Day: May 31, 2025

HEGSETH LEAKS, KEYSTONE COPS EDITION: The White House isn’t happy with a Pentagon leak investigation after an advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed an aide had been outed by a National Security Agency wiretap. Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Hegseth, was initially blamed for the leak of an allegedly Top Secret document to a reporter that outlined options for the U.S. military to retake the Panama Canal. (Caldwell and two other senior aides were fired in a purge last month.) According to The Guardian, Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s attorney and adviser who was overseeing the leak investigation, suggested that there had been a warrantless wiretap on Caldwell’s phone, a claim that alarmed White House aides because it would almost certainly have been illegal and a much bigger scandal than the leak. But White House aides later found the claim wasn’t valid and concluded that Parlatore fed them dubious information. The lawyer then denied having told anyone about an illegal NSA wiretap himself and maintained that any information he had was passed on to him by others at the Pentagon.

Phew. 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.

RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA: A freshly declassified FBI document purports to show that Nellie Ohr, a researcher for Fusion GPS, the Washington, D.C.-based research firm funded by the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign to investigate candidate Donald Trump’s connections with Russians, lied to Congress about her private communication with her Justice Department spouse without facing consequences. That’s according to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who obtained the document.

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