Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth returned to his former employer Fox News to defend his tenure amid new revelations that he shared military plans on a Signal group chat and a bombshell op ed from a former spokesperson who described the Pentagon atmosphere as the “month from hell.”
“Disgruntled former employees are peddling things to try to save their ass, and ultimately, that is not going to work,” Hegseth told Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends.
Hegseth, the former host of Fox & Friends Weekend, accused a group of his senior staffers of leaks. The staffers — Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll — were dismissed on Friday.
Hegseth suggested that they were responsible for leaking to the press, after The New York Times reported that the Defense Secretary shared attack details in another Signal chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer. That followed the bombshell report that the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly included in a Signal group chat in which Hegseth shared plans with top Trump administration officials.
On Fox & Friends, Hegseth insisted that “what was shared over Signal, then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations for media coordination and other things. That is what I have said from the beginning.”
According to the Times, Hegseth shared flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting Houthis in Yemen, similar to the attack plans shared in the chat that included Goldberg.
Hegseth said that the investigation of Pentagon leaks was ongoing, but he told Kilmeade, “Why would it surprise anybody, Brian, is those very same people keep leaking to the very same reporters whatever information they think they can have to try to sabotage the agenda of the president or the secretary. So once a leaker, always a leaker, often a leaker.”
The three staffers released a statement on Saturday, saying, “Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.” Caldwell appeared on Tucker Carlson’s X show on Monday and denied leaking classified information. “Absolutely not,” he said.
“There is a lot of evidence that there is not a real [leak] investigation,” he said, adding that he had not been subjected to a polygraph test, not had he given up his private phone. Carlson suggested that he was terminated because he was “one of the strongest voices at the Pentagon opposing war with Iran.”
Donald Trump has not weighed in on Hegseth’s appearance, but he is a frequent watcher of Fox & Friends. He expressed his support for Hegseth on Monday, while the White House dismissed an NPR report that it was starting the process of searching for a successor.
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