Pentagon Leakers Practice Beating Polygraphs Amid Trump's 'Idiotic' Leak Crackdown
The president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are waging a war on leakers – but ‘this stuff only works if you let it get to you,’ says one Pentagon official.
As President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expand their clampdown on press leaks from the Pentagon, government staffers and leakers are responding by leaking more information to the press – and dismissing their clumsy crusade.
The administration’s renewed assault on Pentagon leakers began just days after Trump and Hegseth held an event with military generals in which the president told them to leave and give up their rank if they disagreed with his remarks and demanded they get on board with his domestic military deployments to “straighten out” Democratic-led cities as part of Trump’s war on the “enemy from within.”
So far, the effort to intimidate leakers is not going well. Inside the government, staffers and leakers have responded to the crackdown with defiance, three Defense Department staffers and two other sources familiar with the situation tell Zeteo. Put another way, those staffers and sources were immediately compelled to leak their thoughts and other details to a media outlet.
“It’s idiotic,” one Defense Department official says of the Hegseth-fronted clampdown. “It is clearly an attempt at intimidating everybody to just fall in line and support Trump, and this stuff only works if you let it get to you.”