The orbit of the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has become consumed by a controversial flight investigation that people inside the Pentagon originally believed three employees of three employees last week, according to five people involved in the situation.
The secretary’s office has been marked for weeks by a ugly internal policy between chief of staff Joe Kasper, who left the department on Thursday, and the three collaborators, including the main advisor Dan Caldwell, deputy chief Darin Selnick, and the chief of the deputy defense secretary, Colin Carroll.
The difficult nature of the survey on the mismanagement of classified information also threatens to reopen the meticulous examination of HegSeth’s ability to manage the Pentagon at a time when he himself shared plans for us strikes against Houthis in Yemen in a second group cat cat who included his wife.
The fallout from the flight investigation were a great range, people said. Hegseth has radically reduced his inner circle, which is now made up of three people: his acting staff chief, Ricky Buria, until recently his junior military assistant; his lawyer Tim Parlatore; And the spokesperson Sean Parnell.
At the center of the leak investigation is an investigation into the disclosure of an allegedly top secret document for a journalist. The document has described flexible options for the American army to recover the Panama canal, in particular by sending American troops to the region.
The leak was allocated to Caldwell, according to two people familiar with what was informed of Hegseth and the White House, and it was suggested that he did it because he disagreed with the military involvement options in Donald Trump’s efforts to recover the Panama Canal.
But Caldwell strongly denied having fled to a journalist and told the former leader of Fox News Tucker Carlson in an interview that he thought that the flight investigation was “army”, in particular because he had been teasing internally for expressed his support for military options for the Panama Canal.
The other two aids, Selnick and Carroll, were also dismissed last week, although they were not characterized in the White House as the main targets of the flight survey, people said.
Carroll was questioned by the Office of the Air Force of Special Investigations, which has jurisdiction about civilian employees of the Department of Defense, but only on Monday after the three aids had been dismissed and only because he had repeatedly asked for an interview to erase his name.
The two assistants suggested in private that they were pushed on the perception they underlined Kasper, which they considered ineffective in his work and expressed their complaints.
The Pentagon refused to comment on reports on the investigation.
The strength of Caldwell’s denial, associated with his close relationship with Hegseth, who had brought him after working together with the veterans concerned for America, caught many senior managers at the White House and the Pentagon to devoid.
And the difficult context for the flight investigation into vicious interpersonal conflicts between HegSeth’s superior aid left them unable to decipher who and what to believe.
When Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon, it was with the slightest experience of one of his predecessors. He obtained the position after impressing Trump in an interview they did during the campaign, and Trump then suggested leading the Pentagon or the Veterans Department.
Hegseth was a fairly successful success during the first six weeks of his mandate, according to four Pentagon officials who interacted with him on a daily basis. He was affable with the world leaders and conquered skeptical members of the Freedom Caucus when he informed them of the pentagon budget.
But pressures in the management of an agency of more than $ 800 billion which oversees more than 2 million soldiers began to catch up, said those responsible, and a series of leaks intensified its distrust of career employees, which defense officials hoped could guide it to effectively lead the Pentagon.
Pressures seem to have filtered to his team, which has become more and more divided between a faction which supported Kasper and rejected his detractors as ambitious colleagues, and a faction behind the three aids who considered Kasper as an ineffective manager.
Kasper complained to the partners that Caldwell, Selnick and Carroll were trying to force his evidence and what he considered attempts to make controversy. In a case, Carroll sent him an email on the possible leaks of the office of the Inspector General, which he found baseless.
Kasper also told the associates that he would have heard Selnick say something about “how to make people fire in this place is to make the headlines,” said two officials.
But senior aids to the White House and Pentagon have increasingly started routing requests via Caldwell and Selnick, officials said, largely because they were faster to get things done – in a dynamic that seemed to grate on Kasper.
The internal rivalries intensified following the leakage of material of the Panama Canal. Hegseth ordered an investigation into nine leaks, and Kasper suggested that he wanted to bring the FBI and carry out polygraphic tests on aid, officials said.
Caldwell pleaded that the flight investigations were partly reduced because it was against the fact that the FBI trains through their affairs, according to several people to whom he spoke of the question – who seems to have been part of the reason why he was suspected.
Tensions among the old aids have continued since their collective evidence. Carroll planned to submit a defamation action against Kasper and started making calls on Monday after his dismissal, asking people if Kasper had already been seen to do cocaine in previous work.
Kasper complained that some of the calls had gone to his wife and previous customers, asking the partners rhetorically how he could have held a security authorization and pass regular drug tests. “It’s so elegantly stupid,” Kasper said when he was contacted to comment.
