What should we Americans do when it comes out that our Secretary of Defense has been committing crimes in plain sight and nobody in the administration seems concerned about it?
Back in 2008, New York Times reporter David Barstow revealed that the Pentagon under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starting in the fall of 2002, had recruited dozens of retired military officers to go on TV as if they were independent military analysts.
They were paid to push the Bush administration’s propaganda about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and other lies to build support for the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the president and vice president had lied us into.
The hired guns got their talking points from the Pentagon, and internal documents called them “message force multipliers.” One participant later described it as “psyops on steroids.” Barstow disclosed how this was pure propaganda, noting:
“[M]embers of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.”
Those unnecessary and illegal wars cost America the lives of about 7,000 troops and 7,600 contractors, led more than 30,000 service members and veterans of those conflicts to later commit suicide, 52,000+ wounded for life, and added roughly $5 trillion to our national debt with an estimated $2 trillion in veterans care and interest still to be paid.
Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for his work and Congress — responding to widespread horror among the public that America would start targeting the civilian and voting population with propaganda the same way Hitler routinely did in the 1930s and Putin does daily in Russia — passed 10 U.S.C. 2241a, which says simply:
“Funds available to the Department of Defense may not be obligated or expended for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not otherwise specifically authorized by law.”
Ever since, every Pentagon appropriation has carried a similar restriction known as Section 8001, following a similar prohibition passed 74 years ago as the Federal Labor-Security Act of 1952, which says:
“No part of any appropriation . . . shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”
Propagandizing the American people has been a crime for more years than Hegseth has been alive: there shouldn’t be any doubt that our government using our tax dollars to target us with psyops is illegal. But don’t bother telling that to Whiskey Pete. He apparently doesn’t care.
This past Sunday, Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp revealed in The Washington Post (Pentagon Secretly Installs Military Influencers in Civilian Roles) that Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has been quietly moving several conservative military veterans with large online followings into government roles, all while refusing to answer any questions about what they actually do.
What we do know is that most have been using their public personas to push stories favorable to Pete and Trump and to trash-talk opponents of this administration’s policies.
Just like another influencer, this one a deaf Utah housewife with nearly a million followers on social media and, until June, an accredited Pentagon reporter. Since July, though, she’s been a “special government employee” at the Department of Defense, something that she didn’t bother to disclose to her audience when she started the DSA Explorer, an interactive map of Americans she claims are associated with the antiwar Democratic Socialists of America.
The Pentagon refuses to explain what she does for it or which office she runs this McCarthy-esque operation out of; she claims it’s a private project.
It brings to mind Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who said in Congress in 1948, as he tried to “restate the existing prohibitions on domestic dissemination” of American-produced propaganda designed to hit Russia:
“By law, the USIA cannot engage in domestic propaganda. This distinguishes us, as a free society, from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity. … The American taxpayer certainly does not need or want his tax dollars used to support U.S. Government propaganda directed at him or her.”
If authorizing and paying for all of this with our tax dollars is a crime, it doesn’t seem to bother Whiskey Pete. Of course, he’s never been all that concerned with following the law.
It’s also a crime in both American and international law to murder survivors of a shipwreck, even if you caused it in a war, but that didn’t stop Pete from ordering a double-tap on one of the boats he was targeting in the Caribbean.
Law professors told TIME magazine that intentionally killing a shipwrecked person is a war crime, and that absent an actual armed conflict it’s simply criminal murder, punishable by life in prison. Congress asked for the video of the killing and the written orders but, 15 months later, neither Congress nor the American public have seen either one.
Or the killings of the unnamed and unidentified men piloting small boats who have never been charged with a crime or faced any sort of due process.
Or the Signal affair, where the Pentagon’s inspector general (before being demoted) concluded that Hegseth illegally transmitted the number and strike times of manned American aircraft over hostile territory through a commercial app on his personal phone hours before those aircraft flew.
Pete declined to be interviewed, never turned over the phone, and some of the messages had auto-deleted before anyone could capture them.
When the Bush administration secretly paid Armstrong Williams to push No Child Left Behind, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) ruled that Bush’s Education Department had violated Congress’ multiple prohibitions on government-funded propaganda directed at American citizens.
They also ruled that by spending money Congress hadn’t specifically authorized, the Bush administration had violated the Antideficiency Act, 31 U.S.C. 1350, a class E felony which carries two years in prison for the people who break it and goes back to 1905. (Bush declined to have his Attorney General prosecute his Secretary of Education.)
And here is Whiskey Pete doing it all over again.
Back in 2018, when a federal grand jury determined that Putin’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg had built fake American social media profiles to influence American public opinion in favor of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, they criminally indicted 13 Russians and three Russian companies. Although they didn’t have Pentagon email addresses, they were doing essentially the same thing on behalf of Trump that these retired military officers are accused of.
It appears that history is repeating itself, although this time it’s Hegseth doing it instead of Putin.
Odds are close to impossible that Trump will have Todd Blanche indict Pete for these crimes, any more than Bush was willing to indict his Education Secretary Rod Paige over the Armstrong Williams crime. But there are other options.
— Any member of Congress can request the GAO to investigate and issue a formal legal decision on whether any of these arrangements violate Section 2241a and Section 8001.
— The Defense Department’s inspector general can be made to produce for Congress the appointment memoranda, position descriptions, ethics opinions, timekeeping records, and compensation for every “special government employee” and “highly qualified expert” hired into Hegseth’s office since January 2025.
— There’s also the Office of Special Counsel, which can take Hatch Act complaints about federal employees engaged in partisan political activity.
— And then there’s impeachment. A Cabinet secretary is a civil officer of the United States under Article II, Section 4 and thus vulnerable to impeachment and removal from office. While rare — only Ulysses Grant’s Secretary of War, William Balknap, has been impeached (in 1876) for corruptly using his office — it’s still an option should Democrats take over Congress come January.
And, in fact, there are already two articles of impeachment that have been dropped in the House against Whiskey Pete.
Shri Thanedar filed H.Res. 935 in December over the campaign of lethal strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and Yassamin Ansari led 14 members in filing H.Res. 1177 in April, containing six articles covering the “unauthorized war against Iran,” “violations of the law of armed conflict and the targeting of civilians,” “the reckless handling of sensitive military information,” “obstruction of congressional oversight,” and “conduct bringing disrepute upon the armed forces.”
Impeachment doesn’t have to be just about getting a conviction and removal from office. Even if it never makes it to the Senate, the process in the House forces evidence into the permanent public record under oath, and establishes for history that a crime was committed, even if it was never punished.
Both impeachment resolutions are sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, where congressional Republicans are trying to pretend they don’t exist.
Meanwhile, Hegseth appears to be exploring a run for president. Talk about deluded! And this week, Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, resigned, apparently because he is disgusted with Hegseth’s lack of competence and management skills.
So call your representative and your two senators at 202-224-3121 and politely ask them to request a formal GAO legal opinion on whether the Pentagon’s undisclosed influencer payroll violates 10 U.S.C. 2241a and triggers the Antideficiency Act.
Tell them you want the Pentagon’s inspector general to force production of appointment and compensation records for every special government employee in the Secretary’s office, and the Senior Service College Task Force report released, and a Hatch Act referral to the Office of Special Counsel.
And if your representative isn’t already a cosponsor of impeachment resolution H.Res. 1177, ask why not.
Then double-check your voter registration, and if this information was useful to you, share it, forward it, post it, and subscribe at hartmannreport.com so we can keep doing this work. Democracy isn’t a spectator sport, and it never was.