He was wildly uncooperative with the investigation, refusing to be interviewed, refusing to let DOD inspect his phone, refusing to turn over other threads.
But Whiskey Pete may not look quite as stupid as JD Vance.
You see, Whiskey Pete turned over the Signal chat that was left on his phone after all the autodeleting these scofflaws had been doing. Most of the thread was gone. But there was a single text that post-dated Jeffrey Goldberg’s departure from the list, something the Deputy General Counsel used to suggest the Atlantic thread might not be reliable (a claim DOD IG refused to put in the body of the report because, some people still refuse bullshit).
After Jeff Goldberg left the group, JD Vance said, “This chat’s kind of dead. Anything going on?”
One after another participant on the thread changed their ID, perhaps in hopes … I don’t know what they fuck they were thinking.
Twenty-eight paragraphs into the story that first focused attention on the murder Pete Hegseth ordered back in September (though as it notes, Nick Turse first revealed the second shot just days after the attack) is this revelation: it took four strikes to kill first the people then destroy any debris from the targeted boats.
The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.
It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four shots the get the job done.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
That fact lies at the core of a whole bunch of other senselessness about Trump’s feckless rule. There’s Trump’s release of Juan Orlando Hernández, a proven high-level threat, even as forces that normally prevent turbulence in the Middle East gather off of Venezuela’s oil fields. There’s the many ways, starting with the destruction of USAID and definitely including Trump’s trade war, that has added to global instability. There’s the cost involved in drone-striking small boats. There’s the neutering of legal advisors who might have saved Admiral Frank Bradley from being underbussed by the guy who promoted him. There’s the pretend press corps filled with nutballs and cranks that ensures that Whiskey Pete will never be challenged with actual knowledge.
But at root, you’ve got Pete Hegseth sitting atop that most powerful military boom boom boom boom, treating it like a children’s game.
And he doesn’t realize that on this, his first attempt, and twice more after that, the most powerful military in the history of the world could not take out an unarmed boat in uncontested waters with one shot.
Donald Trump thinks murderboats make him look strong (though the video he released of this one hid that it took four shots to get the job done).
Pete Hegseth thinks murderboats make him look strong.
But holy hell, can we talk about how feckless the reality is?
Update: This timeline of the conflicting things Trump and his minions have said about the September 2 strike is useful.
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I think the trajectory of the last few weeks has been lost in the serial disclosures, so I want to summarize them here.
Mark Kelly and five other Democrats made a video reminding service members they can refuse illegal orders
On November 18, Elissa Slotkin released a video in which she and five other former military or intelligence officers — Mark Kelly, Chris DeLuzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow — reminding that they can refuse illegal orders.
One of the tactics Republicans chose to use in response was to demand that the members of Congress describe what illegal orders had been given.
An even stupider tactic was to move to prosecute the six, in Kelly’s case (because his retirement makes him susceptible to such a thing), threatening to withdrawn him from retirement to courtmartial him.
Trump and Pete Hegseth chose to give Kelly, a genuine hero, likely presidential candidate, and far more of a man than either of them, a bigger platform and fundraising draw.
WaPo publishes the first double tap story
The video from the six Democrats was likely focused on orders to target Americans, not Venezuelans (or Colombians or Trinis, all of whom have been targeted in the murderboat strikes); it specifically describes that the Trump Administration is pitting the military and intelligence community against American citizens.
But then WaPo described Pete Hegseth — verbally — giving the quintessential illegal order.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
The initial response to this was the same tactic that has gotten Trump where he is: to attack the press, claiming it was fake.
Trump promises to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, destroying pretext for war
Meanwhile, Trump totally undercut the premise behind over a year of targeting Venezuela.
There were always problems with Trump’s pretense for the murderboats and planned Venezuelan invasion, which is that Venezuela’s government leads a cartel of narcotraffickers that amounts to an invasion of the United States.
At first, Stephen Miller’s bullshit about Venezuela was rooted in false claims about Tren de Aragua. Perhaps because the Intelligence Community publicly debunked those claims (but not before Miller relied on his bullshit to send 200 mostly-innocent men to a concentration camp, where they were tortured), Miller moved onto a new predicate. Nicolás Maduro wasn’t in charge of Tren de Aragua, Miller decided; he was in charge of Cartel de los Soles.
Tren de Aragua at least exists, albeit not in anywhere near the numbers of slumlord residents as Miller has claimed. It’s not at all clear CdlS does. Plus, if it does exist, it traffics in cocaine, not fentanyl, the claimed invading drug that justifies treating drug trafficking as war (almost no right wing Senators understand this problem, which would be hilarious if it weren’t about to become the new Yellowcake).
But then Trump promised to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who actually did what Trump claims Maduro is doing, who was convicted of it, who was sentenced to decades in prison.
You cannot credibly claim to give a fuck about drug trafficking when you’re freeing major traffickers. I mean, Trump doesn’t care, but the men and women risk their lives and their liberty have to attend to the likelihood they’ll be left holding the bag for Trump’s crimes.
White House concedes the double tap but defends Hegseth
Then, as Congress — led by Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker — begins to investigate the operation, demanding the full video of the strike and testimony from those involved, and as legal experts made it clear that this was not just a war crime, but murder, the White House changed tack. Trump knew nothing, wouldn’t have wanted it to happen, but in fact it did happen but Pete Hegseth didn’t give the order.
While NYT was publishing a story laundering Hegseth’s claims (that he did not specifically order the murder), WaPo was back with quotes from service members recognizing that Hegseth had begun underbussing his subordinates, especially Admiral Frank Bradley.
“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls—,” one military official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told The Post.
Leavitt’s statement “left it up to interpretation” who was responsible for the second strike that killed the two survivors, a separate military official said, imploring the White House to provide clarity on the issue.
One official said of Leavitt’s statement, “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.” Another person said some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration.
Hegseth, writing on social media Monday night, said he stands by the admiral “and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.” His statement is likely to deepen the sense of furor among military officials who suspect Hegseth is attempting to insulate himself from any legal recourse and leave Bradley — whom the secretary called “an American hero, a true professional” — to account for the fallout alone.
Whiskey Pete even posted a tweet claiming to have Bradley’s back while emphasizing that Bradley made the decision.
The struggles to start over, leave the war behind, and find work were ever present. Lakanwal was fired from his job at a laundromat because he lacked a work authorization card despite being approved for asylum and authorized to work by the Trump administration, according to his former unit mate, who fought alongside him for more than a decade.
[snip]
About a month ago, Lakanwal told his unit mate that his inability to work due to missing immigration paperwork meant his family couldn’t afford rent or food. He resorted to borrowing money from friends and former unit members, and during the conversation, he broke down in tears from frustration and desperation, his unit mate said.
“Every time, like looking [for] somebody [to] help for documents, somebody [to] help for pay the rent, he’s not going to work,” the Afghan unit mate said.
His unit mate said Lakanwal sought help in June from a CIA program designed to aid Zero Unit veterans with immigration issues. Rolling Stone reviewed a screenshot of the group chat in June where Zero Unit veterans shared information with a CIA representative about ongoing issues. Lakanwal posted messages asking for help. His last post went unanswered and was deleted by the chat’s administrator.
None of this excuses the killing. It just makes clear that Lakanwal is one of thousands of men damaged by America’s war on terror who needs — in this case, needed — help before something terrible happens. Nigel Edge, the former Marine sniper who shot up a club from his boat in Cape Fear in September, is another one.
Mark Kelly models leadership
Meanwhile, precisely because Trump and Hegseth chose to attack Kelly, he was able to stage a press conference for little other reason than to attack Trump and Hegseth’s leadership failures.
That included addressing the double tap, in which he mostly deferred to investigations, but still upheld the import of international law.
We don’t know how all this will end.
What we do know is that, in advance of a likely demand that service members do something patently illegal, Pete Hegseth has made it clear he’ll sacrifice everyone to save himself.
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In the last few days, we’ve got allegations of murder against two men who worked in counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, Whiskey Pete Hegseth and Rahmanullah Lakanwal.
We don’t yet know why Lakanwal drove from Bellingham, WA, across the country, to allegedly ambush two members of the West Virginia National Guard, Sarah Beckstrom and Andrew Wolfe. Spencer Ackerman noted that if Lakanwal came to the US committed to terrorism, he learned that commitment — and a great deal of military skills — from Americans.
[T]he most sobering fact about Wednesday’s slayings is that the alleged killer, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was all too compatible with Western Civilization.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued an extraordinary statement revealing that the 29-year-old Lakanwal was a “member of a partner force in Kandahar.” While a knowledgeable source with deep experience in Afghanistan cautions that the US sponsored a variety of proxy forces in southern Afghanistan, muchadditionalreporting has identified Lakanwal as a member of the Zero Units, death squads used by the CIA during the US’s longest overseas war.
In other words, contrary to Miller and Trump, Lakanwal’s shooting spree is not the result of importing Afghan culture to America. While much will surely be revealed in Lakanwal’s upcoming trial, it looks more like the result of importing American culture to Afghanistan. The realities of blowback – the violence America experiences as the unintended consequences of the violence of US foreign policy – are what the US needs to examine in the wake of this horrifying murder if it expects to prevent the next one.
But even Ackerman doesn’t consider the possibility that something happened since — quite possibly in the last year, as Trump keeps dicking around allies of all sorts who’ve helped the United States in the past — that led Lakanwal to drive across the country only to target members of the Guard who had been uprooted from their homes to avenge Ed “Big Balls” Coristine.
The list of Republican governors who will uproot Guardsmen from their home, family, and (for many of them) regular jobs to go to DC continues to grow:
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster
West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry
All of these men believe protecting Big Balls is a higher priority than protecting their own constituents.
How soon we forget that the entire reason why Trump invaded DC is that Ed “Big Balls” Coristine, one of the DOGE boys hired by the richest man in the world to snoop through the private heath and social security data of Americans, got beat up by unarmed teenagers?
Contrary to what Trump and his propagandists keep squealing, Lakanwal was vetted over and over again.
The Afghan national accused of shooting two National Guard members near the White House this week underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, arrived in the U.S. through Operation Allies Welcome (OAW), a Biden-era program that helped resettle Afghan nationals after the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
[snip]
A key question from critics has been whether any evacuees managed to enter the U.S. without proper vetting. Lakanwal, however, would not have been among them, according to the individuals, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation. One of the individuals said Lakanwal was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021. Those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA, the person said.
Lakanwal was also granted asylum earlier this year, a process that would have brought its own scrutiny, according to #AfghanEvac, a coalition that supported the relocation effort — an assertion the White House did not dispute.
But no amount of vetting can forestall every awful possibility of violence.
Similarly, we can’t even say what led our Crusader-tatted Secretary of Defense to personally order the murder of two men who survived the first murderboat operation on September 2.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
Trump claims these murderboat operations combat drug trafficking. That was always suspect. Not only are many of the people killed at most low-level shippers, but killing traffickers was less useful than capturing them.
And Trump’s promise to pardon former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was a major drug trafficker, suggests Trump is not so much opposed to drug trafficking, he just wants a cut.
What we do know about Hegseth, the man who ordered defenseless men to be murdered, is that the Fox News host repeatedly failed efforts to vet him — first when he was excluded from defending the Capitol after January 6, and then the multiple warnings of abuse, incompetence, and addiction reviewed during his confirmation process.
And so it was that Pete Hegseth happily uprooted Sarah Beckstrom from her home to serve as a prop for Trump’s authoritarian theater, where she was as predicted, targeted.
[M]ilitary commanders had warned that their deployment represented an easy “target of opportunity” for grievance-based violence. The troops, deployed in an effort to reduce crime, are untrained in law enforcement; their days are spent cleaning up trash and walking the streets in uniform. Commanders, in a memo that was included in litigation challenging the high-visibility mission in D.C., argued that this could put them in danger. The Justice Department countered that the risk was merely “speculative.” It wasn’t. There are costs to performatively deploying members of the military—one of which is the risk of endangering them.
Hegseth kept Beckstrom deployed even after Judge Jia Cobb ruled, six days before Beckstrom was shot, that state governors, including WV’s Patrick Morrisey, don’t have the authority to send their Guard to DC without being invited by DC.
[T]he out-of-state National Guards are likely operating in the District in a manner contrary to law. Under section 502(f), state law defines the permissible use of the National Guard under state control—i.e., which missions the governors can order their units to conduct. Here, the state governors whose units are currently operating in the District lack authority to order these missions because the District has not properly sought their aid under D.C. law and the EMAC.
This vetting failure, Pete Hegseth, happily obeyed Trump’s order to bring even more Guard troops to DC, whose mission of “crime deterrence and passive patrolling” will now require more Metropolitan Police Department effort to protect the Guard from being targeted again.
Two alleged murderers brought demons with them from Afghanistan to the US. Both together got a young woman with all her dreams and life ahead of her killed.
And yet we’re not removing the more obvious vetting problem to prevent further disasters.
One of the most scathing passages in Jim Comey’s reply brief on his vindictive prosecution claim repeats something Media Matters does persistently to understand how Donald Trump’s brain works.
It’s a reply to this passage of the government response, which is the cornerstone to their claim that Donald Trump’s years of attacks on Comey weren’t animus, they reflected, instead, a sound concern about crime.
The defendant argues that he’s being prosecuted to punish him for being a “[v]ocal [c]ritic of President Trump.” Def. Mem., Dkt. No. 59 at 11. Yet according to his own version of events, the earliest that he “spoke out on public and political issues” was June 8, 2017. Id.; see Def. Mem., Dkt. No. 59-4 at 2 (pinning the earliest exercise of the defendant’s First Amendment rights to criticize the Trump Administration to a New York Times article published on June 8, 2017). By that point, however, the President had already accused him of committing a crime. On May 21, [sic] 2017, less than three weeks after the defendant first testified that he never “authorized anyone at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation,” Def. Mem., Dkt. No. 59-2 at 4, the President publicly accused him of giving “false or misleading testimony,” Def. Mem., Dkt. No. 59-4 at 2. That accusation of criminal conduct was mounted before the defendant first stepped into his self-described role as a vocal critic of the President. And that “sequence of public events” should disabuse any notion that the defendant is being punished for exercising his First Amendment rights. See Wilson, 262 F.3d at 317 (reasoning that a defendant’s “theory on proving causation” will be “belied by the record” if the government’s “efforts to prosecute [him] preceded” his exercise of a protected right).
I focused closely on this passage — on other problems with this passage — here, noting that prosecutors had kicked off a fight about chickens and eggs.
I didn’t note that Lindsey’s Loaner AUSAs got the date wrong, May 21 instead of May 31 (Comey was generous enough not to note it), a date correctly recorded in both Comey’s appendices collecting these things (one, two).
[Note my screen cap is +5.]
But I missed the even bigger problem with this argument.
On May 19, 2017, in the uproar that followed, the Senate Intelligence Committee announced that Mr. Comey would testify before the Committee about his dismissal and the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. Former FBI Director Comey Agrees to Testify in Open Session at Senate Intel Committee, U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (May 19, 2017), https://perma.cc/HC5K-KYUV.
That announcement was followed on May 31, 2017, by the first of the President’s allusions to “false or misleading” testimony by Mr. Comey. The government suggests that this tweet shows that the President’s prosecutorial motive arose from Mr. Comey’s May 3, 2017 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony and that he voiced it before Mr. Comey entered into public debate. ECF No. 138 at 28. The tweet shows nothing of the kind.
To begin, the tweet does not reflect the President’s opinion about Mr. Comey, nor does it refer to Mr. Comey’s May 3 testimony as the government misleadingly implies. Instead, the tweet quotes a report based on a conversation on Fox and Friends describing a letter written by former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page stating Page’s view of Mr. Comey’s March 20, 2017 testimony about links between the Trump campaign and the Russia government.5 This tweet can hardly qualify as expressing the President’s legitimate prosecutorial motive—as opposed to relaying hearsay from a television program with no factual basis. In fact, it is the type of unfounded accusation that displays animus rather than a genuine interest in justice. And despite the government’s reliance on it as preceding Mr. Comey’s public statements, the tweet came after the news broke about Mr. Comey’s imminent testimony, i.e., after the President knew that Mr. Comey intended to exercise his First Amendment rights to speak publicly about Mr. Trump’s conduct in office. The President’s preemptive effort to discredit Mr. Comey reflects his animus triggered by Mr. Comey’s anticipated protected speech.
Finally, and most damaging to the government’s theory of the President’s longstanding prosecutorial motive to bring this case, the tweet has nothing to do with this prosecution: it was issued years before the testimony that forms the basis for the charges against Mr. Comey.
5 The tweet (issued in two parts) says: “So now it is reported that the Democrats who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don’t want him to testify. He blows away their….” “…case against him & now wants to clear his name by showing ‘the false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan…’ Witch Hunt!” Appendix at 1. The tweet was issued thirty minutes after Fox and Friends broke the same story. Id. And Mr. Comey had testified publicly before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, to confirm the Trump-campaign and Russian-interference investigation. See Mueller Report, supra n.4 at 52-53
Trump was parroting Carter Page complaining about Comey’s March 20 testimony, not commenting on Comey’s May 3 testimony, testimony that prosecutors want to make relevant to this case.
Donald Trump was parroting Carter Page and that’s what prosecutors claimed was the genesis of Trump’s purported good faith prosecutorial concern about Comey’s leaking.
Oops.
There is, to be clear, a fair amount of chicken and egg in Comey’s reply, too, some not entirely persuasive (though that pertains to their representation of the evidence prosecutors presented, not the legal argument, and so could be mooted if some of this gets suppressed). But it reads with the confidence of people who, now, have the exhibits with which prosecutors hope to prove their case, as well as a sense of whether and if so which exhibits will be thrown out as unlawfully obtained.
And in the process, Comey has demonstrated to the Loaner AUSAs how little they know about this whole story and the man whose batshit rants they’re treating as credible.
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In a just United States, yesterday’s ruling from Judge Charles Breyer that the government violated the Posse Comitatus Act by invading Los Angeles would result in Whiskey Pete Hegseth landing in prison for two years. That’s the punishment for committing the crime of violating the PCA. And Breyer’s opinion clearly implicates Hegseth, personally, in breaking the law in two ways.
First, the training given to deployed troops claimed there were four exceptions to prohibited law enforcement activities that — Breyer found — were incompatible with the PCA. According to trial testimony, those exceptions came “all the way from the top.”
But Major General Sherman’s instructions were not absolute. For instance, the Task Force 51 training materials specified the law enforcement functions prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act:
Task Force 51 Training Slides at 6. Although the training materials list twelve prohibited functions, Task Force 51 troops were orally instructed that the four functions listed in red—security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, and riot control—were subject to a so-called constitutional exception to the Posse Comitatus Act. Id.; Trial Tr. Vol. II (dkt. 163) at 236:25–238:11; Trial Tr. Vol. I at 60:12–63:12, 63:17–25. This instruction came “all the way from the top of [the Department of Defense] down to Task Force 51.”1
1 Defendants objected to this testimony as privileged. Trial Tr. Vol. II at 280:12–13. By introducing evidence regarding legal advice given by Department of Defense lawyers, however, Defendants waived any assertion of privilege. E.g., id. at 244:19–245:12; see Weil v. Inv./Indicators, Rsch. & Mgmt., Inc., 647 F.2d 18, 25 (9th Cir. 1981).
And Hegseth, by name, ordered an invasion of MacArthur Park that served no purpose other than invading MacArthur Park.
Nor was Task Force 51 deployed only in support of federal enforcement actions. On July 7, approximately 80 Task Force 51 troops participated in a DHS operation, titled Operation Excalibur,3 at MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Id. at 35:3–24, 99:21–24; Operation Excalibur Slides (Trial Ex. 28). This was DHS’s third attempt at the operation, and Secretary Hegseth himself approved it. 4 Trial Tr. Vol. I at 35:8–14, 103:19–24; Trial Tr. Vol. II at 261:24–262:3. Operation Excalibur involved federal law enforcement officials marching across MacArthur Park while Task Force 51 remained stationed on the outside of the park in military vehicles—Humvees and tactical vehicles—including at two traffic control points to prevent vehicular traffic along a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. Operation Excalibur Slides at 5; Trial Tr. Vol. I at 35:25–36:1. DHS’s mission in executing Operation Excalibur was “to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area.” Operation Excalibur Slides at 4. And the operation’s purpose was to “enable and protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions in a high-visibility urban environment, while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”
3 Excalibur is, of course, a reference to the legendary sword of King Arthur, which symbolizes his divine sovereignty as king.
4 Initially, Operation Excalibur was planned to take place on Father’s Day and to have Task Force 51 military vehicles stationed on the section of Wilshire Boulevard that runs through MacArthur Park. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 99:25–100:7. Major General Sherman objected to that request for assistance, expressing concern that (1) there would be a large number of people in the park for Father’s Day, (2) Wilshire Boulevard was in the middle of the Park (the operation’s law enforcement area), and (3) the initial proposal to use helicopters would attract large crowds in opposition to the operation. Id. at 100:8–10; Trial Tr. Vol. II at 263:22–264:15. Chief Bovino of the Department of Homeland Security criticized Major General Sherman for his opposition to the initial plan, questioning Sherman’s loyalty to the country. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 103:5–8. This is relevant because Chief Bovino’s accusations of disloyalty go to the state of mind of decisionmakers who are tasked with ensuring that the Posse Comitatus Act is followed.
These were both included in Breyer’s language finding that the intent of the invasion was to use military troops to conduct law enforcement.
In fact, these violations were part of a top-down, systemic effort by Defendants to use military troops to execute various sectors of federal law (the drug laws and the immigration laws at least) across hundreds of miles and over the course of several months—and counting. The instructions to train Task Force 51 on the purported constitutional exception and thereby excuse unlawful military conduct came “all the way from the top” of the Department of Defense. Trial Tr. Vol. II at 283:1–3. And as Major General Sherman testified at trial, federal law enforcement agencies “always wanted military there, and we had plenty of capacity to do that.” Trial Tr. Vol. I at 137:23–25. Accordingly, Secretary Hegseth himself ordered troops to MacArthur Park as a “show of presence” and to “demonstrat[e] federal reach and presence.” Id. at 103:24; Operation Excalibur Slides at 4. Troops drove over a hundred miles to Mecca, where they significantly outnumbered federal law enforcement agents, to support a drug enforcement operation. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 32:9–33:4, 80:19–23; Mecca Storyboard. Troops also drove nearly a hundred miles in a different direction to Carpinteria to set up traffic control points so that federal law enforcement agents could more efficiently execute their search warrant of a cannabis farm. Trial Tr. Vol. I at 84:7–20.24
23 By contrast, some individual examples of Task Force 51’s conduct, like the detention of a veteran at the Wilshire Federal Building, are too isolated to violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The Marines stationed at the Wilshire Building minimized their interaction with the veteran, turning him over to law enforcement authorities at the first possible occasion. Moreover, the record does not indicate that the military’s presence at federal buildings in Los Angeles involved any impermissible law enforcement activity.
24 Even if there is a “constitutional exception” that authorizes the military to engage in law enforcement anywhere in the field under the label of “protection,” these activities would not fall under such an exception. Troops do not serve a protective function when they act as a force multiplier at a “show of presence” (as in MacArthur Park), when they outnumber federal personnel by 100 at a remote location with a low risk of resistance (as in Mecca), or when they are deployed merely to speed up federal operations (as in Carpinteria).
So if the PCA means anything, some entity should throw Hegseth’s sorry ass in prison.
The impossibility of that happening, the impossibility of even considering that happening (Breyer instead went through some hoops to enjoin further violations, treating it civilly) is a testament to how inapt the laws designed to prevent just this kind of invasion are to the moment. Even if there were an entity not subject to federal funding who could arrest Hegseth, even if there were a prison to put him in, Trump would simply pardon his Defense Secretary (as he has floated doing in the past), and Hegseth would be back in charge to illegally invade some other blue state again.
And all that’s before you consider how a law criminalizing using the military to invade states intersects with SCOTUS’ decision in Trump v US, which would give Trump absolute immunity for ordering the military to violate the Posse Comitatus Act. It is a crime to do what Trump did in Los Angeles, but last year SCOTUS made it not a crime. And SCOTUS will soon have to figure out whether things like laws upholding federalism matter at all anymore.
So while Breyer’s opinion is welcome and may give Trump pause, however brief, as he tests other legal theories under which to invade Chicago and Baltimore, the opinion is better understood as an opinion documenting how inapt all these tools are.
Indeed, the opinion is most interesting where Breyer pointed out the ridiculous implications of the Ninth Circuit opinion reversing his earlier order, which adopted a highly deferential standard to Trump’s claims that he needed the Guard to help enforce Federal law.
The impact of Defendants’ argument is largely due to the Ninth Circuit’s reading of § 12406(3) in its order staying this Court’s temporary restraining order pending appeal. In that order, the Ninth Circuit held that courts can review the President’s invocation of § 12406 only to determine (1) if it has a colorable basis and (2) if it is made in good faith. Newsom, 141 F.4th at 1050–51.11 The Ninth Circuit did not clarify these standards further. For example, it did not explain how a plaintiff could challenge—or how a district court could evaluate, especially on an expedited basis in proceedings for preliminary injunctive relief—a presidential invocation of § 12406 for lack of a colorable basis or good faith. Nor does the Ninth Circuit suggest that courts are well positioned to evaluate whether the President acted in good faith, rather than as pretext for federalizing the National Guard.12 The Ninth Circuit also suggested that the President can invoke § 12406(3) if his ability to execute federal law has been “significantly impeded,” rather than the stricter statutory requirement that he be “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws.” Id. at 1052. Thus, under the Ninth Circuit’s test, the President could federalize the National Guard in any number of cases:
The President, relying upon IRS data showing that a sizeable percentage of corporations and individuals are using tax shelters to avoid paying taxes, could claim that he is unable to execute the tax laws.13
The President, relying upon EPA studies showing that pollution in a river cannot definitively be traced back to a specific manufacturing plant, could claim that he is unable to execute the Clean Water Act.
The President, relying upon health data showing the number of individuals who present to hospitals with narcotic-related symptoms, could claim that he is unable to execute the federal drug laws.
The President, relying upon anecdotes from state election officials that voting machines are glitching, or that fraud exists, could claim that he is unable to execute the election laws.
In each instance above, the President would have asserted a colorable, good-faith claim. Under the Ninth Circuit’s test, that is all he would need in order to call the National Guard into federal service—and then, under Defendants’ urged interpretation of § 12406(3), use those troops to execute domestic law. Though Defendants initially did not disclose the implications of reading § 12406(3) as a grant of significant presidential discretion (those implications being Defendants’ current position that § 12406(3) is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act), they have now fully fleshed out their views. In doing so, they make plain the consequences of the Ninth Circuit’s highly deferential reading of the statute
11 This standard purportedly comes from the Supreme Court’s decision in Sterling v. Constantin. Id. (citing 287 U.S. 378, 399–400 (1932)). In Sterling, the Court determined that the governor of Texas had acted lawfully when he restricted oil production across the state. 287 U.S. at 387. Though the Court found that the governor had acted in good faith, it did not set forth any actual test for evaluating executive discretion. Id. at 399–400. Rather, it relied on earlier cases holding that the Executive has inherent discretion by virtue of his role as Commander-in-Chief and his obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Id. (citing Martin v. Mott, 25 U.S. (12 Wheat.) 19, 29–32 (1827), and Luther v. Borden, 48 U.S. (7 How.) 1, 44–45 (1849)). Neither of those cases instructed courts to evaluate whether the Executive had a colorable basis for his actions or whether he acted in good faith. Martin, 25 U.S. at 31; Luther, 48 U.S. at 43–44. Furthermore, as explained below, Martin, Luther, and Sterling’s reliance on the Commander-in-Chief and Take Care Clauses conflicts with the Supreme Court’s more recent interpretation of those Clauses in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).
12 For instance, the Ninth Circuit’s test would likely enable a President to use federal law enforcement agents to stoke tensions and then use any resistance as justification to call forth the National Guard. As long as the President actually believed that the resistance significantly impeded his ability to execute federal law, it is hard to see how a court could find that he acted in bad faith, especially under the Ninth Circuit’s deferential standard of review. See Good Faith, Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024).
13 Incidentally, when Congress debated the Militia Act of 1792—a distant predecessor to § 12406—Representative Abraham Clark posited in opposition that the law would make it “so that if an old woman was to strike an excise officer with her broomstick, forsooth the military is to be called out to suppress an insurrection.” 3 Annal of Cong. at 575 (1792).
Yesterday, a judge ruled that evidence presented at trial showed that Pete Hegseth broke the law in ordering troops to take actions that amount to law enforcement. He criminally ordered troops to help invade MacArthur Park — and tried to ruin Father’s Day as part of the plan!
But the only way in which that law will mean anything is if SCOTUS stops permitting presidents, this President, to invent any bullshit excuse in the service of fascism.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Screenshot-2025-09-03-at-11.13.43-AM.png9621284emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-09-03 07:00:562025-09-03 07:03:59Pete Hegseth Committed A(nother) Crime But We Can’t Throw Him in Prison
Elon Musk’s SpaceX had an even more spectacular failure than his last spectacular failure last night.
Whoa!! Not only did his latest Starship blow up, but fuel tanks nearby caught fire as well.
I was already going to point to this exchange from yesterday, in which astronaut and Senator Mark Kelly quizzed Whiskey Pete Hegeseth about plans for a Golden Dome. But Elon’s continued spectacular failures raise the stakes of it, because SpaceX and Elon’s other fascist buddies are poised to win a lot of the contract to build a Golden Dome.
Elon can’t do what he’s already being paid to do. But Republicans are poised to provide billions more, probably to him, to take on a far more complex problem.
And Mark Kelly, a guy who (even Whiskey Pete recognizes) would know, seems to suspect that Hegseth just fired the people who would tell him that this boondoggle is physically impossible to pull off.
The exchange starts with Senator Kelly trying to understand the goals of Golden Dome. He then tries to get Whiskey Pete to understand the difficulty of the physics behind it.
Kelly: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I want to talk about the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system. There’s a request to spend $25 billion in this year alone. First of all, is this system designed to intercept a full salvo attack?
Hegseth: Senator, it’s a multi-layer system, that would include different types of salvos–
Kelly: So it’s not just rogue nation. Okay.
Hegseth: Yeah, it’s not meant to be just one nation. It could be utilized —
Kelly: Against Russia, China. Full salvo. So what kind of reliability are you aiming to build into this system? Are we looking for something like four-9s on intercept success?
[Hegseth pauses.]
Kelly explains: 99.99% reliability.
[Hegseth makes hand gesture, seemingly assuring Kelly he’s not that dumb.]
Hegseth: Obviously you seek the highest possible. You begin with what you have in integrating those C-2 networks and sensors. Building up capabilities that are existing with a eye toward future capabilities that can come online as quickly as possible. Not just ground-based but space-based.
Kelly: So against future capability too. So do you believe that we can build a system that can intercept all incoming threats? Do you think we could build that system? This is a very hard physics problem.
Hegseth: You are [points emphatically] You would know as well as anybody, Sir, how difficult this problem is and that’s why we put our best people on it. We think the American people deserve it.
Kelly: So let me tell you what I think we’re facing here.
[Hegseth continues to babble.]
Kelly: You’re talking about hundreds of ICBMs running simultaneously, varying trajectories, MIRVs, so multiple re-entry vehicles. Thousands of decoys. Hypersonic glide vehicles, all at once. And considering what the future threat might be, might even be more complicated than that. And you’re proposing spending not just $25 billion, but upwards of — I think CBO estimated this at at least half a trillion. Other estimates, a trillion dollars. I am all for having a system that would work. I am not sure that the physics can get there on this. It’s incredibly complicated.
This video explains some of the difficulties. [Link fixed.]
Then Senator Kelly shifts to concerns about whether the impossibility of the Golden Dome project was behind Whiskey Pete’s recent decision to eliminate most of the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the office that validates weapons and platforms for DOD.
Kelly: So I want to get to another issue that is — that you’re facing here. How much of the staff of the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation did you cut?
Hegesth: After collaboration, Sir, with the Service — Department of Joint Staff and others, we identified that as a place where there were redundancies and multiple additional layers —
Kelly: I’ll tell you what you cut. You cut 74%
Hegseth: Most of it.
Kelly: Most of it.
Kelly: And was your decision to cut more than half of the Pentagon’s testing and evaluation oval office staff driven in part by concerns about the Office’s plan to oversee testing of Golden Dome?
Hegseth: Uh, the concerns were not specific to Golden Dome, Sir. It was years and years of delays, unnecessarily, based on redundancies in the decision-making process that the Services, COCOMs, and the Joint Staff, together with OSD, identified a logjam that was not–
So Kelly sums up the problem. Trump is demanding $25 billion to pay off the guy who got him elected, and as he’s doing that, Hegseth fired the people who can test whether the whole boondoggle would work.
Kelly: Mr. Secretary, to get the reliability we would need, you need something that’s at four-9s, 99. 99% reliability, with all these challenges. And you cut the staff of the people who are going to make sure this thing works before we make it operational, before we give it to the war fighters. You got to go back and take look at this but I also strongly encourage you to put together some — before we spend $25 billion or $175 billion or $563 billion or a trillion dollars, put together a group of people to figure out if the physics will work. You could go down a road here and spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars with the taxpayer money, get to the end and we have a system that is not functional. That very well could happen. And you’re doing this just because the President — I understand your role is the Secretary of Defense. You got to execute what the president says. But this idea, you know, might not be fully baked. And you could get in front of it now and figure out and, and find out if you put the right physicist on this and I’m not saying go to the big defense contractors. Going to scientists and I know there’s a questionable relationship with this administration and scientists but go to some scientist. Figure out what we would have to do to build a system. And then make smart decisions before we spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Hegseth: Senator, we are doing that. Leveraging existing technologies and not premising the project on aspirational technologies, what we can actually do.
Kelly: Well, $25 billion in the first year is a lot of money. That’s more than just finding out if we have the ability if we can build a system that can handle a full salvo threat, hypersonic glide vehicles, MIRVs, thousands of decoys. Thank you.
There’s some important background here.
A constant theme between the four appropriations hearings Whiskey Pete survived in the last week is the way Trump has bifurcated DOD’s budget next year.
Much of it is in the budget itself — the budget that Whiskey Pete has not yet filled out and is weeks behind deadline on.
But this part of it — the Golden Dome that spends $25 billion with Elon’s company on a physics problem that Senator Kelly says is very difficult to solve — is in reconciliation, the bill that needs only Republicans to pass.
The same bill in which Republicans will raise the debt ceiling by five trillion dollars.
Donald Trump is trying to push a $25 billion slush fund to his fascist tech bro backers on a promise that Mark Kelly thinks won’t work.
And yesterday, Elon just reminded us of how those billions could go — are likely to go — up in flames.
Update: Corrected MIRVs.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Screenshot-2025-06-19-at-2.27.53 PM.png858940emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-06-19 10:30:552025-06-20 08:04:50The Golden Teapot Dome: Mark Kelly Warns “This Is a Very Hard Physics Problem”
There’s a line in Kerry Howley’s entertaining profile of Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s incompetence that, along with the URL title — “Could these be Pete Hegseth’s last days in the Pentagon?” — made me wonder whether she and her editors rushed to publish it in fear that it was about to be Overtaken By Events.
To illustrate her best quote, describing that Whiskey Pete is only playing at Defense Secretary, Howley used the (apparently paraphrased) hypothetical crisis, Israel bombing Iran, to explain what nearly led a longtime Pentagon employee to cry when contemplating how poorly Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon would function.
“Pete is playing secretary,” a source says. “He’s not being secretary.” In crisis — an unplanned evacuation, Israel bombing Iran, China moving on Taiwan — there will be no one with experience to lead. “For any sustained operations, we’re screwed. There’s nobody in the SecDef’s office at this point that has any … they’re not heavyweights. They don’t have the sophistication. They don’t have the experience.” One source described a longtime Pentagon employee discussing the lack of readiness in the office, “close to tears,” saying “the department is so fucked.”
Having spent months crafting a great story about Trump’s woefully incompetent Defense Secretary (though before she had gotten the full story; for example, she didn’t describe the suspected role of DOGE implant Justin Fulcher in fabricating a claim about NSA intercepts), she published it before it became irrelevant.
And here we are, Israel is bombing Iran and Iran is returning fire, and there are probably people crying at the Pentagon and they’re not alone.
Israel’s attack on Iran is not even the biggest risk of having someone as unhinged as Whiskey Pete in charge: the Los Angeles invasion is.
Indeed, over the course of a long week of disastrous Congressional appearances for Whiskey Pete, it became fairly clear he knows fuckall about the invasion of California he has personally authorized. And that is dangerous — inconceivably dangerous — not least because Whiskey Pete also spent the week facing his own inadequacy.
As things (and not just Whiskey Pete’s things) begin to spiral out of control, it’s time we talk about the problems created when people who believe they — a Christian white man with an addiction problem — are supreme, face the kind of public humiliation that destroys the core of their identity.
Whiskey Pete knows fuckall about the Los Angeles deployment
Let’s start with the risk.
Friday, Reuters reported on the first known temporary detention carried out by Marines deployed to Los Angeles. As the shocking video portrays, there were at one point at least five heavily-armed men engaged in detaining Army veteran Marcus Leao.
Leao, who is brown-skinned, was a veteran on his way to the VA office.
Speaking to reporters after he was released, the civilian identified himself as Marcos Leao, 27. Leao said he was an Army veteran on his way to an office of the Department of Veterans Affairs when he crossed a yellow tape boundary and was asked to stop.
Leao, who gained his U.S. citizenship through military service, said he was treated “very fairly.”
“They’re just doing their job,” said Leao, who is of Angolan and Portuguese descent.
[snip]
The troops are authorized to detain people who pose a threat to federal personnel or property, but only until police can arrest them. Military officials are not allowed to carry out arrests themselves.
There’s no hint of what probable cause they had to detain him, at all.
He was going to the VA office.
Imagine what’s going to happen when the target is actually doing something that an itchy trigger might view as a real threat?
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense has repeatedly confessed he doesn’t know what is going on with the deployment.
On June 9, for example, the Secretary of Defense claimed the deployed Marines were coming from Camp Pendleton.
There was, to be fair, some as yet unexplained uncertainty whence DOD was deploying 700 Marines, from Pendleton or Twentynine Palms. But within hours of this tweet, the Marines were deploying from the latter base, not the former (where protests against the deployment had already been staged, which is on the edge of San Diego’s suburbs). The Secretary of Defense’s tweet, posted hours before the deployment, ended up being inexplicably wrong.
The next day, Whiskey Pete appeared before the first of three appropriations hearings this week. Pete Aguilar asked some basic questions: Why were the Guard sent without housing or food? How much will it cost? Where is the money coming from?
Each time, Whiskey Pete answered with bluster rather than facts (the Acting Comptroller, Bryn MacDonnell, did an exceptional job all week, and in in this case revealed the deployment would cost $134 million, mostly TDY costs, which would be paid out of contingency funds).
Then Aguilar asked Hegseth what the legal justification was. Hegseth again blustered.
Aguilar pointed to the statute: 10 USC 12406 — the statute cited in Trump’s Executive Order mandating the deployment, and asked which of the three justifications was triggered.
The Secretary of Defense said he didn’t know.
I don’t know. You just read it yourself. And people can listen themselves. But it sounds like all three to me. If you’ve got millions of illegals and you don’t know where they’re coming from, they’re waving flags from foreign countries and assaulting police officers, that’s a problem. The government of California is unable to execute the laws of the United States. The Governor of the [sic] California has failed to protect his people along with the Mayor of Los Angeles and so President Trump has said he will protect our agents and our Guard and Marines are proud to do it.
And yet days after deploying the Guard, Hegseth confessed that he had no fucking idea which of those three clauses justified the deployment.
Fully 15 pages of Judge Charles Breyer’s opinion enjoining the use of the National Guard addresses this issue and Breyer even scolds DOJ for attempting to retcon their justification, precisely what Hegesth himself tried to do in the hearing.
It is concerning, to say the least, to imagine that the federal executive could unilaterally exercise military force in a domestic context and then be allowed to backfill justifications for doing so, especially considering how wary courts are of after-the-fact justifications even where the stakes are lower.
Hegseth had relied on the law, without any sense of how or why (he claimed) it applied, just as Breyer found DOJ itself had done.
Hegseth had another Appropriations hearing on Wednesday, this time before the Senate. In response to a question from Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Jack Reed whether the troops would use drones and detain Americans, Hegseth refused to answer.
Since then, the military has indeed deployed drones and (as noted) detained at least one American citizen. Reed was correct: The answer Hegseth refused to give was, yes.
Hegseth also stated that both the Guard and the Marines were on the streets.
Only, the Marines weren’t, yet. They hadn’t finished the scant training they were being given.
Some of these gaffes — announcing the wrong base whence Marines would deploy, claiming they were deployed when they weren’t, yet — may represent confusion or DOD changing its mind, which is interesting enough, given the artificial claim of an emergency. But Hegseth disclaimed even knowing the legal basis on which he had deployed 4,700 service members.
Whiskey Pete’s humiliation snowballs
Meanwhile, even as Hegseth is presiding over an invasion of a blue city, even as Howley’s profile was in the works, even as DOD’s Inspector General finalizes a report expected to rebut Hegseth’s claim that he didn’t share classified information on a Signal chat, on the third day of testimony (the Appropriations hearing with Aguilar was Tuesday, the Senate Appropriations hearing with Reed was Wednesday, he had a hearing before the full House Armed Services Committee on Thursday), things got worse.
Here, Democrats, and several Republicans, were far less interested in appropriations; they were teeing up on Hegseth’s manifest incompetence.
Three key exchanges went straight to Hegseth’s incompetence.
Early in the hearing, as many others did and would, Seth Moulton hammered Hegseth on his Signal scandal. As many others did and would, Moulton asked Hegseth to take some accountability for his actions.
But when Hegseth answered (as he did elsewhere) that it didn’t matter if he shared classified information in a Signal chat, that it didn’t matter because the operation itself was successful, Moulton mocked that claim.
Moulton: You talked about the success of the Houthi operation. About how much did it cost? How much money did you spend on missiles, shooting at the Houthis?
Hegseth: Well, you’d have to compare that with what it cost —
Moulton: I’m just asking how much did it cost?
Hegseth: — to divert our shipping lanes.
Moulton: I’m told it’s several hundred million dollars, maybe close to a billion dollars. How many US-flagged commercial ships have transitted the Red Sea since your so-called successful operation?
Hegseth: Well, thankfully, unlike the previous Admin —
Moulton: The answer is zero.
Hegseth: Military vessels transitt–
Moulton: No I didn’t ask you about military vessels.
Hegseth: Which would be the precursor for —
Moulton: How many commercial vessels? It has been several weeks. How many commercial vessels, US-flagged, have transitted —
Hegseth: Well, would you, Mr. Congressman, put civilian ships–
Moulton: The questions are not to me, Mr. Secretary, they’re to you. The answer is zero.
“The answer is zero.” Hegseth tried to cover up the utter pointlessness of the failed operation kicked off on that Signal chat with boasts that two military vessels had sailed through the Red Sea unscathed. But zero US commercial vehicles have, the very opportunity cost Hegseth had tried to use to dismiss the cost of the operation. That’s what success looks like for a guy like Pete Hegseth.
About halfway through the hearing, it was Mikie Sherrill’s turn, fresh off her win in the NJ gubernatorial primary. She started by observing how Hegseth had been using Fox News tactics to try to cover up his incompetence.
Mr. Secretary, your testimony over the last several days before Congress — I’ve heard you speak about all your supposed accomplishments from your time at the Pentagon. I have to say, your training at Fox News has let you spin months of dangerous dysfunction and incompetence into catchy phrases, like “restoring the warrior ethos” and “increasing lethality,” but the truth is it’s really been chaos at the Pentagon under your leadership. You’ve clearly shown you’re unable to manage the Department of Defense but what I’m most concerned about are three specific areas: Your operational incompetence, your managerial incompetence, and your budgetary incompetence.
She then walked through individual incidents substantiating those three kinds of incompetence:
Operational: How Hegseth mistakenly believed Trump wanted to cut off all aid to Ukraine. Hegseth said it was a fake news headline, a Fox News tactic.
Managerial: Why Hegseth fired CJCS CQ Brown and the Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti without cause — Sherrill said it seemed like it was because Brown is Black and Franchetti is a woman — and when Hegseth would get around to replacing Franchetti. Sherrill asked if qualified Admirals keep turning offers down. Hegseth again claimed it was fake news, but had no answer for why he hadn’t yet replaced Franchetti.
Budgetary: Why Hegseth is blowing money on vanity projects for President Trump — Sherill listed the Qatari plane, the parade, the Houthi campaign, and the Los Angeles invasion — and what priorities he has cut funding for to pay for them. Again, no asnwer.
Each time, Hegseth dodged Sherrill’s questions, and she restated the question — the last time, in a sing-song voice like she was speaking to a surly toddler.
On top of the substantive issues, the exchange proved that, yes, Hegseth is treating oversight questions like they’re Fox News games.
Eugene Vindman (Alexander’s brother, and like him ousted after blowing the whistle on Trump), almost the last questioner, chose a different approach to demonstrate Hegseth’s manifest incompetence.
He quizzed him.
He set it up by explaining that,
Many believe you are unqualified — underqualified — for this role. You’ve been Secretary of Defense for four and a half months now, for the sake of the American people and our service members, I hope you’ve done your homework since.
Then, like the questions Tammy Duckworth posed at his confirmation hearing, Vindman asked about topics that demonstrate several American vulnerabilities: China’s growing naval superiority, a key bottleneck that could cut the Baltics off from land reinforcements, and the rise of sight-directed small drones.
What year can the US fight a war with China?
How many ships does China have?
How many ships does the US have?
How many ships will China field by 2030?
What is the name of a corridor central to NATO reinforcements of the Baltic?
What heavily militarized Russian territory, connected to the Suwalki gap, containing nuclear capable missiles, it threatens all of NATO — it’s right there in the middle of Eastern Europe?
What percentage of frontline Ukrainian casualties are caused by FPV drones?
Which US service has written doctrine or standardized procurement of FPV drones?
Hegseth’s attempt to cover up his ignorance about the specifics of these vulnerabilities adopted similar tactics — those Fox News tactics Sherrill had raised — each time.
First, give a pat answer.
Then, falsely claim the answer is classified.
Then, use a political talking point answering a different question.
Then give up.
The one answer he thought he knew — that the Army had a written doctrine on FPVs — was wrong (to be fair, it was a trick question).
That’s when Vindman shifted to the same topic that Moulton had raised: Hegseth’s refusal to take accountability for placing attack information on a Signal chat. Only Vindman had a twist: He conveyed the opinion and request of the mother of one of the men who had piloted that first attack.
She believes that you need to resign. She also had several questions but one thing: she said she would appreciate an apology, an apology for putting classified information — her son couldn’t even tell her where the Truman was going — into the Houthi PC Small Group Signal chat that risked her son’s life and the mission. Mr. Secretary, yes or no, do you think you owe her an apology?
Hours after Moulton demonstrated that the mission accomplished nothing, Hegseth still resorted to the same ploy that failed with Moulton, claiming “it was an incredibly successful mission, and her son did great work, and thankfully the Houthi campaign was successful. … I don’t apologize for success.”
He doesn’t have to exercise any personal accountability because a mission that failed to achieve its stated objective was a great success.
Perhaps because the House Armed Services Committee is so big — the fullhearing went on over seven hours, perhaps because a chunk of Republicans didn’t bother to show up to defend Hegseth (as noted, several joined the fun in thwacking the Secretary), perhaps it was because Whiskey Pete had no answer for his own actions, for DOD’s budget, and still, for how to keep the US safe. But the very process of the hearing showed that there’s no there there, under Hegseth’s non-stop politicization and Fox News answers.
We always knew he was an empty suit. This hearing exposed that.
Turns out you’re not supreme at all!
And that’s what has me worried.
Kerry Howley seems to think Whiskey Pete may be finished, and she’s not alone. The NBC story on the White House difficulties finding Hegseth babysitters — which is, substantively, far more damning than the Howley profile — ends with a prediction that the Inspector General will issue findings adverse to Hegseth. Two days after WSJ dedicated an entire story to that topic, it published a story describing what a failure the Houthi campaign was.
It’s not just Democrats and some Republicans in Congress who have lost patience with Hegseth. It appears most of the Pentagon has, which is why (as both Sherrill and the NBC story point out) people aren’t applying for key jobs. (Some people speculate it’s why some of the soldiers marching in yesterday’s parade couldn’t be fucked to march in lockstep.)
I’m not so sure. Politically, Trump should fire Hegseth, to minimize the surface area of easy attacks on himself, including from Republicans. Operationally, there’s no question that Hegseth’s continued tenure makes the US far less safe (and just as importantly, mucks up the finely tuned bureaucracy of the Pentagon).
Trump could even use the dud of yesterday’s military parade as an excuse. His Fox News hire couldn’t even make Trump’s long-sought military parade into rousing propaganda.
But Trump just invaded California relying on the authority of a guy who couldn’t be bothered to figure out why he was invading.
To carry out his (or Stephen Miller’s) attempt to pursue a reverse Reconstruction, he needs cabinet members like Kristi Noem and Hegseth who don’t care about the legal niceties but are happy to parrot lines about liberating the largest state, and the world’s fourth largest economy, from its elected leaders.
Without that, Trump himself, the entire project, becomes vulnerable.
If I were Hegseth I might resign on my own, to avoid any further public humiliation like I experienced this week. You had Democrats, women, Latinos (Salud Carbajal’s contempt for Hegseth was particularly scathing), Black people, and LGBT people, all looking smarter than Hegseth, hour after hour, a tremendous advertisement for the proposition that diversity is our strength, which Whiskey Pete loathes so much.
Over the course of seven hours, the contrast between the prepared members and Hegseth’s evasions dismantled Hegseth’s claims to Christian white male superiority. And that’s before he had no answer to Jason Crow’s question about what distinguishes the US from al Qaeda or ISIS.
All Hegseth had to fall back on were Fox News evasions.
It will never get better for Pete Hegseth.
Whiskey Pete will never catch up on mastery of these facts. Worse still, a masterful Howley euphemism suggests the stress of trying to do so has allowed his demons to take hold again.
Hegseth was different after Signalgate, according to six people in a position to know. He was more prone to anger and less likely to be clean-shaven in the morning.
This is a man who is failing because he came in without qualifications, quickly proved an easy mark for political infighting, and as a result keeps making decisions that threaten greater and greater catastrophe.
Whiskey Pete Hegseth has become a perfect advertisement for the lie of white supremacy. Couching your decisions in some claimed inherent superiority, over and over, doesn’t work in a bureaucracy like the Pentagon.
More importantly, for the same reasons he can’t accept accountability for Signalgate, I don’t know how Hegseth could, emotionally, quit. He can’t do so because Trump would turn on him (which Trump will eventually do anyway). He can’t do so because it would cause permanent psychic damage.
If he admits Mikie Sherrill is right, it will destroy him, because his assumed superiority is the core of his identity.
Escalation is no off-ramp
It turns out, freed from the guidance of adults counseling his decisions, that Trump is discovering he was wrong, over and over. In the weeks before Israel started what could be a catastrophic escalation, Trump was pitching what was basically the JPCOA he had overturned eight years earlier. In light of Israel’s attack, Voice of America ordered all its Farsi workers to return to work, just months after Trump ordered the entire service disbanded.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media told employees placed on administrative leave to immediately return to their roles providing counter-programming to Iranian state media as the conflict between the two nations escalated Friday, according to an email seen by POLITICO and three people familiar with the situation.
“Effective immediately, you are recalled from administrative leave,” said the email from USAGM’s human resources department. “You are expected to report to your duty station immediately.”
There are 75 full time employees within VOA’s Persian wing — the language predominantly spoken in Iran — and it’s believed most, if not all, have now been brought back after being put on administrative leave for three months.
In recent days, Trump discovered that Stephen Miller’s immigration jihad is too costly for powerful lobbying interests, so he is reversing course on part of that, too.
In another immigration gulag failure, Kristi Noem thought a smart way to deal with Newark’s concerns about Delaney Hall’s use as an immigration facility was to arrest Newark’s Mayor. Then they changed their mind and charged Congressman LaMonica McIver, instead. In the very same week they indicted McIver, four people (two accused of burglary, the other two accused of more violent crimes) in Delaney Hall escaped through a “drywall with a mesh interior” wall leading into a parking lot after days of unrest because GEO had repurposed the cafeteria to manage detainee movements and so not fed detainees sufficiently. Admittedly, DHS has not yet admitted that they can’t use this facility, but they certainly substantiated Newark’s concerns about its fitness to hold detainees, some of them dangerous.
The problem is, even as Trump is — with his actions — proving that the experts, Barack Obama, and Kamala Harris were right after all, he cannot admit they were right, because his entire political identity is based on a claim that they’re wrong or (in the case of Black politicians) inferior.
At least in Whiskey Pete Hegseth’s case, being confronted with his incompetence only caused him to double down.
The only sign of this disastrous seven-hour hearing on Whiskey Pete’s Xitter timeline, below his pinned “Never back down” tweet, and now sandwiched among the inaccurate claim he was deploying Marines from Pendleton, an RT of a DOD Rapid Response attack showing his refusal to respond to Pete Aguilar, both a DOD Rapid Response and a Rapid Response 47 celebration of his contempt in response to questions from Ranking Appropriations member Betty McCollum about the LA deployment, eight [!!!] posts from the politicized rally at Fort Bragg (about which, Hegseth would claim in the HASC hearing, not to know DOD had imposed political litmus tests on the attendees), various false claims about Los Angeles, various false claims about US involvement in Iran, and various claims to a recruiting bonanza partly debunked in this WaPo article, the only sign of the seven hours of Whiskey Pete’s life when he was publicly and repeatedly exposed as an incompetent hack was this DOD Rapid Response attack on Sara Jacobs’ questioning of him, edited to focus on Hegseth’s response.
The full exchange is rather instructive.
Jacobs starts by noting that she represents the largest military community in the country and noting it was National Women’s Veterans Day. She sandbagged him, getting him to first reiterate his prior statements hailing the service of women. “With your focus on and emphasis on merit, standards, I wanted to tell you about three incredible women.” She then described the most recent performance evaluation of three women described as exceptional. (She didn’t name them, but they might be Erica Vandal, Emily Shilling, and Kate Cole.)
Jacobs: Given their stellar qualifications and accomplishments, and their record of surpassing standards, I assume that you agree that the Pentagon and the Services should do everything they can to retain women like these, correct?
Hegseth: I would commend the Major, the Aviator, and the Instructor for their service.
Jacobs: Great. I’m glad you agree because I also believe we should be recruiting and retaining the very best and brightest to serve in the military. And yet, you’re actually kicking out these three highly qualified solely because of their identity. These are trans women. And you are using the very same arguments used against desegregating the military or allowing women to serve or allowing gay people to serve. And in all those cases, those arguments were wrong. So I think it’s clear that this is actually not about standards or — I’m quoting you again — “an equal, unwavering, gender-neutral merit-based system,” because if it were you would be keeping these women in. Instead, you’re the one injecting culture wars into the military. And it’s at the detriment of our readiness and national security.
What DOD’s Rapid Response thought made Whiskey Pete look good was where he interrupted Jacobs’ next question, to label these women as, “Men who think they’re women.” Hegseth’s own propagandists had to censor the part where Jacobs described the excellence of trans women that Hegseth has ejected from the military, claiming they pose a threat to national security.
It was just another feeble Fox talking point, one that affirmatively buried the actual facts.
The problem with exposing the inadequacy of someone like Hegseth is the logical response — his suppression of the proof of excellence in favor of his forceful Fox redefinition of what excellence among trans servicemembers really is.
The same thing is happening with his Los Angeles invasion. Not only did Hegseth himself tweet false claims about the extent of the violence in Los Angeles, but as Gavin Newsom’s press team exposed, his Rapid Response account has started posting disinformation — old riot footage — as part of its campaign to support the Los Angeles invasion.
Pete Hegseth’s DOD is disseminating Russian-style disinformation to justify their invasion of Los Angeles (as Newsom’s staff noted, DHS has started doing the same).
Whiskey Pete’s response to being exposed as incompetent, DOD’s response to launching an invasion with no basis, has been the same: To double down on the lies, to double down on the dehumanization.
Sure, Whiskey Pete may soon be gone. Blaming him for the failed birthday party would be the easy way to do it.
But he remains particularly dangerous unless and until then, not least because he has ordered the military to be something they are not, and to do so based on his transparently false claims about what America is.
Because Pete Hegseth cannot admit who he is — and more importantly, what he is not — he is demanding that the men and women who serve under him be something they are not.
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In Jimmy Kimmel’s attack on Trump’s authoritarian interference in California last night, he recalled how, earlier this year, Trump claimed California had so many fires because they don’t sweep its forest floors.
It was a funny dig. Except it is also dead serious.
As laid out in California’s bid for an emergency Temporary Restraining Order filed Tuesday, among the problems with Trump’s federalization of the California National Guard is not just that Trump usurped Gavin Newsom’s authority to command the Guard and incited further unrest.
It also steals resources that California relies on to combat forest fires (and fentanyl trafficking).
Defendants’ unlawful federalization of 4,000 California National Guard members, over the repeated objections of Governor Newsom, diverts necessary state resources. See Eck Dec. ¶ 32 (noting the California Military Department has “has identified and committed 4,600 service members to achieve state specific missions, which is 38% of the available strength”); id. ¶ 33 (“In 2025, there have already been 3,332 services members activated for 89,061 duty days, indicating the state will need every available service member to meet the State’s operational needs.”). Most members of the California National Guard serve in a reserve capacity, meaning they work in civilian roles when not serving as part-time militia forces, often in specialized positions. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 21, 37. As one pertinent example, 2,500 California National Guard members were activated in response to some of the most destructive fires in Los Angeles County that occurred in early January 2025. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 35-36. Likewise, the federalized force includes elements of the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team that serve in Taskforce Rattlesnake, the State’s specialized fire combat unit. Eck Dec. ¶¶ 14, 39-40. The 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team also includes Counterdrug Taskforce members that specialize in providing support to stop the trafficking of fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Id. ¶¶ 15, 42-43. Members of the California National Guard also serve key roles in a variety of functions, from defending the state from cyber threats to conducting emergency traffic control. Id. ¶¶ 44-46. In short, Defendants’ federalization of the California National Guard jeopardizes vital resources on which the State depends to protect itself from emergencies, including the 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team’s specialized fire suppression and drug interdiction teams. Id. ¶¶ 47-50.
In short, Defendants’ unlawful federalization of a significant subset of the California National Guard for 60 days at the expense of state resources jeopardizes the safety and welfare of the state’s citizens on two fronts: first, it removes these servicemembers from their vital roles combating drug trafficking in California’s border zones and fighting wildfires and second, their deployment risks inflaming an unstable and dangerous situation of Defendants’ own making, putting property and countless lives at unnecessary risk. See id. ¶¶ 13-16. [emphasis original]
The Deputy General Counsel in California’s Military Department, Paul Eck, described the specialized roles the Guard plays in combatting fires in a declaration accompanying the TRO request. There are 14 Task Force Rattlesnake crews that focus full-time on wildfire prevention (the kind of mitigation Trump demanded in January) and response.
38. For example, the California National Guard operates FireGuard, a wildfire satellite detection mission. During the last 18 months, FireGuard activated at least fire Emergency State Active-Duty Force Packages, consisting of 360 personnel total, in support of the Bridge Fire, Line Fire, and Park Fire in California. One hundred-forty additional Emergency State Active-Duty Military Police Soldiers were also activated to operate and augment Traffic Control Points at the Line Fire and Bridge Fire.
39. The California National Guard also operates Joint Task Force Rattlesnake, a joint taskforce with CalFire to mitigate and prevent fires through fuels mitigation projects and direct fire suppression. Task Force Rattlesnake provides 14 full-time, year-round Type I Hand Crews to reduce fuels and respond to fire incidents and other emergencies across the State. Each Task Force Rattlesnake crewmember is trained to Firefighter 1C standards, which require at least 540 hours of training. Each of California’s 14 Crews are staffed with a minimum of 22 California National Guard personnel and maintain a minimum of 22 Firefighter 1C trained crewmembers (308 personnel in total).
40. Over the past 18 months, Task Force Rattlesnake responded to at least 738 wildland firefighting response missions, covering 10,243 acres of land. [my emphasis]
Best as I can tell, those filings were submitted around 11AM on Tuesday.
Having predicted that Trump’s usurpation of control over California’s National Guard might deprive the state other other emergency response resources on Tuesday, yesterday at 9AM (my screen cap is Irish time, so ET+5 and PT+8), Newsom pointed to the way Trump’s federalization of the Guard has depleted those dedicated fire response Guardsmen.
Trump’s bozo-the-clown response to the TRO request (which forgot to include its Table of Authorities and cited a Fox News story that misrepresents when Newsom and Trump spoke, all the while hiding that Trump can’t even remember when that happened) mentions fires or fireworks nine times — claiming at one point that protestors “lit fires in dumpsters and trans bins,” whatever “trans bins” are. (Whatever they are, they don’t seem like the kind of federal property to which Whiskey Pete Hegseth can assign Guardsmen and Marines.)
But Trump’s response doesn’t address how he’ll undermine efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking and wildfires. Trump’s response doesn’t address how his actions will make California less safe.
In January, Trump lectured California about preventing fires; then he manufactured an emergency to steal the personnel who perform that role.
In January, Trump declared emergencies because (he claims) Mexico, Canada, and China aren’t doing enough to combat fentanyl trafficking. Then he manufactured a different emergency via which he stole some of the personnel California uses to respond to that threat.
Even on Trump’s own terms, Trump is making California less safe.
Update: Paul Eck filed an updated declaration to accompany the state’s reply. He describes over half of the specialized firefighting members.
6. Task Force Rattlesnake, California’s highly trained fire mitigation and ‘ prevention and direct fire suppression unit, lost 190 out of its total 340 members to the Title 10 federal activation. A reduction of 55.88% of California National Guard’s fire prevention and fighting force.
7. The negative impacts of the reduction in force to Task Force Rattlesnake are imminent.
8. Prior to the Title 10 Federal activation of California National Guard forces, Task Force Rattlesnake (Rattlesnake) maintained Fourteen (14) Type 1 Wildfire Handcrews. Post the mobilization, Rattlesnake has been whittled down to Nine (9) Type 1 crews.
9. The reduction in the number of Rattlesnake Type 1 crews has limited the CMD’s, and consequently Cal Fire’s, ability to conduct ground fuels reduction missions, and more importantly, it has negatively impacted CMD’s ability to respond to wildfires.
10. The consequences may be felt soon. As of June 11 there are 13 fires over 10 acres burning in California, including the Ranch Fire in San Bernardino which has consumed over 4,200 acres. If it continues to grow at its current rate of spread, it would necessitate the use of Rattlesnake. [emphasis mine]
He also described that 31% of CA’s drug interdiction team has been affected.
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Back when Whiskey Pete Hegseth had trusted advisors by his side, he launched an ill-considered escalation against the Houthis based on Stephen Miller’s vibes about Trump’s views. He shared probably-classified details, in advance, about the attack on Signal. According to WSJ, he “drew resources from efforts in Asia to deter China and pushed back maintenance schedules for carriers.” And, after several months and two F/A-18s later, he packed up, having achieved nothing, and went home.
Since then, he fired those trusted advisors. According to the Guardian, the process that led to their firing appears to have been driven by rumor spread by a guy taking them out.
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.
[snip]
In particular, one Trump adviser recently told Hegseth that he did not think Caldwell – or any of the fired aides – had leaked anything, and that he suspected the investigation had been used to get rid of aides involved in the infighting with his first chief of staff, Joe Kasper.
[snip]
Still, the Trump advisers who reeled from the claim also eventually told Hegseth they were concerned by the optics of Parlatore, who had been close to the former chief of staff Kasper, running an investigation that targeted Kasper’s perceived enemies in the office.
Curiously, Guardian’s Hugo Lowell neglects to mention that Tim Parlatore was a Trump defense attorney — indeed, he vouched that Trump wasn’t hoarding any more classified documents — until he blabbed his mouth one day.
So that was then: Hegseth took action. Bungled that action. Fired the competent people around him.
This is now: Donald Trump just gave Whiskey Pete open-ended authority to attack US cities, in the name of protecting ICE deployments.
I hereby call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. 12406 to temporarily protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations. Further, I direct and delegate actions as necessary for the Secretary of Defense to coordinate with the Governors of the States and the National Guard Bureau in identifying and ordering into Federal service the appropriate members and units of the National Guard under this authority. The members and units of the National Guard called into Federal service shall be at least 2,000 National Guard personnel and the duration of duty shall be for 60 days or at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense. In addition, the Secretary of Defense may employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion.
After usurping control of the California National Guard, Hegseth is also prepping a Marine deployment, just in case.
Oh, and he’s also engaged in a whole bunch of dick-wagging on Xitter, on his personal account (he hasn’t posted on his official account since Friday, making me wonder whether he lost the password or the password holder to that account).
Again, he’s doing all that without the kind of trusted advisors he had when he bolloxed the Yemen attack.
In fact, NBC describes that as he is directing an attack on a US city, the White House is attempting, but failing, to find him some babysitters.
The White House is looking for a new chief of staff and several senior advisers to support Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after a series of missteps that have shaken confidence in his leadership, but it has so far found no suitable takers, according to four current and former administration officials and a Republican congressional aide.
Top Defense Department jobs, including the defense secretary’s chief of staff, are normally considered prestigious and typically attract multiple qualified candidates. But at least three people have already turned down potential roles under Hegseth, according to a former U.S. official, the defense official and a person familiar with the matter.
[snip]
Vance and Wiles have been searching for candidates who could support Hegseth ever since, according to three current U.S. officials and a former U.S. official. So far, though, the administration has not had much luck identifying people who are either willing to work for Hegseth or who fit the bill politically. And the White House has rejected some people Hegseth wants to hire, while Hegseth has rejected some of the White House’s candidates.
He is failing to do the day job — like completing a budget (though Kash Patel also failed to get his budget done on time) — of the Secretary of Defense and is primarily supported by an aide the White House doesn’t trust.
Hegseth now leans heavily on a former military aide, Ricky Buria, who retired from the military in April hoping he could serve as Hegseth’s chief of staff, a civilian position. But White House and Pentagon officials view Buria as a political novice who had reportedly been critical of Trump and Vance in private. (A Defense Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment from Buria.)
As a result, White House officials rejected Hegseth’s plan to hire Buria as his chief of staff, one of the defense officials and an administration official said. Despite that, Buria was seen with Hegseth during his recent trip to Asia in a workout video posted on social media.
[snip]
The infighting helped delay plans for “Golden Dome,” Trump’s signature missile defense program to defend the U.S. homeland, officials said. It has also contributed to the lack of a Pentagon budget, which raised frustrations among Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom supported Hegseth in his tight confirmation battle.
We’re getting closer and closer to the moment when the White House will have to admit what we all told it, back in January: Whiskey Pete is manifestly unfit for his job. He has neither the temperament nor the experience to do this job.
And at the moment, he doesn’t even have the aides — the White House, after several months of trying, can’t find him those aides — that, he said during his confirmation hearing, would help compensate for his lack of relevant experience.
And that’s the guy that Trump just put in charge of usurping California’s National Guard and — possibly — leading a Marine invasion of Los Angeles?
The guy behind the claim that NSA intercepts showed Hegseth’s reliable aides were the leakers was someone Elon implanted via DOGE at DOD. And no one cared that Forbes caught him doctoring his resume.
The adviser, Justin Fulcher, suggested to Hegseth’s then chief of staff Joe Kasper and Hegseth’s personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, that he knew of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified the leakers.
Fulcher offered to share the supposed evidence as long as he could help run the investigation, three of the people said. But when he sat down with agents over a week later, it became clear he had no evidence of a wiretap, and the Pentagon had been duped.
The problem was that before investigators debunked the claims by Fulcher, who was previously found to have embellished his resume, the damage was done: Trump advisers had been told by Parlatore about “smoking gun” evidence incriminating three aides, and Hegseth had already fired them.
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