attention.
A month ago, Trump posted online that he was close to a deal “FAR BETTER” than the 2015 accord. “I am under no pressure whatsoever, although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!” To several reporters, he suggested he in fact had a deal and that Iran had agreed both to suspend its nuclear activities and to forfeit all of its enriched, near-weapons-grade uranium.
Preposterous claims, given Iran’s current government, and Tehran promptly denied them. It was a sign of Trump’s squandered credibility that few, if anyone, believed him in the first place. Nor have folks believed his more recent talk of imminent success; oil markets, too, have learned not to trust the president, as prices at the pumps attest.
On Tuesday at the White House, amid a noisy tour of the billion-dollar-ballroom construction site, Trump told reporters he’d been “an hour away” from striking Iran again that very day but Mideast leaders asked for more time for negotiations.
Don’t hold your breath.
But for the tragic consequences, Obama might be enjoying some justifiable schadenfreude about Trump’s travails.
“We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of the enriched uranium out,” he told Stephen Colbert in an interview last week. Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed that Iran was abiding by the nuclear limits, Obama added, “and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”
That sure doesn’t sound like the “worst deal ever.” It wasn’t.
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