On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sat down with Fox News (his former employer) and assured viewers that Joe Kasper, his chief of staff at the Pentagon, would remain a valuable member of his team. “He’s staying with us,” the secretary said. He added that Kasper is “not going anywhere.”
Roughly 48 hours later, Kasper resigned, adding to the personnel turmoil at the Department of Defense.
As Hegseth’s chief of staff exited the building, The Associated Press added to the Pentagon chief’s troubles, reporting that the secretary had an internet connection set up in his office that “bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols.”
The existence of the unsecured internet connection is the latest revelation about Hegseth’s use of the unclassified app and raises the possibility that sensitive defense information could have been put at risk of potential hacking or surveillance. Known as a ‘dirty’ internet line by the IT industry, it connects directly to the public internet where the user’s information and the websites accessed do not have the same security filters or protocols that the Pentagon’s secured connections maintain.
In case the AP report, which has been independently verified by NBC News, weren’t quite enough, it was soon followed by a New York Times report that took Hegseth’s troubles to surprising new depths.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal phone number, the one used in a recent Signal chat, was easily accessible on the internet and public apps as recently as March, potentially exposing national security secrets to foreign adversaries. The phone number could be found in a variety of places, including WhatsApp, Facebook and a fantasy sports site. It was the same number through which the defense secretary, using the Signal commercial messaging app, disclosed flight data for American strikes on the Houthi militia in Yemen.
The Times’ report (which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News) quoted Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, who said, “There’s zero percent chance that someone hasn’t tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone. He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage.”
I’m just going to go ahead and state the obvious here: In a healthy administration, overlapping allegations like these would force Hegseth out of the Pentagon so quickly that he’d leave skid marks on his office carpet.
Indeed, one of the most striking developments about Hegseth’s recent difficulties is the sheer volume, not only of damaging revelations, but also of humiliating accounts from inside the Pentagon. The Wall Street Journal and Politico both published brutal new reports with allegations that the secretary has targeted senior military leaders with paranoid threats, while shrinking his inner circle to a small handful of confidants — including his wife, who doesn’t have a security clearance or a background in military policy.
These reports, coupled with an avalanche of related allegations, create the worst of all possible scenarios for Hegseth: Not only is a hapless amateur in over his head, and not only is he facing a leadership crisis of his own making, but he’s quickly discovering that there are quite a few folks at the Pentagon who’ve learned some unfortunate things about Hegseth — and they’re suddenly eager to share that information with journalists.
Or put another way, a few months into Hegseth’s tenure, he’s generating the kind of chatter that his respected and qualified predecessors didn’t have to worry about at the department he ostensibly leads.
It’s a problem for the Pentagon chief that there’s evidence of his incompetence, abuses and failures, but it’s just as notable a problem that DOD insiders are apparently willing to talk to reporters about his incompetence, abuses and failures.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
