The shock here is not so much that the blackout drunk who holds the title SECDEF (often spoofed as SECDRUNK) has had an intervention or two. The shocker is that the man in question does hold the title, and the responsibility, for being the Secretary of Defense, in the first place. That’s the root of all Hegseth’s problems and the Pentagon’s problems in a nutshell. That’s the part that cannot be gotten around. And so behavior that would get any normal staffer put on leave, with a referral to a professional help facility, is simply going undealt with in this administration, as the incompetent Hegseth fumbles and bumbles along, winging it as he goes. However, we now find out that Hegseth’s acting out of his paranoia and his failure to do his job normally as required has incurred interventions from within the ranks of those he allegedly manages and supervises — and the White House itself. Whoa, doggies.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of polygraph tests to search for people leaking information to the news media was stopped at the direction of the White House after a senior adviser to Hegseth raised alarm to senior officials there about being targeted, U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter said.
Time out. This was certain to blow. Both Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel are obsessed with leakers and leaks. And at some point the normal business of the DOD and FBI simply have to go on without the titular heads of those entities making everybody’s work life a walk on eggshells, living hell.
The adviser, Patrick Weaver, complained to White House officials this spring with concerns that he could soon be directed by Hegseth or another member of his team to submit to a polygraph test, the people familiar with the matter said. The possibility angered Weaver, an immigration hawk seen within the administration as a loyal foot soldier to President Donald Trump and associate of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for reprisal from the Trump administration.
The White House intervention, which has not previously been reported, came in the form of a phone call by an individual close to the administration after Hegseth’s team had begun administering polygraph tests to people around the defense secretary in April, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to identify the individual.
Before they were stopped, multiple tests were carried out over several weeks with approval by Hegseth and advice from Tim Parlatore, who has served as both Hegseth’s private attorney and a part-time military aide on his staff.
That’s intervention number two that we know about. And I would bet good money that there have been and will be more in the future. Intervention number one came from none other than Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine. General Caine is the designated adult in the room in this administration. If we make it past the Trump 2.0 ordeal in one piece, it will likely be due to Caine’s machinations.
Tests also had been threatened by Hegseth against others, including two top military officers: Navy Adm. Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims, the director of the Joint Staff. Those threats were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Hegseth later decided to bypass promoting Sims to a four-star general, despite an earlier plan to do so and intervention from Gen. Dan Caine, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior Pentagon officials, people familiar with the matter said. That decision, first reported by the New York Times on Saturday, has irked a number of senior officers who thought Sims had acted in an apolitical manner and deserved better.
The Pentagon declined to respond directly to the reporting about the polygraph tests.
I’m sure the Pentagon is a hell hole to work in these days. How could it not be with the paranoid Fox News host peeking around the corners, and ordering polygraph exams of people so that he can determine who his “enemies” are? This is straight out of Dr. Strangelove.
Hegseth had started the polygraphs before the SignalGate scandal and since then he’s undoubtedly all the more paranoid about who knows what, who says what, and most important, who says what to whom.
Hegseth’s role in the Signalgate matter has become especially controversial, since his account of planning for the strike, posted on the unclassified app, shared detailed information about the operation before it commenced.
The administration has repeatedly said that none of the information was classified. But witnesses later told the Defense Department inspector general’s office as part of its ongoing investigation that the shared operational details were taken from a classified email labeled “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning release of the information to the public was considered potentially damaging to national security and should not include foreign officials.
If Hegseth would spend more time learning his job, rather than trying to cover up his screw ups and learn who his “enemies” are, he and we would all be better off. Don’t hold your breath. Hegseth, of all of the members of Trump’s cabinet and administration, is the most wildly out of his depth. It is a joke that he was even taken from the curvy couch at Fox News and nominated in the first place. He does not belong in the job.
And his means of staying in the job is going to be, from all appearances, from running a reign of terror, where anybody and everybody is subject to Soviet-level interrogation techniques at the drop of a hat. This is not America. This is TrumpMerica.
