Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has become a “top target for the left” because of his aggressive stance against DEI in the Pentagon, so no matter what he does, his enemies will continue to come for him, America First Policy Institute senior fellow Fred Fleitz said on Newsmax Sunday.
“Staffing a Cabinet office when you’re starting from scratch, letting go all the career people, that’s difficult and there’s going to be some pitfalls,” Fleitz, appearing on Newsmax’s “Sunday Report” with former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Darin Gaub, commented.
Still, Fleitz said that he believes the Presidential Personnel Office should have better vetted senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, all of whom were placed on administrative leave and then fired following an investigation into leaks at the DOD.
“How did they get in there if they couldn’t function for the first two months?” he said.
Hegseth has come under fire for his use of the Signal chat app in two different conversations where military action was discussed.
“The rules on using Signal for government communications was changed by the Biden administration last year,” said Fleitz. “Now, Hegseth probably didn’t know that. But there has to be someone in the Trump administration who’s reviewing changes to security regulations by the Biden administration to see if they were good ideas. So that’s what I would like to see focused on, rather than hitting him so hard for following a rule that he thought had been in place for a long time.”
Gaub, meanwhile, spoke out against the media using anonymous sources in the news reports about Hegseth and others in the administration.
“Anybody can do that,” he said. ” I could go upstairs and write a piece like that today and just say, sources told me something, anything, whatever it takes. And then the sad thing is that when you’ve got the things like New York Times and, and different outlets, all they do is grab headlines and then repeat and just say alleged or sources. And they keep pushing this narrative to the point where people suddenly think it’s actually true.”
President Donald Trump has strongly defended Hegseth, and Fleitz said that’s because the president knows that the left is coming after the secretary in the same way it came after him.
He added that Trump sees that morale and recruitment are going up under Hegseth, who will have to “put together a new team that can help him get control of this enormous, sprawling bureaucracy and get control of it fast.”
“There’s no doubt that people inside this building are trying to undermine Hegseth,” Fleitz said. “This can be fixed. It will take some time, but he has to bring in better people with more experience.”
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