Three Defense Department Employees Fired After Investigation Into Top-Secret Leaks

I don't know if these three people were among the leakers, but the White House is suggesting they are.

Before linking the story, I'll link Megyn Kelly's overview. She reports that back in March, some DoD personnel leaked top-secret military plans to NBC "News." The plans were to deploy additional US troops to the Panama Canal zone, as a contingency against Chinese aggression.

One would assume the leaks came from either the usual crop of anti-Trumpers... or hardcore isolationists who repudiate Trump's -- dare I call it this? -- moderate and nuanced take on the use of military power.

Yes, Trump is the moderate here, and he seems pretty much where I am: Yes, we must repudiate the neocons' lunatic claims about what the armed forces (which they've bravely resisted all actual contact with) can accomplish, their insane stated intentions to invade the world until it looks like Teaneck, NJ (or possibly better), and their juvenile, pathological imperative to feel like Men by sending actual men to fight pointless wars.

On the other hand: I do not want to embrace Ron Paul total isolationism, I do not want to do what Obama said we must do, which is to just "absorb" terror attacks without retaliation.

And that's what the hardcore isolationists want. And their attachment to MAGA is highly contingent -- they support MAGA only to the extent they can dictate Trump's foreign policy, and embrace simple bad-old-days peace-at-any-cost, Blame America First pacifism as the new "rightist" position of military force.

I didn't like this position when Noam Chomsky was pushing it, and I like it no better now that Tucker Carlson has embraced it in his new quasi-religious crusade.

Megyn Kelly sure suspects this leak was made to embarrass Trump and control him, and use NBC "News" as a co-conspirator in their plot to exercise a Bureaucrat's Veto over Trump's plans to rattle the saber a little in Panama.

The White House suggests it too.

Politico:

'Unconscionable': 3 former Pentagon officials say they don't know why they were fired

The ousted advisers, in their first public comments, praised the administration but made no mention of their former boss, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Megyn Kelly notes that the leakers are planting quotes in the media attacking Pete Hegseth, even though Hegseth is just executing Trump's foreign policy directives here.

Let me point out that this is a typical strategy of the Neo-Isolationists and Tucker Carlson personally: They know they cannot attack Trump himself, because he's far too popular with their own audience and he may just cut them off completely if they go after him.

So instead, they attack Trump's policies by attacking other people in the government for advancing them, pretending they don't know that these are Trump's policies.

The guy ran on a judicious and skeptical but tough -- he uses that word constantly -- use of military force in the world. the Neo-Isolationists don't like the "tough" part. They want zero use of the military overseas; they are dogmatically, nigh-religiously convicted of the idea that we cannot use military force except to repel an invasion.

They know the "tough" part of Trump's foreign policy comes directly from Trump's lips and is a foundational part of his political worldview, but instead of being honest and saying "We disagree with Trump here," they pretend that Trump's foreign policy is akshually being made by Pete Hegseth or whoever.

This is just dishonest. These are cowards masquerading as heroes. If you have a beef with Trump, say so, pussies.

Three top Pentagon advisers, who were fired this week after a leak investigation, said Saturday they had no idea why they were ousted.

Former senior adviser Dan Caldwell, former deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the deputy Defense secretary's former chief of staff, said in an X post that they "have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of 'leaks' to begin with."

Their public comments about an "unconscionable" and false firing add to a tumultuous week for the Pentagon. Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's chief of staff and the person who signed the memo authorizing the leak probe, left his role on Friday for a different position.

POLITICO reported this week that the advisers were under investigation for a series of leaks that included reports about Elon Musk's visit to the Pentagon, military plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, and a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine.

The former officials contradicted the allegations.

"Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door," the former Pentagon officials said in a statement posted to Caldwell's account.

They continued to express support for the "Trump-Vance Administration's mission to make the Pentagon great again," but did not mention Hegseth, with whom they'd worked closely.

Yes, they "support" Trump and Vance, but only to the extent that Trump and Vance adopt their Neo-Isolationist absolutism.

I'm starting to suspect I know where the leaks of Pete Hegseth's Signal chats are coming from.

After a weekend of headlines, the White House faced new questions about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and at least one Republican is now calling on him to resign. Some of this is related to Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to text operational details of military action. But as Lisa Desjardins reports, that is not the only issue.

Meanwhile, they're spreading the idea that Trump is looking to fire Hegseth -- which Trump himself calls "fake news."

The Pentagon is in "total chaos" and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is unlikely to remain in his role, according to its former top spokesperson, who painted a scene of dysfunction, backstabbing and continuous missteps at the highest levels of the department.

"The building is in disarray under Hegseth's leadership," John Ullyot wrote Sunday in a POLITICO Magazine opinion piece. "The dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president -- who deserves better from his senior leadership."

Ullyot, who resigned from the Pentagon last week, described a department in collapse. He accused Hegseth's team of "falsehoods" about why three top officials were fired last week, saying they hadn't leaked sensitive information to the media. He chastised Pentagon officials for how they handled revelations that Hegseth shared sensitive military information in a Signal chat, and he pointed to other leaks that caused embarrassment to the administration.

The remarkable accusations by a former official -- who left only two days ago and insists he still supports the Trump administration's national security policies -- underscores the infighting and upheaval that has turned increasingly public in recent weeks.

But he also found himself in the center of several controversies that added to that chaos.

This reminds me of Andrew Sullivan's complete flip on George W. Bush. First Sullivan wrote "mash notes" to Bush -- crush notes. Then he turned on hims savagely.

Sullivan went from being absolutely confident that George W. Bush was right and perfect in all that he did to, overnight, becoming absolutely confident that George W. Bush was the devil with a drawl.

There was no "in between" period for Sullivan. He did not go into a period of doubt and reflection, where he might right "I admit that my former passions were not well-founded, and I'm in a state of doubt as I grope now to figure out what the truth is."

No, he want from being 100% sure of one position to being 100% of the exact opposite position nearly overnight.

Tucker Carlson is doing the same thing. Overnight he went from a firebreathing neocon warmonger who was attached at the sphincter to the Republican Establishment to being a firebreathing convert to the cause of Peace At Any Cost. There was never a period of doubt and questioning. He went right from one Received Truth to its exact opposite Received Truth.

My position on the use of force is a lot like Trump's 2017 position on Muslim immigration: We have to shut it down for a while until we can figure out "what the hell is going on." But I certainly have not become some kind of dogmatic leftwing shill claiming that countries have the right to attack us and our interests and we must never, ever attack them.

Or that the only real foreign policy problem we have to solve is... Israel. And the Neo-Isolationists never stop running their mouths about Israel. They've got nothing to say about the Houthis attacking American (and all other countries') ships, but damn, can they talk a blue streak about Israel's missile strikes against the Houthis.

Last week, someone in the administration leaked the news that Israel planned an attack on Iran's nukes, but Trump talked Netanyahu out of it.

Again, this is top-secret information, and it seems to be leaked by someone who is opposed to any use of force by the US or even a US ally, and someone who has very protective feelings about Iran and very antagonistic feelings towards Israel.

This a serious federal offense. The people doing the leaking are not heroes. They are criminals who think they're righteous.

posted by Ace at 04:27 PM

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