It felt like a breakthrough.
Pete Hegseth, then a Fox News host whose clout within Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was on the ascent, had taken an interest in the case of a Navy SEAL commander whose death a decade earlier had left the man’s family shattered and confounded.
“Those pictures are damning for the Navy,” Hegseth said in a text to a friend of the deceased sailor’s family, who in late 2022 — weeks after Trump announced his bid to return to the White House — contacted the future defense secretary hoping his cable news platform would spotlight the case.
Hegseth was referring to photographs from a military investigation of the death of Cmdr. Job Price. The 42-year-old was found in his quarters in Afghanistan, a gunshot wound to his head and a service pistol in his hand. Military investigators ruled he had died by suicide on Dec. 22, 2012.
The family friend, Matt Cubbler, an Army veteran like Hegseth, shared the investigation with Hegseth at the family’s request. Irregularities in the report — and with the handling of Price’s remains — appeared to contradict the military’s conclusion, the family has maintained.
Hegseth, in his message to Cubbler, left little doubt that he shared the family’s suspicions. “Nobody — nobody — would be caressing their pillow while taking their own life,” his text states. “I agree, it does not add up at all to suicide.”
An investigator assigned to Price’s case ruled out foul play, acknowledging certain “irregularities in the evidence” but describing them as “within the realm of possibility” and “not inconsistent” with his determination that the Navy officer had died by suicide, according to a military report.
To question that finding, as Hegseth had done privately in his messages with Cubbler, would invoke criminal suspicion of the SEALs under Price’s command — the only other people with official access to their shared living space — and imply that there had been a cover-up.
For a while, it appeared that Hegseth, who had previously voiced skepticism of military investigations, intended to examine the case in a segment for Fox News or shop the story to another major media outlet, Cubbler recounted in an interview with The Washington Post. His commitment, as Cubbler understood it, was to making sure the story received prominent attention, however he could.
But despite his validating statements about the death scene photos, the aspiring politician eventually went dark, leaving the Price family devastated and embittered.
This account is based on a review of hundreds of pages of investigative materials spanning two military inquiries into Price’s death; interviews with family members and others who have reviewed the case; and verified private correspondence between Price’s advocates and both Hegseth and Donald Trump Jr., a family acquaintance who ahead of the 2016 election said that he would use his political leverage to help get new attention on the case if his father became president.
Cubbler previously discussed Price’s case, including the outreach to Hegseth and Trump Jr., in appearances on at least three podcasts — “Redacted,” “The After-Action Report” and “The Robb Show” — he said. The specific content of the messages has not been previously reported.
Initially, Cubbler recalled, Hegseth appeared bullish about the story. But a review of their text exchanges showed that his enthusiasm seemed to wane after a few weeks, and eventually it became evident that there would be no televised report.
The two discussed Cubbler writing an opinion piece for FoxNews.com, with Hegseth acting as a liaison to the website’s editors, but for reasons that remain unclear, that effort also went nowhere, their texts show.
In one of his final messages to Cubbler, dated April 2023, Hegseth, though vague and noncommittal, conveyed an openness to “help another way” in the future. Eventually, though, he stopped responding. And despite his role now, leading the Pentagon in an avowedly pro-military administration, members of the Price family say they have received no indication that the case will be reopened.
The lack of follow-through, they say, feels like “being ghosted” by someone who styled himself as an advocate for troops and their families.
“Whenever we think something is going to have a positive outcome, it just gets shut down,” Bronwyn De Maso, Price’s older sister, said in an interview. “We’ve run into a lot of brick walls, and Pete Hegseth was someone who could have helped us and chose not to, for whatever reason.”
De Maso characterized her feelings toward Trump Jr. as ones of disappointment, saying that her late father’s relationship with the president’s eldest son went back decades and that he had held on to hope for years that Trump Jr. would take action on the family’s behalf.
In response to several questions that The Post submitted to Hegseth’s office at the Pentagon, his chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, issued a statement noting the recent formation of a “Special Review Panel” to examine how the Defense Department conducts investigations and handles other legal matters.
The statement did not address questions from The Post about whether Hegseth has pursued a fresh look at the Price case since becoming secretary and how he reached a decision on whether to do so.
“Our servicemembers deserve to have incidents investigated promptly and thoroughly to find the truth,” Parnell said, speaking more broadly.
A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said that at one point last year Hegseth voiced caution about weighing in on sensitive cases like Price’s and a desire to do so with care. It was not clear who was advising Hegseth on the issue.
Parnell’s statement also downplayed Hegseth’s influence at Fox, saying “Secretary Hegseth was a host on Fox News, not an executive producer, and was not responsible for determining programming.”
In a brief statement, Fox News confirmed that it never produced an on-air segment or digital article examining Price’s death. The network would not comment further about whether Hegseth discussed the matter at all with his superiors there.
Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment. A person familiar with his thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that the president’s son provided information about the Price case to the Trump transition team after his father’s victory in 2016.
It’s unclear what, if anything, officials in the first Trump administration did with the case at that time.
De Maso and Cubbler say they remain committed to securing a new investigation that would — at a minimum — replace the finding of suicide with an inconclusive determination instead. But they acknowledge feeling disillusioned by the lack of action.
Both said they have concluded that Hegseth’s public advocacy for other troops does not extend to more complex cases like Price’s because, they contend, there is less political upside for him.
Investigation ‘irregularities’
At the time of his death in 2012, Price was commander of SEAL Team 4. He had spent the past four months in and around Afghanistan’s mountainous Uruzgan province. The region was a well-known Taliban hideout that had become a focus for U.S. training with Afghan security forces and relationship-building with local leaders, what the Pentagon called “village stability operations.”
Price had completed more than a dozen deployments, including multiple combat tours, but this one was especially tough, sometimes requiring 22-hour workdays, De Maso said. Four men assigned to his task force had been killed, one of them SEAL Kevin Ebbert. Ebbert’s death devastated morale and prompted complaints about the team’s leadership, one witness told Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigators who examined Price’s death.
The investigation also noted that among Price’s personal effects was a report about an Afghan girl who had died in an explosion near a U.S. base weeks earlier, although the report on Price’s death does not draw any conclusions about this evidence.
NCIS ruled the case a suicide. But as Price’s family received more details about his death, they would discover reasons to doubt that determination, Cubbler said.
Also puzzling to the family: Price’s head was found facing in the direction from which investigators concluded he had been shot — an unnatural way for his body to settle, and cited among the “irregularities” identified in a separate investigation performed by the SEALs’ chain of command in Afghanistan. Like Hegseth, Price’s family balked at the image of his left arm clutching a pillow, as if he had been asleep.
Perhaps most troubling for his survivors, the command report shows that the death scene was left unattended by NCIS officials and was by default under the purview of Price’s unit for nine hours after his body was found. The documents show, too, that his body, upon arriving home in the United States, had been washed and dressed in a uniform and skullcap despite it being a critical piece of evidence in a death that remained under investigation. Cubbler and De Maso cited these details as a major concern.
Members of the Price family were left with the sense that crucial details had been withheld from them, Cubbler said, and they speculated whether any omitted information might incriminate members of the SEAL unit and point to a cover-up.
Before his own death, Harry Price, Job Price’s father, raised the family’s suspicions with Naval Special Warfare Command, the organization within the Navy that oversees all SEAL teams. He received a cordial but noncommittal response. A spokeswoman for the command referred The Post’s questions about the Price case to NCIS.
A spokesman for NCIS, Jeff Houston, issued a statement defending the agency’s work but declining to address specific questions about the Price case.
“NCIS death investigations are thoroughly conducted and are reviewed multiple times by panels of senior investigators before a case is determined to be closed,” the statement said. “Individuals who have information pertaining to new and specific facts that may merit additional investigative steps can provide this information” via a tip line on the agency’s website.
Political connections
Cubbler had first reached out to Hegseth through a mutual acquaintance, and their correspondence in 2022 and 2023 would eventually include texts, emails and phone conversations, Cubbler said.
At the time, Hegseth’s influence within the MAGA movement, and his ability to bring about the reversal of government decisions regarding military service members, was well known.
During Trump’s first presidency, the former Army National Guard officer used his perch at Fox News to advocate for three men at the center of highly publicized war crimes cases, securing presidential pardons for each over the objections of some top Pentagon officials at the time and military legal scholars who warned that doing so would damage American credibility.
By April 2023, after Hegseth acknowledged to Cubbler that Fox News was not going to run a story about Price, he said, “I hope I can help another way at some point,” the texts show.
Although Hegseth did not elaborate, Cubbler felt the message was clear: A position in government was next should Trump return to the White House. There was widespread speculation that Hegseth “was positioning himself to get a spot in Trump’s administration,” Cubbler said, “because he is loyal and because he was always very positive about Trump.”
It was the second time that a promising connection had offered false hope.
In 2015, Harry Price had reached out to Trump Jr., who along with his brother Eric Trump had attended the Hill School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania where Price had been associate headmaster. The SEAL’s father hoped that personal connection would matter.
In a detailed four-page letter, Price asked Trump Jr. for help getting his son’s death investigation reopened. The response, sent via email in January 2016, was encouraging.
“It certainly seems like there are some oddities here,” Trump Jr. wrote, according to a copy of the message reviewed by The Post. “While I am not sure there is much I can do at the moment, if my father ever ends up in a position where he would be able to look into it I will certainly make sure that happens.”
Trump was elected president less than a year later, but his first term came and went without any movement on Price’s case.
Harry Price died in 2024.
“For my father — he was the one who had the communication going — I know that it was just sort of disheartening,” De Maso said. “He was ghosted. That’s literally what happened, if you get down to it.”
De Maso said her family never sought special treatment — only someone who would take their concerns seriously. They never made a similar appeal to either the Obama or Biden administrations, she said.
A ‘toxic topic’
De Maso has sought to carry her father’s effort forward.
She linked up with Cubbler around 2019. He had been a high school classmate of Price’s before the men joined the military.
Cubbler, who worked in law enforcement for three decades following his Army stint, agreed to look into the case. But as he investigated, obtaining in 2024 an additional NCIS report that contained ballistics data, gunshot residue data and DNA testing never shared with the family, his curiosity became conviction and then a driving focus, he said.
The separate investigation overseen by the SEALs’ parent command in Afghanistan contained testimony from one colleague who said that Price appeared weighed down by the recent death of a service member, had been sleeping poorly and had shown a “bizarre” detachment in the days before his death. The sailor’s name is redacted in the report.
In 2016, the New York Times published a lengthy analysis of Price’s case that explored concerns he was at a “breaking point,” in the words of one person who spoke to investigators. But the physical evidence, and the possibility that the death scene and body could have been compromised, rankled family members and troubled Cubbler, too, once he began to scrutinize the military’s investigative work.
The ballistics report released to Cubbler showed no conclusive analysis proving that the bullet found at Price’s death scene was the one he had been shot with, he said. Cubbler also homed in on the lack of witnesses who said they heard a gunshot. Only one of his SEAL teammates reported hearing a noise, described in the report as like a wooden pallet dropping.
Other evidence, including a bullet casing found inexplicably under Price’s body and blood patterns extending in multiple directions, indicated to him either the casing or the body had been moved, Cubbler said.
Hegseth also noted this irregularity in a message to Cubbler following an exchange of close-up autopsy photos in February 2023, suggesting that there had been “a silencer pressed against his head, you can see it.”
The SEAL force’s legendarily difficult entry training and role in high-stakes operations — such as the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011 — has helped cement its reputation as one of the United States’ most elite military organizations. Part of the SEALs’ mystique is tied to their self-proclaimed identity as “quiet professionals” and keepers of a cultural “code of silence” that critics say has also provided cover for wrongdoing.
To Cubbler, who has not publicly accused anyone of foul play, the Price case is yet another story of the secretive SEAL community closing ranks around a questionable narrative.
Cubbler has spoken frequently about John Chapman, an airman and posthumous Medal of Honor recipient whose 2002 death on a mountain in Afghanistan has raised theories about whether a SEAL team left him behind. The SEAL community has consistently denied such allegations.
Military investigations over the past decade have exposed drug use, hazing and other unsanctioned behavior that was shielded from public view by the SEALs’ code of silence, Cubbler said.
“I know it’s a toxic topic, particularly if you’re a pro-military president. You don’t want this kind of s— aired out in public. But it needs to be,” he told the hosts of a military podcast in 2024. “We can’t fix what’s broken until we do the hard work, until we talk about our skeletons.”
Cubbler said that he is a conservative but that his belief in the Trump administration has sunk “very low.”
De Maso, who describes herself as politically “middle of the road,” said her “eyes had been opened” to the motivations of politicians through the series of letdowns her family has faced.
“I guess there was nothing in it for them,” she said.
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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