Pete Hegseth spends at least half of his time investigating leaks—and then working out with active-duty troops to appear competent despite the leaks, according to a former Pentagon aide.
President Donald Trump’s defense secretary has reportedly become increasingly isolated and paranoid as news of Pentagon plans leaked, including details of military plans for the Panama Canal, the movement of a U.S. carrier in the Red Sea, the decision to pause intelligence gathering related to Ukraine, and Elon Musk’s visit to discuss China.
Three aides were put on administrative leave and escorted out of the building earlier this month following a probe into the leaks.
“I think it’s kind of consumed the team a little bit… If you look at a pie chart of the secretary’s day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably leak investigation. Press. It’s that,” one of the fired aides, Colin Carroll, said during the latest episode of The Megyn Kelly Show.
“That’s a bad thing for America. It’s a bad thing for the president’s objectives,” added Carroll, who had served as chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense. “And in order to combat that image, it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go work out with the troops.’”
Over the past month, Hegseth has posted 16 photos and videos of himself working out with combat troops, The New York Times reported last week. Carroll said the Army Ken photo-ops were good for recruiting and morale but that they had become too much of a priority for Hegseth.
“If you’re taking a half-day trip to the Naval Academy at the same time the budget is due, and we really need some support here, come on, you gotta weigh priorities,” he said.
Carroll and the other fired aides—senior adviser Dan Caldwell and deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick—have slammed their dismissals as “unconscionable” and said they weren’t given any clear reason for their firings. Caldwell in particular has blamed the move on a bizarre deep state plot that he claims implicates former Obama administration officials.
Carroll, however, told Kelly it was Hegseth’s own people who were responsible for the mess at the Pentagon.
“Where I saw us run into problems was we did not have a functioning political team process,” he said.
“The people [Hegseth] brought in,” Kelly clarified.
“Yeah, really one person,” Carroll replied.
That person was Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s former chief of staff, who was often late to meetings and “lacked the focus and organizational skills” to do his job properly, sources told Politico. He berated officials in meetings, referred to military officials by a lower rank, and was prone to juvenile tangents during high-level meetings about strip club visits and bowel movements, according to the outlet.
Caldwell, Carroll and Selnick were axed following an internal “knife fight” with Kasper, according to Politico, but the battle seems to have ended in mutual destruction. Last week, Kasper agreed to exit the Department of Defense, and Carroll’s staffers are reportedly making calls trying to dig up dirt for a potential defamation lawsuit against him.
Despite Kasper’s exit, Carroll doesn’t expect things to turn around anytime soon at the Pentagon. He said he’s been told that officials are “polygraphing people actively right now” at the Defense Department.
“Now there is a culture of fear and toxicity,” he told Kelly. “I’m not sure how you recover from that.”
At one point in the conversation, Kelly asked Carroll, “Do you think he’s OK? You know, do you think Pete is OK?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Carroll replied, with the tone of a guy discussing Joe from the office and his bummer of a divorce rather than the potential distractions and paranoias of a man tasked with keeping 300 million Americans safe.
“I wish I could definitively say he’s totally fine, but I don’t know,” he added.
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