The White House is aggressively pushing back on a report claiming that a search has begun for a suitable candidate to replace Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth after it was revealed that he’d been involved in yet another group chat to discuss sensitive defense information with people who had no need to know anything about it.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took to X at 1:32 pm on Monday to denounce an NPR report, citing a single U.S. official, that stated how the White House was starting the process to find a successor for the former Fox News weekend host, who Trump tapped to lead the massive agency shortly after winning the 2024 presidential election.
She called the NPR report “total FAKE NEWS based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about” and referenced Trump’s statements from earlier in the day when he reiterated his confidence in Hegseth, despite the newly-unearthed Signal chat scandal, which was reported on over the weekend by The New York Times.
“As the President said this morning, he stands strongly behind [Hegseth],” she added.
Hegseth’s tenure at the Defense Department has been mired in controversy from the start, but the Pentagon leadership was rocked this past weekend not just by the Times report on how Hegseth had shared details of an upcoming airstrike against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen with his wife, brother and personal lawyer, but also by a first-person op-ed by his former top spokesperson describing “chaos” at the headquarters of the U.S. defense establishment.
John Ullyot, a veteran of the first Trump administration who worked in the Pentagon public affairs shop for the opening months of the new administration but recently left government service, wrote in Politico Magazine that the department was “in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership” and described “dysfunction” that he called “a major distraction” for President Trump.
Ullyot’s bombshell op-ed came just days after Hegseth sacked three of his top staffers — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy Defense secretary — purportedly for leaking information to the press.
In a statement, the trio of former officials said they were “are incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service at the Department of Defense ended” and accused “unnamed Pentagon officials” of having “slandered [their] character with baseless attacks on [their] way out the door.”
Ullyot, the former Pentagon spokesperson, denied that any of the fired officials had been found to have leaked anything and accused Hegseth and his remaining team of “spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.”
For now, Trump appears fully supportive of the former television personality, telling reporters at the White House on Monday that he thinks Hegseth is “doing a great job.”
“It's just fake news. They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. He was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people and that's what he's doing so you don't always have friends when you do that,” Trump said.
Yet not all Republicans are singing from the president’s hymnal on the fate of the controversial defense boss.
Don Bacon, a former U.S. Air Force general and a key GOP member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico on Monday that Hegseth’s antics would not fly if he were running things at the Pentagon.
“I’m not going to tell the White House how to manage this … but I find it unacceptable, and I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was in charge,” he said, citing what he described as “a meltdown” at the Defense Department.
“There’s a lot — a lot — of smoke come out of the Pentagon, and I got to believe there’s some fire there somewhere,” he said.
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