Playing Secretary As war looms, Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is beset by infighting over leaks, drugs, and socks. How long will Trump stand by his man?

Portrait of Kerry Howley

By Kerry Howley, a features writer for New York Magazine since 2021.

8:55 A.M.

save

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in his office on January 30. Photo: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander C. Kubitza

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

On Dan Caldwell’s 87th day as a senior official at the Department of Defense, he read some intelligence reports and prepped for some phone calls and ordered from the secretary’s mess his favorite Pentagon lunch: “steak bites” with asparagus and mashed potatoes. It was April 15. Pete Hegseth, Caldwell’s friend for more than a decade and the reason he had been elevated as a 38-year-old to the role of senior adviser, spent that particular Thursday at the White House rather than in the office. The two had met while working at a Koch-funded nonprofit. They’d knocked on doors in the Capitol Building years before Hegseth became a weekend host on Fox in 2017. Hegseth always said that if you want to talk to the president, you go on Fox & Friends, and as co-host, he invited Caldwell on to press for Koch-approved reforms at the Department of Veterans Affairs. When there was a chance that Hegseth might be named secretary of Defense, it was Caldwell he asked to help with the transition. Caldwell coached Hegseth for his combative confirmation hearings, and once confirmed, Hegseth told transition officials it was “crucial” that Caldwell be in the building as soon as possible.

In policy circles, Caldwell was known as a serious analyst, a veteran committed to nonintervention and military restraint in ways that worried the bipartisan foreign-policy Establishment. When Mitch McConnell declined to support Hegseth’s nomination, he singled out Caldwell, who had written in support of “retrenchment” from the Middle East, a retreat from interventionism that alarmed the senator. Caldwell is six-foot-two with dark circles under his eyes and a military haircut, polite and professional, fluid in conversation but not given to laugh. On the day we met, he carried in his backpack a book called Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, but he did not want me to mention that because the truth was he hadn’t yet started it; he was reading a different book on “NATO expansion and the end of the Soviet Union.” Caldwell is slightly tuned up, vigilant, a quality that may or may not be the result of his four years in the Marines.

On that Tuesday in April, when Caldwell was about to leave his office in pursuit of his steak bites, an aide told him three men had arrived to escort him out of the building. The aide seemed perplexed. Caldwell thought it was a joke.

“Are you fucking with me?” he asked.

“Can we come in and talk?” one of the men said. They walked into his office, and they walked slowly because one of them had a gold-topped cane; he’d injured his leg pulling people to safety when the Pentagon was hit on 9/11.

“We’re relieving you of your duties,” one of the men said, “and we’re escorting you off the premises. Collect your things and follow us.”

There was only one person with the immediate authority to throw him out of the building: his old friend, Pete Hegseth. Unable to think clearly, Caldwell began packing up random things. He had an extra stick of deodorant on his bookshelf. He put it in his backpack and zipped it up. As Caldwell followed the men to the elevator, the deputy secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, came upon them.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going, Dan?”

“We’ll find out, sir,” Caldwell said.

With senior adviser Dan Caldwell during his Senate confirmation hearings. Photo: Courtesy of Subject

In the drama of Hegseth’s January confirmation hearings, it was easy to get distracted by the financial settlement for an assault allegation, by the multitudinous accounts of heavy drinking on the job, by claims of misogyny from both his mother and his sister-in-law, by the fact that Hegseth, while married with three small children, had fathered a child with a Fox News producer who was also married with small children, during which pregnancy he had slept with the woman who later accused him of assault, and thereby miss some straightforward information about his managerial experience. Pete Hegseth had run a nonprofit called Veterans for Freedom for several years, an organization that employed fewer than 20 people, and resigned after alleged financial mismanagement nearly bankrupted the organization. He had run a group called Concerned Veterans for America, which employed around 160 people, and resigned amid allegations of misconduct and, once again, financial mismanagement. In choosing Hegseth, Donald Trump did not choose from the large set of people who had never managed an organization, or the considerably smaller set of people who had managed an organization without incident, but from a smaller still set of people who had managed multiple bureaucracies and resigned multiple times under complex circumstances. The Department of Defense, which oversees 3 million people, is one of the largest employers on earth, comprising the four main branches of the military as well as the National Security Agency and dozens of other agencies of which most people have never heard. Pete Hegseth assumed office on January 25.

In the beginning, Hegseth was positive and inquisitive, demonstrating a healthy curiosity about the job he had miraculously acquired, and it was possible to believe that he and his fresh-faced staff would change all they thought wrong with the department: the overspending, the inertia, the tendency to engage in endless foreign entanglements to no clear national purpose. Caldwell loved the work. These would be the most fulfilling 12 weeks of his career. Caldwell had served in Iraq, where he handed Jolly Ranchers to Yazidi boys at dusk. The boys were maybe 6 and 8; they had round little-boy paunches; their shadows stretched long on the expanse of desert sand. The boys put the Jolly Ranchers in their mouths still wrapped in plastic; Caldwell showed them how to tug the yellow corners and reveal the candy inside. Five years after that, ISIS took over that area. The boys, he thought, were almost certainly dead. ISIS, Caldwell told me, was an organization forged in American prisons as a result of the American-led invasion. The war had been a “monstrous crime,” but for a very, very long time, no one in public life would admit the obvious.

Caldwell was always going to be a Republican: a Marine from a deeply Republican family, a gun enthusiast, a divorced father of two who considers the military’s equity initiatives “nonsense.” In 2016, he was watching the South Carolina Republican-primary debate. “The war in Iraq was a big fat mistake,” Donald Trump said. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives … obviously it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake … We should have never been in Iraq.” “It took guts to say something like that in 2016,” Caldwell told me. “It was an absolute righteous takedown of the Republican foreign-policy Establishment that still put Bush on a pedestal. And you had all these ghouls saying it was going to destroy him in South Carolina and he went on and had a blowout victory.”

Caldwell was fully invested in a foreign policy of restraint. When I pointed out that Pete Hegseth is not a man one would typically associate with the word restraint, Caldwell emphasized that Hegseth had “evolved” and had staffed a department distinct from that of, say, Paul Wolfowitz. The opportunity to stop the cycle of endless war was more important than any individual person’s behavior. He was working with people he liked and trusted; people he had helped Hegseth hire in the first place, such as Darin Selnick, another Concerned Veterans for America alum who had known Caldwell and Hegseth for more than a decade. They were joined by Feinberg’s chief of staff, Colin Carroll, who had been fired for lowering morale during the Biden administration (“I can be abrasive”) but came back under Hegseth to “get shit done”: “I was of the opinion,” Carroll said, “that a person who doesn’t know jack shit about the department actually could be beneficial given the ability to build a team that knows what they’re doing.”

This had in fact been Pete Hegseth’s argument during the confirmation hearings: He had no relevant experience and was therefore, almost tautologically, a “change agent.” In his first term, Trump had left the Department of Defense mostly to men with what Hegseth called “supposedly the right credentials … retired generals, academics, or defense-contractor executives.” “And where has that gotten us?” Hegseth asked. He had come to deliver something new, and he would.

With chief of staff Joe Kasper (to his left) and Elon Musk at the Pentagon on March 21. Photo: U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Madelyn Keech/Office of the Secretary of Defense

The Pentagon is an isolating place to work. In sensitive parts of the building, personal cell phones must be kept in drawers and storage lockers, rendering the outside world eerily distant: no messages from home, no news of a sick child or a package on its way. At the center of this shared exile Hegseth sat behind a giant wooden desk in his low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit office, swiveling on a chair on top of plastic laid over bright-blue carpet. Hegseth is not skeptical of military intervention. He has argued at length that our failure in Iraq was a failure of will, an unwillingness to double down. But his office was ideologically diverse: Caldwell’s office was nearby, as was Selnick’s. These two men were among his top four advisers, his core team. Down a wide wood-paneled hallway lined with portraits of former defense secretaries one came upon Feinberg’s suite of offices, where Carroll worked. Sometimes Hegseth shut down the hallway so he could film himself and post. It was clear from the beginning which parts of the job Hegseth most enjoyed: working out, posting about working out, and discussing the imminent removal of trans servicemembers. He liked the word lethality almost as much as he liked the word warfighter. He posted pictures of himself mid-push-up, tattooed biceps taut in the effort, and videos of himself running among younger, uniformed men. As one of his first acts in office, he put out a memo stating that “individuals who exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.”

It was clear, too, what worried him: disloyal operatives hiding in plain sight, whispering to his enemies under cover of anonymity. “The leaks seemed to come as fast as we had meetings in the building,” one source told me. (Relatedly, this account is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen people with close knowledge of Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon.)

On March 13, Courtney Kube of NBC News published a story in which two anonymous officials shared plans the military was developing to “reclaim” the Panama Canal. Hegseth had been talking about Kube ever since she published a story in which his second wife’s sister, who, confusingly, was also his brother’s ex-wife, said her sister was so frightened of Hegseth that she had established a safe word to text in times of danger. He was outraged that the Panama leak had happened at all, but it was much worse that it had been to Kube. He wanted an investigation. “I’ve had enough,” he told Joe Kasper, his chief of staff, and put him in charge of finding the leaker.

Kasper was an unusual choice. “I’ve known lots of chief of staffs,” one source said, “and like, this guy doesn’t act, look, or talk like any chief of staff I’ve known.” A bearded, amiable, gravel-voiced 44-year-old from working-class Connecticut, Kasper had gotten his start as a press liaison for Duncan Hunter, a disgraced congressman sentenced to 11 months in prison for misusing campaign funds. When Hunter spent $625 of those funds on air travel for his pet rabbit, it had been Kasper’s job to explain this to the press. At the Pentagon, he called members of the military by the wrong rank, a habit those around him could only assume was intentional because he had been a mechanic in the Air Force. He referred to his military assistant, Colonel Kevin Ward, as K-Dog. He could be hard to follow as he jumped from subject to subject.

“I think that’s arbitrary and subjective,” Kasper told this magazine. “You know who else is hard to follow? Elon Musk. But would you say he doesn’t have creative elements of opportunity to incite and excite you?”

Kasper did not, for the first six weeks, wear a tie. He sometimes failed to wear socks, which struck some inside the Pentagon as unprofessional. (“Rare for me to wear no socks! It’s gotta be the right shoe, man. There are people in there wearing SpongeBob socks.”) He used large vocabulary words other officials were not sure he knew the meanings of, words such as supposition. (“I don’t pretend to be a Rhodes scholar,” he says in his defense, adding that he has never used the word supposition. “Innocuous means harmless. Banal means boring. Indigenous means local. Constituent means something.”) Kasper was the kind of “bro vet” to whom Hegseth gravitated, whereas Caldwell could be stiff, oddly formal; he called Hegseth, a man he had known for more than a decade, “Mr. Secretary.” Kasper shared few of Caldwell’s convictions about American foreign policy, but he had constant access to Hegseth, a commodity for which various factions of the office were now competing. For some, the tension was immediate. “I knew he was a moron,” Colin Carroll tells me, “within 30 seconds of meeting him.”

A typical leak investigation would be referred to the relevant investigative body, be undertaken in secret, endure for months to years, and likely result in suspects being put on administrative leave for an extended period. Kasper took a different approach. “This investigation will commence immediately,” read a memo he put out March 21. The following week, about eight men gathered around a long table in Hegseth’s office. Everyone, Kasper said, would be subject to polygraphs, and the FBI might get involved. He said all this, he told me, mostly to see how people would react; he did not actually know how to procure a polygraph or how any of that worked. Someone who reacted was Dan Caldwell. Caldwell, in his stiff way (“Mr. Secretary”), said he had concerns about bringing the FBI into the office. Kasper noticed. Meanwhile, another leak: Elon Musk, reported the New York Times, was to be briefed on secret war plans, according to “two U.S. officials.”

Kasper, according to six sources, was holding up Pentagon business. He did not, as the others did, arrive early and stay late. He was not scheduling meetings, and when other people scheduled them instead, he seemed offended. Someone who worked with Carroll in Feinberg’s office told me Carroll was “the most effective, driven person brought onboard in this administration” but no one thought he was a man with much patience. Sources said Carroll, Selnick, Caldwell, and the White House all complained about Kasper to Hegseth, but Kasper remained chief of staff.

Another leak: The Pentagon, according to “two defense officials,” had ordered a second carrier to the Red Sea. Kasper seemed, a source said, “jittery.” In Hegseth’s office he’d be constantly at the coffee machine, “bouncing off the walls.” “I don’t know what drug users look like and how they act,” Carroll later told Megyn Kelly. “I can say that Joe was super-erratic and he would be totally normal on one thing and then totally not normal on another thing within the same 30-minute period. I’ve been told by other people that seems like the mannerism of a substance abuser. But I’m not going to allege that here.” (Kasper denies using drugs.)

The leaks were damaging Hegseth with the only person who mattered. “What the fuck is Elon doing there?” Trump reportedly asked of the leaked Musk briefing, which was quickly canceled. Who was talking to the press, scoring little hits against him day after day? Was it a Biden political appointee? The “deep state”? Or one of his closest allies, committed to what one source called “some weird policy theology, the New Right”? “I’ll hook you up to a fucking polygraph!” Hegseth said to Admiral Christopher Grady, an exchange we learned about in the pages of The Wall Street Journalbecause the Pentagon failed to contain leaks about the leak investigation itself.

With Kasper distracted, Hegseth needed someone to do the work a chief of staff would normally do. He turned to Selnick, an ambitious, rail-thin, soft-spoken 64-year-old who had mentored Hegseth in the workings of the VA. A certain faction of Republicans had hoped Selnick would end up running the VA, but Selnick was, according to one Republican operative, “a bad self-promoter.” He took a pay cut and flew weekly from San Diego to D.C., where he rented a small apartment, soulless in a way particular to Pentagon City, leaving his wife back on the other coast. Selnick says he did not plan to come back to D.C., but “Pete’s my friend. He asked me to do it. He said he needed me, needed my experience.”

Hegseth did in fact need him. Selnick understood the government, how to get what you wanted through a slow and steady protocol. He was someone with the patience to learn the details. When Selnick met with me at his apartment, he handed over a printed two-page biography tidily stapled to a business card. When the Pentagon banned trans servicemembers from serving, it was Selnick’s name on the order.

Hegseth asked Selnick, essentially, to do Kasper’s job without the job title. Kasper, a source says, resented it when others picked up the slack. According to another source, Hegseth would not fire Kasper because Hegseth “sees everything through the lens of media” and knew that the media would spin Kasper’s dismissal as “an early L.” This would be precisely the argument, as the department descended into chaos, that seemed to best explain why Trump did not get rid of the increasingly embarrassing Hegseth.

Sources in the Pentagon during these months describe a sustained sense of instability. People quit or were fired and the roles went unfilled. Kasper would speak openly, in front of staff, about the need to root out Biden political appointees. There were also threats from without — activist-influencers who wielded power in strange, sudden bursts. On April 2, Laura Loomer met with the president in the Oval Office and gave him a list of around a dozen officials she wanted fired. Laura Loomer’s central wound, her animating trauma, is this: She has been nothing but loyal to Donald Trump; he had, according to her, offered her a job; and yet that job has not materialized. “It really has become quite the elephant in the room,” she told an interviewer later that month, “why I don’t work in the administration.” Trump, she argued, “obviously loves me,” but “oppositional, defiant individuals” are working against her and, therefore, against him.

As she was talking to Trump, Mike Waltz walked into the room. He defended people Loomer wanted out. By the next day, six people were fired, including the head of the NSA.

As much as anyone, Kasper himself was fearful for his job. By April 3, rumors had begun circulating of an inspector general’s report into Kasper, potentially about drug use. Colin Carroll received a call from Politico about the report. Carroll said “no comment” and emailed chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell to warn him about Politico’s research. No one seemed to have evidence that such a report existed, but in an office already simmering with resentment, the rumor was enough. Any report would have originated with a complaint, perhaps from someone who did not like Kasper. It was interesting to Kasper that Politico was able to reach Carroll so easily and that in Carroll’s email about the report Caldwell was copied. He was convinced someone was trying to “get a headline” on him; news of a report even if a report would reveal nothing. He reached out to the Pentagon’s investigative arm. “No one knew what the fuck I was talking about,” he recalls, but the rumor would continue to haunt him.

Participating in training with 75th Ranger Regiment soldiers on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, on June 6. Photo: U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza/Office of the Secretary of Defense

Signal is an app one uses on a phone connected to the internet. A typical smartphone has what researchers call “a large attack surface”; one can, through any number of apps, hack into it and thereby access the Signal messages. Such a phone is vulnerable to surveillance in all the ways the Pentagon’s boring, time-consuming, compartmentalized systems are intended to prevent, but these are technical minutiae, and Pete Hegseth is a man engaged by something else entirely.

“THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP,” he texted Marco Rubio, J. D. Vance, national security adviser Mike Waltz, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, and 13 other people on March 15 in a series of messages discussing the nominally covert bombing campaign against the Houthis. When Waltz asked for a point person from each department for the operation, Hegseth named Dan Caldwell.

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Hegseth added. (“Why would Pete Hegseth say this into the Signal group?” Micah Lee, an independent security researcher, asks me, sounding genuinely puzzled. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I think he was just trying to sound cool.”)

The leaks up until March 24, when Goldberg published an article about the affair, were embarrassing, stress-inducing, given to create interpersonal chaos in a DoD full of nervous new hires, but they were not this: a fuckup that would enliven the opposition, embarrass the White House, and further sink the already questionable morale in the Pentagon.

Selnick, Caldwell, and Carroll were sympathetic. The story, they thought, was overblown. And it wasn’t Hegseth’s fault in their view; Waltz had invited Goldberg into the chat. But Hegseth did not seem to know how to respond to the allegations. One longtime official tells me the culture of DoD was to “accept full responsibility, learn from mistakes, and move on.” Instead, Hegseth, just off a plane in Hawaii, his shellacked hair barely moving in the breeze, tensed up and laid into a journalist. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called” — and here Hegseth raised his eyebrows, as if amazed that anyone could be so dishonest — “journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia” — with each repetition of the word Russia he leaned in, as if threatening to bite — “or the fine people on both sides hoax or the suckers and losers hoax.”

The journalist pressed; why were they texting war plans on Signal? “Nobody! Was texting. War plans,” he said, “and that’s all I have to say about that.”

That same day what anyone would colloquially call “war plans” were available to see, in a series of damning screenshots, on The Atlantic’s website. Hegseth’s denial rendered the story bigger in importance and longer in duration. Carroll felt that Hegseth should simply state that he had the right to declassify information and had done so; there was no story. He assumed Hegseth didn’t say this because he had surrounded himself with people who did not even know that he had that power. “They aren’t people who know what to do,” Carroll says.

Hegseth was different after Signalgate, according to six people in a position to know. He was more prone to anger and less likely to be clean-shaven in the morning. He seemed reluctant to make decisions; scared of doing the wrong thing, paralyzed as he awaited orders from the White House. The Pentagon had ceased, one source says, to be “creative”; it was a mechanism for implementing executive orders. Each new leak contributed to Hegseth’s sense that he was surrounded by moles in league with his enemies. It was “consuming his whole life,” says one source, “when he should have been focused on, you know, our national security.” Unclear on how to move forward, he retreated into spaces where he was comfortable. “Kicked off the day alongside the warriors,” posted Hegseth against an image of himself doing a burpee.

His circle grew smaller and, to people more accustomed to a traditional Defense Department, stranger. Why was his personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, always around? And his brother Phil? Hegseth began including his wife, Jennifer Hegseth, in meetings at the Department of Defense, a development that was reportedly “confusing” to foreign officials. Jenny directed the communications staff to “draw up a PR package” in a way that offended them; they did not work for her. In the secretary’s office are a half-dozen prints known as “jumbos.” Typically these would be pictures of tanks and troops in battle. In Hegseth’s office, instead, are seven giant pictures of Jenny Hegseth, many of them showing her in the same pink dress. “Without those two J ’s,” Hegseth once said to Megyn Kelly, “I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.” The other J was Jesus.

In late March, Hegseth and his team met with the prime minister of Japan. “Who in their right mind,” asked someone on X, “snags a high-level meeting, in a seat of honor, with the Japanese Prime Minster, and dresses and sits disrespectfully like that, with no socks and casual loafers?” The account posted a picture with a circle around Joe Kasper’s unsocked ankle. It was, as one source close to Hegseth described it, “a minor diplomatic scandal.”

The inspector general launched an investigation into Signalgate. “Starting off the day with a motivating run alongside some of America’s finest,” Hegseth posted, below a photo of himself mid-push-up.

More significant scandals followed, mostly attributable to leaks: Hegseth had a second group Signal chat, with his wife and brother and Parlatore, that could not be blamed on Mike Waltz. He had introduced an unsecured internet line into his office. People in the Pentagon were using an obscure Israeli version of Signal that was even less secure than the normal one and had, according to research done by Micah Lee, been hacked while they were using it. John Ullyot, a former press official and vocal supporter of Hegseth, published a piece calling the preceding weeks at the Pentagon “the month from hell,” stating that the DoD’s top ranks were “near collapse.” He was, like everyone else, talking to the strongman at the top. The president, he wrote, “deserves better than the current mishegoss.”

The mishegoss to which he was referring went like this: Dan Caldwell was dismissed on the morning of April 15. Darin Selnick had just arrived in D.C. on a red-eye from San Diego, where his wife was recovering from surgery. He went from the airport to his apartment to the Pentagon. “I had no idea what was going on,” Selnick says, and he didn’t have time to find out. The man with the gold-topped cane came for Selnick late in the day.

Colin Carroll was at the National Theatre that evening, seated beside his wife, most of the way through a performance of Annie. He had heard about Caldwell and thought, Well, maybe he did leak, or maybe it was somehow related to Signalgate. It was in the second act of Annie that he got a text saying Selnick had also been escorted out of the building. All right, Carroll thought, I know exactly what this is now. Joe Kasper is going to fire me. He got a text from a friend suggesting he would be next on the list; he would, he assumed, be fired at work tomorrow. “Should we leave?” his wife asked, but Carroll thought they might as well finish the play.

Carroll messaged Steve Feinberg to say he was next.

“That’s not true,” Feinberg said.

The next morning in the office, according to Carroll, he was faced with a “minor crisis.” Kasper, he says, had been ranting about how his office was full of “Biden politicals.” His staff were worried for their jobs. Were they about to be fired? Should they quit? Carroll was asked to go reassure them. He said he could not reassure them; he had no say over whether they stayed employed. And anyway, as he told Bob Salesses, a deputy director in the Department of Defense, “a guy with a cane is coming to get me.”

“What do you mean?” Salesses said, shortly before not one man with a cane arrived but, astonishingly, two men with three canes. One man in his mid-60s had a missing leg and a cane in each hand. Salesses shook hands with one of them.

“Bob,” Carroll asked, “why are you shaking their fucking hand? They’re going to fire me.”

“This can’t be right,” said Salesses.

“Look,” Carroll told the men, “I’m already packed up.”

What proceeded was what Carroll calls “the slowest perp walk ever.” The two men with the three canes walked, very slowly, through the second-largest office building in the world. Each man made fun of the other for how slow he was. Carroll encountered many people as he walked through the hallway, onto the escalator, off the escalator, through the mess hall, to the basement, where he was interrogated for an hour. On the way out, in the Pentagon lobby, he saw General Michael Guetlein.

“Mike,” Carroll said, “I got fired.”

“That’s really funny,” said the general.

The man with one cane walked him to his car. Carroll offered to drive him back to the building. The man, he says, thanked him profusely.

The days after the languid perp walks were confusing. No officials put forward charges or explanations. It was in a Reuters report that Caldwell learned he was put on leave for an “unauthorized disclosure,” according to an unnamed source. On X, MAGA accounts rejoiced: “The rat,” said a YouTube host in a post retweeted nearly 1,000 times, “has been found.” His profile picture was circulating, and in this context, Caldwell’s dark-rimmed eyes and bad haircut looked cartoon-villain sinister. “Dan Caldwell … was escorted out of the Pentagon today,” Laura Loomer posted. Elon Musk responded simply: “!” Caldwell was embarrassed and angry and, when social-media accounts started posting pictures of his daughters, afraid.

“Hey Joe,” wrote Carroll in a text to Joe Kasper. “Wanted you to know that you are a fucking coward, and I should have handled you my way a month ago. That’s ok though, I don’t think this is going to end the way you thought it would.”

“Hey man,” said Kasper, “I previously delegated the investigation stuff and have nothing to do with decisions … I have zero insight into the decision space here.”

“I just know I didn’t leak anything,” said Carroll, “and the only person who didn’t like me was you.”

There were many aspects of this affair that would strike anyone familiar with leak investigations as strange. There was a marked lack of curiosity regarding the men’s personal belongings: Their devices and homes were not, they say, searched. There was little effort to prevent the alleged leakers from accessing classified information. Though it appeared that he had been tagged as a security threat at least by that night at Annie, Carroll attended a high-level security briefing the next morning. “There are, I don’t know, seven people in the Department of Defense who get the president’s daily briefing. If someone thought I was fucking leaking, maybe, I don’t know, stop that before they let me go?” None was given a polygraph test, which, while discredited and unscientific, remains a technology of which the Pentagon is fond. They were not taken into custody. From the intensity of 16-hour days among friends in a sealed-off building, the men were forced back into quiet days at home, piecing together rumors and unsourced reports, wondering, as Caldwell puts it, “what the heck happened.” The sudden change in pace reminded Caldwell of his transition from the Marines back to civilian life. On the morning of April 15, he had been at the center of a vast and powerful state; by the end of the day, that same bureaucracy was impenetrable to him. He could get no one to tell him what he had done or how he might prove himself innocent.

It was from the media that Caldwell learned he was specifically thought to have leaked the Panama news, an accusation he says he found almost reassuringly absurd. Why would he leak something about Panama? He supported the president’s plans in Panama; the canal was, to him, a legitimate national interest. “Finally,” people in the office had said, “we found a war Dan likes.”

In the Free Press, Caldwell read something more disturbing: According to three anonymous sources, “Caldwell had photographed secret documents on his phone and leaked them to an NBC reporter.” At that point, he says, he was terribly worried that someone had fabricated evidence. He stopped sleeping. While he was at a friend’s house, he received a phone notification that his home-security camera had gone down. The FBI, he assumed, had shown up and disconnected his system. Should he call his mother and tell her he was going to jail? He drove home in terrified silence to find that it was only a power outage.

Despite all that had happened, it was still possible, until April 21, to think Hegseth would change course, double back, admit that this affair had been poorly handled, and invite the men back into the building. None of the three ousted men was emotionally prepared for Hegseth’s comments at the White House Easter Egg Roll. Against the sound of light jazz and the murmur of families on the White House lawn, a reporter asked about Signal. “What a big surprise,” said Hegseth, “that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax.” He was riling himself up, getting progressively more intense, settling into a performance. The change that officials describe in Hegseth’s demeanor was evident to anyone watching his interviews, and it was especially evident here, at an event for children in which it ought to have been easy to say he would not be discussing Pentagon business. “Anonymous smears from disgruntled former employees on old news? Doesn’t matter … This is why we’re fighting the fake news media,” he said, pointing at two of his seven kids, one of whom looked bored and one of whom looked skeptical. “This is why we are fighting hoaxsters. Hoaxsters! … That peddle anonymous sources from leakers with axes to grind.”

The next morning, Hegseth was on Fox & Friends; he was, one could assume, speaking to the president. The pictures popped up onscreen: “Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick, Colin Carroll,” said Brian Kilmeade. “These are the guys you picked.” “Why would it surprise anybody, Brian,” Hegseth said, “if those very same people keep leaking to the very same reporters … to try to sabotage the agenda of the president?” Hegseth was blaming the leaks regarding the second Signalgate controversy on one of the three ejected men. Demonizing his friends was now part of the story he was telling.

Both Caldwell and Selnick use the word devastated to describe their reaction to Hegseth’s public attacks. “He was a good friend of mine for 13 years,” Selnick tells me. “How could he so callously throw us under the bus like this?” Selnick’s wife was mad; after all her husband had done for this man. “What has he been told?” Caldwell wants to know. “Who put what in his head to get him to believe this?”

On this point, people had their suspicions. “I’m talkative and social and gregarious,” Joe Kasper tells me. “That’s my personality.” Kasper says he handed the leak investigation to Tim Parlatore around April 5, more than a week before the three men were ousted, and is not responsible for what came of it. Kasper’s most compelling point is this: He could not possibly be the source of the chaos at the Pentagon, because after he left, it got much, much worse.

In late April, Hegseth announced that Kasper would no longer be chief of staff and would be relegated to “special projects.” Days after that, it was announced he would leave the Pentagon altogether. “Polygraph Threats, Leaks and Infighting: The Chaos Inside Hegseth’s Pentagon,” read a headline in The Wall Street Journal. “It looks like there is a meltdown going on,” said Representative Don Bacon, the first Republican to call for Hegseth’s resignation; he called the secretary “an amateur person.” “Regular workforce adjustments,” the department’s spokesperson assured the press, “are a feature of any highly efficient organization.”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the leak investigation was the behavior of the accused. If it is generally unwise to assume that the guilty keep quiet, it certainly surprised the White House that Caldwell and Carroll gave full-throated defenses of themselves. When leakers go to the media, it is typically to cast themselves as whistleblowers and establish the importance of the information they’ve disseminated. It is atypical for someone denying leak allegations to say, as Carroll says to me, that if he had wanted to embarrass the president, he would have found something better to leak.

“No more gender confusion,” Hegseth said in a late-April speech to servicemembers. “No more pronouns.” With Kasper gone, Tim Parlatore was the face of the investigation. Parlatore, who has both represented and been sued by Mob Wife Ramona Rizzo and was once allegedly called “unstable” by Donald Trump, now had to field questions from an increasingly skeptical White House. Having seen Caldwell’s public denials, Trump advisers wanted to know more about the picture allegedly found on his personal phone. Where was this picture? How had the Pentagon become aware of it? Parlatore reportedly said that someone at the NSA had “wiretapped” Dan Caldwell’s phone. The advisers were shocked. Wiretapping Caldwell’s personal phone without a warrant would be extremely illegal. It would be a much bigger deal than the leak itself. Could he elaborate? He would not elaborate. The White House had “lost faith” in the investigation. A source close to the White House told me that Parlatore had “cooked up” the “batshit crazy” story about the wiretap and told “ten or 12 people” at the highest levels of the DoD, who seemed to believe it. One of those people appeared to be Pete Hegseth.

The narrative people were piecing together became, over late April and into June, increasingly unified. Kasper had suspected Carroll of trying to get him fired through an inspector general’s report into his alleged drug use. The leak investigation he led then landed on Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll — people with whom Kasper had clashed — as suspects. Someone within Hegseth’s inner circle told Hegseth that there was evidence of leaking from Caldwell but did not produce said evidence. Parlatore started telling the story about wiretaps. (Parlatore has denied being the source of the wiretap story.)

The episode seemed increasingly to be a kind of official hallucination. “There is no investigation into those men,” a source close to the White House told me, which is to say that an illusory inspector general’s report might have led to a nonexistent investigation. The men remain in a reputational and legal purgatory. How does one conclude an inquiry that consists mostly of unnamed Pentagon sources delivering quotes to the media? How does one clear one’s name from charges never put forward? What are the career prospects for a bureaucrat best known for being publicly escorted from the Pentagon?

It could have been so simple, Selnick, Carroll, and Caldwell told me recently, when we gathered in Selnick’s apartment. If Hegseth had asked them politely to leave — if he had said “things aren’t working out with Joe Kasper” — they would have resigned. It would have been the same outcome with none of the damage. “That’s what pisses me off the most,” Carroll told me. “I don’t want a secretary of Defense that can’t even fucking fire people properly and not have it rebound back on his ass. Pete can’t even be a good villain.”

Chaos comes to us from the Greek for a “gaping void,” a space prior to order and intent. Whether one feels safe with Pete Hegseth alone in his office surrounded by pictures of his wife in a pink dress depends on whether one fears the void more than one fears a Trump White House forcefully executing its plans. “Pete is playing secretary,” a source says. “He’s not being secretary.” In crisis — an unplanned evacuation, Israel bombing Iran, China moving on Taiwan — there will be no one with experience to lead. “For any sustained operations, we’re screwed. There’s nobody in the SecDef’s office at this point that has any … they’re not heavyweights. They don’t have the sophistication. They don’t have the experience.” One source described a longtime Pentagon employee discussing the lack of readiness in the office, “close to tears,” saying “the department is so fucked.”

“Claims of chaos at the Pentagon under Secretary Hegseth are false,” Sean Parnell said in response to queries from this magazine. “When members of the legacy media lie, they disrespect the brave servicemembers and civilians who selflessly serve our country.”

Hegseth still does not have a chief of staff or a deputy chief of staff; according to new leaks, the department is having trouble hiring anyone with relevant experience. Who actually shared the Panama intel with Courtney Kube remains anyone’s guess. Colin Carroll’s bike is still in the Pentagon, and he doesn’t know how to get it back. Darin Selnick is in San Diego, figuring out what to do with a yearlong lease on a D.C. apartment he no longer needs. Joe Kasper says he somehow has a new job at the Pentagon; he’s just now signing the paperwork. In late April a parked $67 million fighter jet slipped off an American aircraft carrier and disappeared into the Red Sea. Mike Waltz was finally reassigned. (“Loomered,” Laura messaged a reporter.) Less than a week after that, on the day the U.S. announced a cease-fire with the Houthis, another American fighter jet landing on the same American aircraft carrier slipped off the boat and disappeared, which, while unfortunate, was only an insignificant percentage of what had been lost in the attacks in Yemen, months of combat that cost over a billion dollars and depleted American munitions others in the Pentagon hoped could be reserved for a potential conflict with China. No one seemed to know what comprised winning or what had justified the deaths of hundreds of Yemeni people, many of them civilians. The department in any case has moved on; in June, Hegseth approved the deployment of 700 Marines in response to isolated protests in Los Angeles. When Hegseth was asked, in congressional hearings, what law gave him the authority to do so, he could not say.

“No more pronouns,” Hegseth told Special Forces at a conference in Tampa. “No more dudes in dresses.”

Laura Loomer got three more people fired but failed, once again, to find employment herself. She found it curious that the people around Trump, the people presumably opposed to her employment, were not telling Trump about the disloyal operatives around him. Her voice was pure acid. “I mean, we’re told these are the best people, right? We were told, what is it? I only hire the best people. Right? That’s what we were told … Only the best people get to work for Trump.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5737471&forum_id=2#49013191)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5737471&forum_id=2#49013196)

- that he hired Kasper, whose first sentence in the article is sufficient to fully summarize his intellect, if the bovine look in his eyes weren't persuasive enough.

- including his fucking wife in meetings

- throwing his friends of several years under the bus, after the least impressive "investigation" of all time

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5737471&forum_id=2#49014256)

LMAO!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5737471&forum_id=2#49014352)

-------------------------

Sometimes Hegseth shut down the hallway so he could film himself and post. It was clear from the beginning which parts of the job Hegseth most enjoyed: working out, posting about working out, and discussing the imminent removal of trans servicemembers. He liked the word lethality almost as much as he liked the word warfighter. He posted pictures of himself mid-push-up, tattooed biceps taut in the effort, and videos of himself running among younger, uniformed men.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5737471&forum_id=2#49015397)