Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced backlash Monday after announcing a new task force to hunt and prosecute "leakers," drawing an immediate rebuke from CNN anchor Jake Tapper.
Hegseth posted a video to X Monday morning announcing that the Pentagon and the Justice Department had created a joint task force to identify and prosecute anyone who leaks sensitive military information.
"Some call them whistleblowers," Tapper fired back. "When they're alerting the public to government lies and malfeasance, for instance."
"To leak sensitive national defense information and secrets betrays the men and women who wear our nation's uniform," Hegseth said in the video. "Those who betray that trust will be met with the full force of the law."
In a second post, Tapper linked to the Pentagon's own inspector general report on Hegseth's use of Signal, a commercial messaging app. "I know of one leak that put our brave pilots at risk!" Tapper wrote.
That report, released in December 2025, found that Hegseth had shared sensitive strike details — including the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory — on an unsecured app hours before those pilots launched their mission over Yemen. The Pentagon watchdog concluded Hegseth "did not comply" with department policy. The journalist who received the information had been inadvertently added to the chat by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
"Not as dangerous as installing an angry adolescent at the Pentagon to play 'Secretary of War' and botch an armed conflict in the Middle East," former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood wrote on X, also pushing back against Hegseth's announcement.
Monday's crackdown was not Hegseth's first. In April 2025, as the Signal scandal swirled and his own conduct was under investigation, Hegseth suspended three senior Pentagon officials he accused of leaking — then went on Fox News to declare: "Once a leaker, always a leaker, often a leaker."
"Accountability starts at the top," Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) told The Intercept at the time. "Secretary Hegseth has refused to take responsibility for his own mishandling of classified information, but has readily punished others for far less."
