Pentagon Leak Investigation: Either Illegal Surveillance Happened Or Everyone’s Lying About Everything

Failures

from the tight-ship dept

What the fuck is going on at the Pentagon? We’ve talked about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s apparent penchant for exposing attack plans over unsecure, easily hacked messaging apps. But there was also a bit of a scandal in April, when three of his top aides were fired as part of a “leak” investigation.

And now, the Guardian broke a story claiming that Hegseth’s lawyer told other Trump admin officials they uncovered those aides were leaking… by using illegal warrantless NSA surveillance techniques. Then, as even Trump admin officials started freaking out about potential constitutional violations, they were told — whoops! — none of it was true.

The White House has lost confidence in a Pentagon leak investigation that Pete Hegseth used to justify firing three top aides last month, after advisers were told that the aides had supposedly been outed by an illegal warrantless National Security Agency (NSA) wiretap.

The extraordinary explanation alarmed the advisers, who also raised it with people close to JD Vance, because such a wiretap would almost certainly be unconstitutional and an even bigger scandal than a number of leaks.

But the advisers found the claim to be untrue and complained that they were being fed dubious information by Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, who had been tasked with overseeing the investigation.

So we’re left with two equally damning possibilities: either the Pentagon actually conducted warrantless surveillance on American government officials (a massive Fourth Amendment violation that would make the FBI’s FISA abuses look quaint), or Hegseth’s personal lawyer fabricated claims about illegal surveillance to justify firing people.

The fact that we can’t tell which nightmare scenario is real pretty much captures everything wrong with this administration’s approach to national security.

And, I guess, the most unbelievable bit of all of this is that anyone in the Trump administration actually would be concerned about constitutional violations in an administration that seems to rack up such violations by the dozen.

Apparently, things got so dumb that Hegseth’s lawyer denied telling admin folks something they claimed he had, in fact, told them:

The advisers were stunned again when Parlatore denied having told anyone about an illegal NSA wiretap himself and maintained that any information he had was passed on to him by others at the Pentagon.

This is where the story gets particularly absurd. Either Parlatore is lying about what he told people, or multiple Trump administration officials are collectively hallucinating the same conversation about illegal surveillance. Neither explanation inspires confidence in the people running our defense apparatus.

The end result:

a breakdown in trust between the Pentagon and the White House, where the Trump advisers tracking the investigation have privately suggested they no longer have any idea about who or what to believe.

Yeah, join the club.

But here’s what should worry everyone: this isn’t just garden-variety incompetence. If the Pentagon is actually having the NSA conduct warrantless surveillance on government officials, that’s yet another constitutional crisis to add to the pile. If they’re just claiming they did to cover for arbitrary firings, then that’s authoritarian theater designed to chill dissent through fear of imaginary surveillance.

Both scenarios represent terrible abuses of power. The only question is whether the abuse is real or performative.

Either way, seems like a real tight run ship over there at the Defense Department. Who could possibly imagine that the guy whose entire managerial experience was effectively destroying two tiny non-profits was ill-prepared to manage the largest military in the world?

Filed Under: defense department, leak investigations, nsa, pete hegseth, warrantless surveillance, wiretapping