The White House is blocking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth‘s de facto chief of staff from a permanent appointment due to his criticisms of Donald Trump and JD Vance.
Ricky Buria, the New York Post reported Friday, has called some of Vance’s views “wackamamie crazy” and “isolationist.” Buria, who worked under former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, also said it was “dumb” for the president to use the military for his immigration crackdown.
As a result, some referred to the Biden administration holdover as “Rasputin Ricky.”
“There was absolutely no withholding of his personal sentiments on any of this stuff,” one source told the outlet. “He would talk about the ‘wackamamie crazy’ of [Vance] and the New Right. He was a military officer, which makes it even worse.”
One critic of Buria’s said the administration’s resistance to having him be formally named chief of staff for Hegseth related to his efforts to get others in the Defense Department out of the picture.
“There is an ideological component to this,” this person said. “Hegseth is elevating a Democrat who does not share the vice president or the president’s worldview and who weaponized his position to push out internal rivals, including people who had very strong histories of being supporters of the MAGA agenda.”
Several staffers were shown the door in recent weeks amid the department’s investigation into leaking. Among them were Colin Carroll, Darin Selnick and Dan Caldwell, a known non-interventionist who later told Tucker Carlson in an interview that he and others were removed because of “personal vendettas.”
“Colin wasn’t afraid of challenging people when they were acting stupid and wanted to keep doing the same thing. And Darin’s the same way. Darin upset a lot of the people who want to keep using the military to be a giant social science experiment,” Caldwell said last month. “All of us threatened established interests.”
Buria “is more interventionist than most of the people in Trumpworld,” his critic explained to the Post.
Buria encouraged Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, to convince the secretary to fire Caldwell, Selnick and Carroll, five sources said. The three men have denied leaking.
Buria has become close Jennifer Hegseth, and has been to the couple’s Tennessee home. Sources said Buria even allowed her to look through his phone to prove that he wasn’t leaking.
Yet one source said this move was “really bizarre to me because Ricky literally has five phones” and “could have shown her any phone.
“But Jen didn’t understand,” this person said.
In addition to Buria’s alleged comments critical of Trump and Vance, he also apparently talked openly about his own political ambitions—on a Democratic ticket.
“He made it very clear that he wore a different political stripe. And I think that culminated when he, on several instances, discussed his ambition to run for governor of Florida one day as a Democrat,” one source said. “That wasn’t just in front of me—that was in front of multiple people.”
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