War Secretary Pete Hegseth is done playing nice with whoever keeps slipping classified nuggets to reporters, announcing Monday that the Pentagon and the Department of Justice have formed a joint task force dedicated to identifying and prosecuting leakers. As Conservative Brief reported, the War Department's Office of General Counsel now has the authority to request records, information, and support from across the entire Pentagon for leak investigations, and every component and person in the building is required to treat those requests as a priority. Oh, and you have two days to respond. Not two weeks, not "we'll circle back." Two days.
Hegseth posted a video on X laying out the reasoning in terms that left very little room for interpretation. "Leaked information risks lives. These new tools and processes will greatly assist us in protecting our joint force. The security of our nation cannot be a bargaining chip for those who seek momentary headlines," he said. He also added, "Access to confidential and secret information is a sacred trust, and those who betray that trust will be met with the full force of the law." So basically if you are sitting on a Pentagon email chain and your finger is hovering over the forward button to a reporter, maybe reconsider your life choices.
The timing here is not exactly subtle. This announcement dropped just days after the Justice Department subpoenaed four New York Times reporters, trying to get them in front of a federal grand jury in Manhattan over their reporting on security concerns involving President Trump's Qatari-donated aircraft, which he used to fly to Turkey for the NATO summit. That move drew immediate fire from press freedom advocates and the Times itself, as The Hill reported.
Times attorney David McCraw fired back with a statement: "Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public's right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used." He called the subpoenas "nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs."
This is hardly Hegseth's first rodeo on the leak front. Last year the War Department launched investigations into personnel suspected of feeding classified information to the press, with warnings that polygraph examinations could be part of the fun. Several of Hegseth's own senior aides got swept up in that dragnet, including former senior adviser Dan Caldwell and former deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick. They were placed on administrative leave, escorted out of the Pentagon, and dismissed. In a twist that only Washington could produce, investigators later found no evidence that Caldwell had actually leaked anything. He was subsequently hired by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence earlier this year, which is the government equivalent of getting fired from one restaurant and immediately being seated as a VIP at the one next door.
So the Pentagon is now fully in "trust no one" mode, the Justice Department is issuing subpoenas to reporters, and anyone with a security clearance is presumably sweating through their uniform. Whether this task force actually catches leakers or just makes everyone paranoid enough to stop talking remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: Hegseth is not bluffing.
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