Three Pentagon officials were recently put on administrative leave – and then fired – pursuant a leak investigation ( “Leak Investigation 2”) into the reporting of military plans for the Panama Canal, a second carrier en route to the Red Sea, Elon Musk’s planned field trip to the Pentagon for a military briefing on China or a pause in the collection of intelligence for Ukraine. We don’t really know. Remarkably, however, the massive operational security failure dubbed “Signalgate” – when National Security Advisor Mike Waltz unwittingly invited the editor of The Atlantic into an encrypted-but-unsecured chat where Walz, Hegseth, and other principals discussed real-time U.S. airstrikes on Yemen – does not seem to be among the possibilities. (Signalgate is part of an earlier-launched, separate Pentagon Inspector General investigation into whether Hegseth shared classified information with other senior national security leaders across the executive branch over an encrypted, but unclassified, commercial messaging app, “Leak Investigation 1”.)
This uncertainty stemming from why the three high-level Defense Department political appointees were put on leave and then fired prompted chatter that they were being unfairly targeted or treated as sacrificial lambs for others in Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s office. Like the Justice Department mass resignations in early March, the ousted Defense Department trio did not go quietly. Former senior advisor Dan Caldwell, former deputy chief-of-staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, the deputy Defense secretary’s former chief of staff issued a joint statement on X (an unconventional medium for such things, but one that Trump and Musk were sure to see):
