A veteran Pentagon reporter can't recall a more chaotic environment within the upper echelons of U.S. military leadership as leaks spill out about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The defense department's former chief spokesman John Ullyot Sunday warned that a month of "total chaos" had left Pentagon leadership "near collapse," and New York Times reporter Greg Jaffe told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" about his new article revealing that Hegseth had been involved in a second group chat to discuss confidential military operations with questionable individuals.
"The chat, as you noted, included his wife, his brother, his personal attorney, and most of his inner circle, which has been in a state of tumult these last couple of weeks," Jaffe said. "I think it's worth noting, it's a very inexperienced inner circle, and he's a very inexperienced secretary, so it's a group of people who hadn't been used to operating at this level of government, and I think that's the other kind of key point here.
"He doesn't have a lot of experience, and he's surrounded himself with people who also kind of lack experience."
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The Atlantic's Jeffery Goldberg had previously revealed that he had been mistakenly added to a Signal chat in which Hegseth revealed top-secret plans for a Yemen bombing raid, and Jaffe and his colleagues revealed a separate chat involving his family members about the same topic – which Ullyot warned was just the tip of the iceberg.
"It's really unlike anything I've seen in the kind of 20 years that I've been following the building," Jaffe said. "To have the secretary's inner circle kind of turn on each other this way, that's really, really unprecedented, and as far as I can tell, it's the infighting is not really over policy or anything like that.
"It's just kind of, it's I think, who has the secretary's ear, how meetings should be run. It's just a really, really chaotic environment, and you get the sense that there's just a lack of process around the secretary in terms of just how to run the office on a day-to-day basis, just basic function is not happening."
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