Maine Writer

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My blogs are dedicated to the issues I care about. Thank you to all who take the time to read something I've written.

Monday, June 30, 2025

Donald Trump and the MAGA Republican administration is using evil ICE terror tactics to separate innocent immigrant families.

ICE deported my husband. Our everything is gone, and we are unraveling.😢

This is not just an immigration issue. This is an issue of basic humanity. It is the brutal unraveling of a family.
Daniel Flores-Martinez and Kenia Guerrero, a US citizen, have three children, including a 12-year-old daughter with multiple disabilities.Kenia Guerrero

"Daniel’s deportation has devastated us. Lawyers for Civil Rights is providing us with free legal support, and La Colaborativa is helping us with vital community support during this crisis."

Echo opinion article by Kenia Guerrero published in the Boston Globe: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/30/opinion/ice-husband-deported-children-disability/?event=e

Kenia Guerrero is co-owner of a painting business in Chelsea.

On Mother’s Day, May 11, my life fell apart. What should have been a day to celebrate family unity culminated in family separation at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chelsea.

That morning, my husband, Daniel Flores-Martinez, noticed suspicious cars parked down the street from our home, but we continued our daily activities. We prepared ourselves to head to church. My husband helped our three children get into the car, including our 12-year-old daughter, who lives with multiple disabilities. A few minutes after driving away, we saw flashing lights behind us. I pulled over.


Suddenly, the suspicious cars my husband had seen surrounded us. Masked, armed officers swarmed our vehicle from both sides. One of them asked for my identification, but he was clearly interested in my husband, not me. He insisted on knowing who my husband was.

I know my rights as a US citizen, and as the driver, I asked why they wanted to know about a passenger. I asked who they were and why our car had been stopped. But I received no answers. Within moments, one of the officers raised what looked like a weapon and used it to tap the glass of the passenger window, suddenly threatening to break it. I begged them not to use violence because my children were in the back seat.


Without any regard for our safety, they smashed the passenger-side window.

Glass shards flew into the car, even into the back seat, where our children were sitting. They screamed. We were all terrified. Within seconds, ICE officers physically reached inside the vehicle through the shattered window and unlocked the front passenger door. Then the officers opened the door and unbuckled Daniel’s seat belt. They forcefully yanked him out of the car. They slammed him face down onto the sidewalk, their knees pressed into his back, even though he never resisted. A bystander captured it all on video.


I ran out to see what was happening, but an officer restrained me. I pleaded with her, saying, “Aren’t you a mother?” But the officers did not stop. My children sobbed as the officers arrested Daniel, taking him away. No one ever told us who they were. No one showed a warrant. And just like that, Daniel was gone.

Now he has been deported. And we are left behind.

Daniel, an undocumented immigrant, was deported to Matamoros, Mexico — even though he has no ties there.

Daniel is a loving father and a devoted husband, and he helps run our small family painting business. He is the backbone of our home, community, and church. His sudden and violent removal has left our family in crisis — medically, emotionally, and economically.

Our daughter is disabled. She lives with epilepsy, hydrocephalus, and cerebral palsy. These conditions require constant medical care and hands-on support. She cannot dress or bathe without assistance. Daniel provided all this care unassumingly, with love and diligence, every single day.

Since he was taken, our daughter’s condition has worsened. Her mental health has deteriorated. She lacks motivation to attend school and has a hard time focusing in class. How can anyone blame her? Her father is gone.


I am doing my best, but I am now the sole caregiver to our children — our daughter and two sons, ages 14 and 3— and I am struggling.

Daniel’s deportation has devastated us. Lawyers for Civil Rights is providing us with free legal support, and La Colaborativa is helping us with vital community support during this crisis.

Our youngest son refuses to ride in the car, haunted by the memory of what happened. Our teenager has withdrawn from school and friends. We’ve lost our only source of income: The painting business Daniel and I built together. I cannot sleep. I cannot afford to keep up with our daughter’s care. I am holding everything together by a thread. Why would the government separate our family?

Because Daniel was undocumented, he was detained at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I. We begged ICE to let us have one year to transition our daughter’s complex medical care from Boston Medical Center to cerebral palsy specialists in Mexico. Daniel committed to self-deportation at the end of that period. He asked only to stay long enough to ensure that our daughter’s care would not be interrupted in ways that could trigger further harm to her health, including seizures.

At every turn, we were ignored. No one listened to our plea, despite extensive medical evidence. No one considered the trauma to our children. No one thought about the danger to a disabled child who now must be medically relocated to Mexico as our family plans to reunite with Daniel.

Daniel posed no threat. He was not a flight risk. He had lived peacefully in our community for years. He was our provider. Our caregiver. Our everything.


Now he is gone. And we are unraveling.

This is not just an immigration issue. This is an issue of basic humanity. It is the brutal unraveling of a family. It is the abandonment of a disabled child. It is the erasure of the care, love, and labor that immigrant fathers like Daniel give every day — unseen, unrecognized, and, now, violently taken.

We are still here. We are still trying to survive.

Please remember Daniel Flores-Martinez’s name. And please remember what the Donald Trump Republican government has done to our family.



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Donald Trump and MAGA extremist Republicans are afraid of the No Kings peaceful demonstrataions

The political left- progressives with Democrats and Independents, are not promoting political violence, an echo opinion letter published in the Houston Chronicle:

I proudly attended the “No Kings” protest in downtown Houston with over 15,000 other folks. Not one of the signs I saw at the protest featured the type of violence.

There were many clever signs. One of the best I saw was one that said, "I've seen better Cabinet picks at Ikea!", referring to Donald Trump's clown car cabinet, including the former Fox (Fake) News fill in on the weekends, Pete Hegseth and the grossly incompetent RFKjr.

Many of us truly believe, with sound reason, that Donald Trump is a bully, a sexual predator, a convicted felon, abusing the office for financial gain through conflicts of interest and a threat to democracy. Fortunately, he is still only a wannabe dictator.

Republicans that misrepresent the No Kings and other peaceful protest rallies as (fake news) inciting violence are cowards, fearful about the power of the people.  Instead, Republicans must look at their own party to see who is promoting political violence

In summary, "The right , led by cult leader Donald Trump, with MAGA and right wing Republicans, must stop their rhetoric of spewing hate."  When Republicans wrongly accuse peaceful protestors with " inciting violence", it just shows how insecure they are when faced with the "power of the people".

From Kevin Grice, in Houston, Texas

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Sunday, June 29, 2025

Everything Donald Trump touches is a bust. He makes everything about himself!

Everything Donald Trump gets involved in is a bust for the American people- It's always all about him

Echo opinion letter published in the Milwaukee Journal

Reporters and headline writers, and the entire USA Today Network, are feeding Donald Trump's narcissistic ego and doing our nation a great disservice when referencing what happened in Washington on June 14, as "Donald Trump's parade." "Wisconsin Republicans cheer Trump's military parade but do not plan to attend" June 12.



The U.S. Army has been planning a celebration of its 250th anniversary for years, under more than one president.

In fact, the anniversary dates from the Continental Congress authorizing an army for the United States of America as a whole. True, Trump has been trying to make it "All About Me" as he does just about anything happening in the world.

But, by calling it "Donald Trump's parade" you are ceding the ground, aiding and abetting his well known narcissism.

Next you will be making it impossible to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence without making that "Trump's declaration."

The better approach is to report on the 250 anniversary of the army of the United States, and leave Trump entirely out of the story, except perhaps for brief mention that he was there to watch.

Also note that the 250th anniversary of American independence is an eight year rolling celebration which has been notably absent from most press coverage, with rather limited official observance.

A few towns in Massachusetts celebrated the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, but hardly anyone anywhere else did, including in Washington, D.C.

This is our celebration of the origins of our common country and all the contributions people of every race, creed, color and national origin made to bring it about.

And yes, there were Americans of African descent among the Minute Men, there were Irish Catholics willing to rise against the British Empire, there were Jews devoting their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause, and there were Oneida, Stockbridge, Tuscarora, among other nations playing vital roles throughout the war. Also there were women serving in the army, although they had to do so under disguise.

From Charlie Rosenberg, in Milwaukee

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Saturday, June 28, 2025

Paying taxes cannot be cost shifted to middle class working people. Billionaires and Donald Trump must pay their fair share

Echo opinion letter published in the Tama-Toledo News Chronicle:

I am a proud American, and there was a time when I felt an even deeper pride in our country. Like many people, I didn’t always appreciate paying taxes — especially when the difference between gross and net pay is so noticeable. But as I matured, I came to understand the critical importance of the essential services our taxes fund.
"Hands Off" peaceful protestors 
As a student, I received a solid education at a public school where I was taught civics and the role taxes play in keeping our government running. I spent most of my career as a registered nurse caring for veterans — men and women who served this country honorably. The funding that supported my work came largely from taxpayer dollars through Medicare, Medicaid, and VA benefits. I also benefited personally from Pell Grants and scholarships that helped me pursue my education. I am deeply grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to serve, contribute, and live a meaningful, productive life.

Of course, no system is perfect. I support reforms that make our government more efficient and responsive. Continuous improvement should be a shared goal, regardless of political affiliation.

What I cannot support is the glorification of those who manipulate the system to avoid paying their fair share — particularly individuals like Donald Trump, who proudly claims it’s “smart” to avoid taxes. That mindset is not patriotic. It’s not leadership. It’s self-serving. Trump was born into wealth and has repeatedly demonstrated a disregard for the responsibilities that come with privilege. His behavior does not reflect the values of hard work, sacrifice, and shared duty that truly make America great.

We need leaders who invest in this country, not just themselves.

We deserve better and should remember to "pay it forward", for the benefit of future generations.

From Kelli McCreary in Toledo, the Tama-Toledo News Chronicle, in Iowa

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an idiot who has no prescription for disease prevention in an age when vaccines have saved lives for nearly 200 years

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has zero health care experience other than the myths he invents in his worm infested brain.  In my opinion, Americans should declare him to be a public health danger!
Echo opinion letters published in the Boston Globe:
"Does RFK Jr. have a prescription (Rx) for the times we live in?

In fact George Washington ordered the inoculation of the Continental Army against smallpox during the Revolutionary War. This decision, made in 1777, was a bold and controversial, but widely credited with helping the Americans win the war by preventing the devastating effects of a smallpox epidemic on their troops.

So, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if I eat my veggies and avoid stress, I will not need a vaccine from Moderna or any other drug maker to fight any new bird flu mutations."

Eat right, get exercise … tell that to the Mayans

Five hundred years ago, a thriving Aztec civilization of 16 million people in Mexico was devastated within a short time by Hernán Cortés and his 500 men from Spain. A primary cause was smallpox, a virus unknown to the Aztecs. Similarly, the Mayan and Incan civilizations were also felled by epidemics of foreign diseases such as smallpox, measles, and mumps.

Europeans also brought their diseases to what is now the United States, including reportedly deliberately infecting Indigenous people, with the same devastating results.

World history would have been very different if only these people in the Americas had eaten the right foods, exercised sufficiently, and promoted better sanitation practices.

From Marilyn Levin in Arlington (Boston) Massachusetts

Does RFK Jr. have a prescription (Rx) for the times we live in?

So, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., if I eat my veggies and avoid stress, I will not need a vaccine from Moderna or any other drugmaker to fight any new bird flu mutations. Regular exercise, three salads a day, and abstinence from exposure to news of atrocities from the Trump administration should keep me and my octogenarian friends in good health? Sorry, I’m not buying that bridge.

From Rosemary Jones in Jamaica Plain Massachusetts


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Friday, June 27, 2025

Donald Trump continues to spew dishonesty. Trump's litany of lies are dangerous to our nation and the world

Dear Editor of the East Aurora Advertiser, in New York:

“That Is So Donald Trump”—a (rhetorical) phrase that now serves as a grim shorthand for deception, chaos and the corrosion of democratic norms.  Too many people are acquiescing to Trump's deliberate cruelties.
Donald Trump doesn’t just lie—he industrialized lying. From the size of his inauguration crowd to the Big Lie about the 2020, election, he built a political career on a foundation of falsehoods. And too many Americans came to accept that dishonesty was just part of the deal. That’s what’s so dangerous: the normalization of behavior that once would have disqualified anyone from public office.

“That is so Donald Trump” also means self-enrichment at the public’s expense. He turned the presidency into a family business, funneled taxpayer dollars into his private clubs and used the power of the office not to serve the nation, but to serve himself. The line between state and personal gain was not blurred—it was erased.

And in the process, he wages war on the very institutions that uphold our democracy: the courts, the press, the intelligence community, even the peaceful transfer of power. He has shown nothing but contempt for accountability, civility and truth.

So, when people say “That is so Donald Trump,” let’s be clear about what that really means: manipulation, exploitation and an unrelenting assault on the principles that make this country worth fighting for.

We cannot allow this to become the American standard. We should demand better—from our leaders, and from ourselves.

From Geoffrey K Hintz in East Aurora

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Thursday, June 26, 2025

Maine medical providers and citizens request Senator Susan Collins to stop cuts to Medicaid

To anyone who reads this blog, please listen to me....all Republicans have people in their families who have used the Medicaid benefit including Senator Susan Collins.  In other words, Republicans use the Medicaid benefit as much as any other qualified group.  



I have signed on with the Homecare Advocates of Maine (HAME) to ask Senator Susan Collins to oppose cuts to the Medicaid program proposed in the Trump budget bill. Republicans want to use cuts to Medicaid to offset tax cuts planned for billionaires.  In fact, Republicans know the passage of this bill will destroy their Congressional majorities in the 2026, mid year election but it does not matter, because they also know how, even a Democratic majority, will never reverse the tax cuts, after they are passed. 

Main stream media must ask Republicans about who among them have had family members who received Medicaid benefits.  Be sure to ask former Maine Governor Paul LePage the question because he will be forthcoming, as a Republican, he will admit how many of the 11 children who were in his family have been Medicaid beneficiaries. Makes no sense for hypocritical Republicans to cut Medicaid when so many Americans  need it and hospitals provide care using this federal and state funded benefit.

Senator Susan Collins sign on letter from Healthcare Advocates for Maine:

Dear Senator Collins,
 
We are members of the inter professional healthcare advocacy organization Healthcare Advocates for Maine (HAME), formerly known as Maine Providers Standing Up for Healthcare. Our members represent the diversity of our state: we have members from every healthcare discipline, across all levels of training, and from all our counties. We work in mental health, primary care, specialty care, law, and more. What unites us all is our passion for healthcare and protecting our patients.
 
That is why we must speak out against current plans to gut Medicaid across the country. Most Medicaid funding in Maine comes from the federal government. Any cuts to that funding will devastate healthcare in Maine. Almost 400,000 Mainers rely on Medicaid for their healthcare, 20% of our total population! And on top of that, about ¾ of Medicaid recipients are currently working. The proposed work reporting system would eliminate rural workers without internet access. It would punish seasonal workers and those who work for small businesses with irregular schedules - many of our citizens who cannot otherwise afford healthcare. If the political push for work requirements is impossible to resist, please consider implementing work requirements that help people get work – such as was done in Montana
 
Any cuts to Medicaid will hurt our state. Medicaid covers primary care, preventive services (like colonoscopies and mammograms), maternal health (like labor and delivery), and mental health. Medicaid funds rural and community clinics to ensure they stay open even with increasing needs and demands for healthcare across the state.  These cuts would definitely threaten the financial stability and existence of our rural hospitals.
 
We are not exaggerating when we say, as hundreds of health professionals across the state, decreasing funding for Medicaid in Maine, or making it more difficult to access, will kill our patients and community members. They rely on these services. 
 
Senator Collins, we urge you to protect Medicaid. Our organization was founded in 2017 to advocate for healthcare; our members met with you in your office in 2017 to advocate for healthcare protections and to protect the affordable care act. We implore you again to protect the people of this state. Oppose any restrictions applied to Medicaid, like work requirements, that will put health insurance and healthcare further out of reach for our patients and families.  

You must not let these cuts hurt Mainers.
 
Sincerely,  Healthcare Advocates for Maine
 

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Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Donald Trump Republicans cannot prove damage caused by the bunker busting attack on Iran without evidence

 Will Trump's Bombing Raid on Iran Prove Not Just a Bust, But a Disaster?

A longtime military and intelligence insider explains why the failure to destroy Iran’s nuclear bunkers may have weakened U.S. power far beyond the Middle East. Published in the Washington Montly Newsletter, by Paul Glastris.
Where is the Iranian enriched uranium?

Yesterday, June 24, CNN broke the news (an exclusive reportt) about a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) preliminary report showing that the Iranian nuclear programs at underground facilities targeted by U.S. airstrikes over the weekend were not “completely and fully obliterated,” as Donald Trump claimed, but instead were likely set back a matter of months. 

To get a better sense of that report and what it means, Paul Glastris spoke with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. military and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following is an edited version of our conversation:

Are you surprised that this DIA report was leaked?  Not at all. The results would be of high interest. Hundreds of folks at least would be on the distribution list or have access to the report.

How reliable is this report?  Time will tell. But, the DIA is the key intelligence agency that does these kinds of after-action damage assessments. That’s their traditional role and they’re very good at it. Their assessments are typically based on a combination of imagery, signals intelligence largely provided by the NSA, and human intelligence that comes from the CIA, the Israelis, and other sources. The DIA would have pulled these strings together to come up with their assessment of the damage. These nuclear sites have been the focus of the United States and Israel for decades and we’ve built up considerable sources over the years. The Israelis have clearly penetrated Iran at the highest levels. So presumably, in addition to what we can see from satellites, we are hearing chatter from within the Iranian national security bureaucracies. We will see. This is only a preliminary report, but it is not encouraging.

Are you surprised at what seems to be the limited degree of damage to these facilities? No, the United States military has been toiling for several decades to develop weapons capable of destroying underground facilities. These complexes are called “Hard and Deeply Buried Targets” (HDBT). These efforts started all the way back in the Clinton administration when the Secretary of Defense was looking at options for taking out Libya’s underground chemical weapons complex at Tarhuna. At the time, none of the options on the table were palatable, so the quest began to develop air delivered munitions that could take out these targets. It proved far more difficult than anyone would have imagined. The government established a test facility, a mock underground chemical and nuclear production facility, out in the western US and bombed it literally for years. Every type of bomb or combination of bombs were used, rarely did it cause 
any more than superficial damage to the facility. So, this latest weapon, long in development but never deployed, has demonstrated once again that if an adversary simply digs deeply enough, the laws of physics are on their side. So, these results were disappointing, but by no means surprising, following a long history of failure against this type of target. That’s a major reason why previous administrations have been resistant to using them.

If this initial report proves true, what are the consequences? The consequences are terrible. As long as we didn’t use them, Iran didn’t know for sure how damaging they could be. That gave us leverage with them. Now, the situation is reversed. We’ve revealed or confirmed that our most fearsome weapon, or the most fearsome we’re willing to use—we could drop nukes or send in the 82nd Airborne, but that’s not going to happen—can collapse the entrances of tunnels but not destroy facilities buried deeply in a mountain. Going into any negotiations with them, they know our limits. 

That doesn’t mean Iran is in a strong position. Israel has decimated its military, and its economy is in ruins because of sanctions. In any negotiations with Trump, it’s the sanctions they want lifted. But now they’re in a much better position to get what they want than they were before this bombing run, especially considering other intel suggesting that the regime removed some or all its highly enriched uranium and centrifuges out these facilities before the attack.

And not just Iran. Every other adversarial regime now knows these weapons are essentially duds. That weakens our leverage considerably with all of them. I am sure Kim Jung Un is happy in North Korea today.

What do you make of the fact that Trump is continuing to insist that the facilities were totally destroyed? I’d say that’s not going to fly. If I’m the Iranians, I’m going to clear the rubble from the entrances of those facilities and then invite CNN and Al Jazeera to bring their cameras into the tunnels and show that they’re still there, still functional.

Paul Glastris is the editor in chief of the Washington Monthly

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Donald Trump has no credibility about the outcome of the bumper busting bombing while Army intelligence reports enriched uranium is only set back

Exclusive to CNN: Early US intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites, sources say. Reported in CNN by Natasha Bertrand, Katie Bo Lillie, Zachary Cohen

Donald Trump has zero credibility because he continuously lies about everything

CNN —The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.

The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.

The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing, and could change as more intelligence becomes available. But the early findings are at odds with Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also said on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “have been obliterated.”

Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.”

“So the (DIA) assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops,” this person added.

The White House acknowledged the existence of the assessment but said they disagreed with it.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt  (alias "3-D printer Barbie) told CNN in a statement: “This alleged assessment is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

(Okay....total obliteration of what Obliteration of nearly empty caves)

The US military has said the operation went as planned and that it was an “overwhelming success.” -( i.e., an overwhelming operational success, but, duh?....the mission did not succeed its intended purpose.)

It is still early for the US to have a comprehensive picture of the impact of the strikes, and none of the sources described how the DIA assessment compares to the view of other agencies in the intelligence community. The US is continuing to pick up intelligence, including from within Iran as they assess the damage.

Israel had been carrying out strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities for days leading up to the US military operation but claimed to need the US’ 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs to finish the job. While US B-2 bombers dropped over a dozen of the bombs on two of the nuclear facilities, the Fordow Fuel Enrichment plant and the Natanz Enrichment Complex, the bombs did not fully eliminate the sites’ centrifuges and highly enriched uranium, according to the people familiar with the assessment.

Instead, the impact to all three sites — Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — was largely restricted to aboveground structures, which were severely damaged, the sources said. That includes the sites’ power infrastructure and some of the aboveground facilities used to turn uranium into metal for bomb-making.

The Israeli assessment of the impact of the US strikes also found less damage on Fordow than expected. However, Israeli officials believe the combination of US and Israeli military action on multiple nuclear sites set back the Iranian nuclear program by two years, assuming they are able to rebuild it unimpeded which Israel would not allow. But Israel had also stated publicly before the US military operation that Iran’s program had been set back by two years.

Hegseth also told CNN, “Based on everything we have seen — and I’ve seen it all — our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons. Our massive bombs hit exactly the  right spot at each target (the problem
the wrong targets) and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.“

Trump continued to repeat his (fake
)belief that the damage from the strikes was significant.

“I think it’s been completely demolished,” he said, adding, “Those pilots hit their targets. Those targets were obliterated, and the pilots should be given credit.”

Asked about the possibility of Iran rebuilding its nuclear program, Trump responded, “That place is under rock. That place is demolished.”

While Trump and Hegseth have been bullish about the success of the strikes, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine said Sunday that while the damage assessment was still ongoing it would be “way too early” to comment on whether Iran still retains some nuclear capabilities.

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, the chairman emeritus of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, would not echo Trump’s claims that the Iranian program had been “obliterated” when pressed by CNN on Tuesday.

“I’ve been briefed on this plan in the past, and it was never meant to completely destroy the nuclear facilities, but rather cause significant damage,” McCaul told CNN, referring to the US military plans to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. “But it was always known to be a temporary setback.”

Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who has closely reviewed commercial satellite imagery of the strike sites, agreed with the assessment that the attacks do not appear to have ended Iran’s nuclear program.

“The ceasefire came without either Israel or the United States being able to destroy several key underground nuclear facilities, including near Natanz, Isfahan and Parchin,” Lewis said, referring to the ceasefire between Israel and Iran that Trump announced on Monday. Parchin is a separate nuclear complex near Tehran.

“These facilities could serve as the basis for the rapid reconstitution of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Earlier on Tuesday, classified briefings for both the House and Senate on the operation were canceled.

The all-Senate briefing has been moved to Thursday, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Two separate sources familiar told CNN the briefing for all House lawmakers has also been postponed. It was not immediately clear why it was delayed or when it would be rescheduled. (Ultimately, the briefing was cancelled by the Republicans who do not want to be in a defensive position about having to defend an expensive mission without evidence to support the outcome.)

Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan of New York said on X on Tuesday that “Trump just cancelled a classified House briefing on the Iran strikes with zero explanation. The real reason? He claims he destroyed ‘all nuclear facilities and capability;’ his team knows they can’t back up his bluster and BS.”

As CNN has reported, there have long been questions about whether the US’ bunker-buster bombs, known as Massive Ordnance Penetrators, would be able to fully destroy Iran’s highly fortified nuclear sites that are buried deep underground — particularly at Fordow and Isfahan, Iran’s largest nuclear research complex.

Notably, the US struck Isfahan with Tomahawk missiles launched from a submarine instead of a bunker-buster bomb. That is because there was an understanding that the bomb would likely not successfully penetrate Isfahan’s lower levels, which are buried even deeper than Fordow, one of the sources said.

US officials believe Iran also maintains secret nuclear facilities that were not targeted in the strike and remain operational, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

This story has been updated with additional details.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Jim Sciutto, Lauren Fox and Annie Grayer contributed reporting.

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Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Donald Trump Republican interference in the Social Security data base creates anxiety puts all beneficiaries at risk of loosing benefits

"Social Security advocates are aghast. “As with most of the actions of the Social Security Administration since Trump came into office, we cannot make rational sense of the policy to place immigrants on the SSA’s list of deceased persons,” says Max Richtman, chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare." Echo report by Michael Hiltzik published in the Los Angeles Times:

Trump’s Kafkaesque attack on Social Security--Declaring living people as dead.

In so many ways the evil Trump Republican administration has given us a window into a dystopian world — flouting a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court, elevating scientific myth into healthcare policy and so on. But its latest attack on the Social Security system is arguably the most frightening of all.

Reportedly pressured by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the current stewards of Social Security have allowed the government to declare 6,300 people “dead” in a crucial Social Security database, even though they’re very much alive.

The initial reports of this action were reported by the New York Times and Washington Post, but it was confirmed for me, if somewhat obliquely, by a White House spokeswoman.


Trump promised mass deportations and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” the spokeswoman, Elizabeth Huston, told me by email.

The White House claims that “DHS identified over 6,300 temporarily paroled aliens on the terrorist watch list or with FBI criminal records,” and as of April 8, “terminated” their right to hold Social Security numbers or receive benefits.
What’s that? It’s what is officially known as Social Security’s “Death Master File,” the database of deceased number holders.

Make no mistake: In effect, these 6,300 living, breathing individuals have been declared “dead” by Trump administration fiat.

“You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian,” says Devin O’Connor, an expert on Social Security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Social Security advocates are aghast. “As with most of the actions of the Social Security Administration since Trump came into office, we cannot make rational sense of the policy to place immigrants on the SSA’s list of deceased persons,” says Max Richtman, chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“These are people who are in the United States legally and need active Social Security numbers in order to work and transact personal business,” Richtman says. “By placing them on the list of dead persons, the Trump administration is needlessly preventing them from utilizing their Social Security numbers for legitimate reasons.”

Before we delve further into the consequences of this action — for the newly “dead,” for all Social Security beneficiaries and indeed American citizens, and for the Social Security system itself — a few words on how this came about.

It started on inauguration day, when Trump abruptly terminated four Biden administration humanitarian programs granting legal U.S. residence to applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela seeking asylum. By the end of Biden’s term, more than 500,000 applicants had been granted so-called parole via the programs known collectively as CHNV. Typically, they feared political violence or death in their home countries.

After passing national security and public safety scrutiny and showing that they had a U.S. sponsor to provide housing and other support, they were granted a “parole” of up to two years permitting them to work legally, which required them to obtain Social Security numbers and to contribute payroll tax to the program. During that period, they could seek more permanent permission to stay in the country. As of April 8, they lost those rights and obligations.

The White House, i.e., Donald Trump Republicans, have not specified what evidence it has that the 6,300 immigrants declared “dead” were members of terrorist groups or FBI-designated criminals.

As it happens, the termination order was blocked Monday by federal Judge Indira Talwani of Boston. In a 41-page order, Talwani raised the question of whether Congress had given Trump the authority, “after parole has been granted and individuals have entered the country on a lawful basis,” to revoke the grants of parole “en masse.” She wrote: “The answer is no.” The revocation, she ruled, would have to be on a case-by-case basis, just as their paroles had been granted.

Trump’s Kafkaesque attack on Social Security--Declaring living people as dead

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly demanded changes in Social Security’s database so living people could be classified as “dead.”

In so many ways the Trump administration has given us a window into a dystopian world — flouting a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court, elevating scientific myth into healthcare policy and so on. But its latest attack on the Social Security system is arguably the most frightening of all.

Reportedly pressured by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the current stewards of Social Security have allowed the government to declare 6,300 people “dead” in a crucial Social Security database, even though they’re very much alive.

The initial reports of this action were reported by the New York Times and Washington Post, but it was confirmed for me, if somewhat obliquely, by a White House spokeswoman.

You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian.

“President Trump promised mass deportations and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” the spokeswoman, Elizabeth Huston, told me by email.

The White House claims that “DHS identified over 6,300 temporarily paroled aliens on the terrorist watch list or with FBI criminal records,” and as of April 8 “terminated” their right to hold Social Security numbers or receive benefits.

“To prevent them from receiving any payments,” the White House told me, the Social Security Administration moved their numbers into what the White House calls the “Ineligible Master File.”

What’s that? It’s what is officially known as Social Security’s “Death Master File,” the database of deceased number holders.

Make no mistake: In effect, these 6,300 living, breathing individuals have been declared “dead” by the evil Trump administration fiat.

“You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian,” says Devin O’Connor, an expert on Social Security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Social Security advocates are aghast. “As with most of the actions of the Social Security Administration since Trump came into office, we cannot make rational sense of the policy to place immigrants on the SSA’s list of deceased persons,” says Max Richtman, chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“These are people who are in the United States legally and need active Social Security numbers in order to work and transact personal business,” Richtman says. “By placing them on the list of dead persons, the Trump administration is needlessly preventing them from utilizing their Social Security numbers for legitimate reasons.”

Before we delve further into the consequences of this action — for the newly “dead,” for all Social Security beneficiaries and indeed American citizens, and for the Social Security system itself — a few words on how this came about.

It started on inauguration day, when Trump abruptly terminated four Biden administration humanitarian programs granting legal U.S. residence to applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela seeking asylum. By the end of Biden’s term, more than 500,000 applicants had been granted so-called parole via the programs known collectively as CHNV. Typically, they feared political violence or death in their home countries.

After passing national security and public safety scrutiny and showing that they had a U.S. sponsor to provide housing and other support, they were granted a “parole” of up to two years permitting them to work legally, which required them to obtain Social Security numbers and to contribute payroll tax to the program. During that period, they could seek more permanent permission to stay in the country. As of April 8, they lost those rights and obligations.

The White House hasn’t specified what evidence it has that the 6,300 immigrants declared “dead” were members of terrorist groups or FBI-designated criminals.

As it happens, the termination order was blocked Monday by federal Judge Indira Talwani of Boston. In a 41-page order, Talwani raised the question of whether Congress had given Trump the authority, “after parole has been granted and individuals have entered the country on a lawful basis,” to revoke the grants of parole “en masse.” She wrote: “The answer is no.” The revocation, she ruled, would have to be on a case-by-case basis, just as their paroles had been granted.

Meanwhile, Tuesday in Baltimore, federal Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander convened a hearing over whether the Social Security Administration has complied with her earlier order to keep DOGE employees’ hands off the agency’s records — an issue on which the unilateral “death” designations may well be relevant. Hollander had ordered acting Commissioner Leland Dudek to appear for testimony, but the government has refused to allow him to appear.

That brings us back to the Death Master File. (The administration has said it should be referred to now as the “Ineligible Master File,” but its authority to change its official designation isn’t clear, and in any case this looks merely like an attempt to obscure the nature of the file itself.)

The DMF is one of the most important and closely supervised databases in the Social Security Administration’s possession. Currently it contains more than 141 million names of deceased workers, along with their Social Security numbers and their dates of birth and death. The program uses the information, according to former Social Security official Tiffany Flick, for the purpose of “discontinuing benefits payments to deceased individuals, confirming an individual’s right to survivor benefits, and identifying fraud” carried out by users of dead persons’ Social Security numbers.

The information is carefully vetted unless it comes from family members, a state agency or a funeral home, Flick said in a court declaration. The agency takes pains to verify reports from anyone else. Of the 2.9 million death reports received each year, Flick said, fewer than one-third of 1% typically have to be corrected.

Federal law requires the agency to keep the full database confidential. A redacted version, however, is marketed via the Department of Commerce to banks, credit agencies and other financial institutions — but only if they can pass an annual certification in which they have to show they can protect the data from illicit use. The limited version contains only information that is more than three years old.

There can be no question that “intentionally marking people who are still living as dead” in the master file “is unheard of and improper,” Flick stated.

Beyond that, “when Social Security incorrectly declares someone dead, it ruins their lives,” observes Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy organization Social Security Works.

In 2023, Altman notes, “a Maryland woman was wrongly declared dead and found her health insurance and Social Security benefits terminated, her home listed for sale, her credit cards canceled, and her water shut off. Her health deteriorated as she spent endless hours trying to undo the mistake. Indeed, she did actually die seven months later.”

Because the DMF is viewed as authoritative by financial services companies, adds O’Connor, its misuse can cause “disruption in your bank account access, your credit cards canceled, your pension benefits being cut off, your insurance coverage canceled or an insurance claim denied. If you apply for a job your application could be rejected, or have a denial of credit.”


The very idea that government bureaucrats can designate living persons as dead for reasons other than their actual death should send shudders through all Social Security participants, citizens and otherwise — especially given the manipulation of the program from Trump acolytes already and the absence of official oversight over DOGE’s rampaging minions.

“Now, if you’re included in the Death Master File even by accident, how do you show not only that you’re not dead, but that you don’t belong on the file for some other unknown, mysterious reason?” O’Connor asks. “It’s creating the potential for some Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmares every time they make a mistake — and there will be mistakes.”

As for the administration’s contention that the 6,300 “dead” people are on a terrorism watch list or FBI list, the administration’s treatment of facts and statistics when it comes to immigrants or Social Security does not inspire confidence.

The administration, for instance, has consistently described Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it admits to having transported to El Salvador illegally, as an “illegal alien” and a member of the criminal gang MS-13. But he was in the U.S. legally, and no valid evidence has been produced to show he’s a member of MS-13 — quite the contrary, he may be a victim of MS-13.

DOGE’s claims about Social Security data are almost risibly ignorant. Musk asserted that DOGE found millions of dead people as old as 150 receiving benefits, but he was misinterpreting a software artifact.

The manipulation of the Death Master File itself has obliterated its validity as a data source for financial and commercial institutions. If those institutions can no longer trust what was once the gold standard for information about their present or future customers, how can it be used at all?

What’s scariest about the cavalier manipulation of the Death Master File is that Trump’s refusal to observe bureaucratic norms, statutory limitations, and even to respond to court orders, points to the question of how far he’s willing to go. Designating living persons as dead could be only the beginning.

“If they can do this to somebody,” O’Connor says, “they can do it to anybody.”


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Monday, June 23, 2025

Donald Trump does not value vetarans, is incapable of showing honor to those who supported Americans that liberated Europe

The Dutch in Holldand honor our Amercan fallen soldiers better than we do here at home | Opinion

(Maine Writer:  My uncle was an Italian immigrant to the US, he joined his family in Pennsylvania in 1922 (?) when he was already 10 years old. When World War II was declared, he was drafted because his father- my grandfather- became an American citizen and made sure his son was naturalized. When my uncle was drafted, he served as a sargent on a tank in a unit that landed in Normandy, but the orders directed then through Europe towards Holland, where he was wounded while trying to escape a Nazi Luftwaffle attack on his tank. My uncle's unit was part of the US army that helped to liberate Holland from the Nazi occupation.)

World War II - Dutch Liberation Of The Netherlands

An echo opinion published in the Houston Chronicle

Memorial Day essay, Veterans and Donald Trump: Regarding “Grew up in Houston. Killed by Nazis. Remembered by the grateful Dutch. | Opinion,” (May 23): Thank you for the lovely op-ed about the Dutch care and concern for the American military graves.

My father ws a pilot in the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. I visited the place where he was buried by a village priest after his plane crashed in the battle called “Operation Market Garden.” He dropped paratroopers and pulled gliders.

This first burial place, near the city of Eindhoven, was green, tree-covered and beautifully maintained. On the monument’s left were the names of the Dutch soldiers. On the right were names of Allies, and it was very gratifying to see Lt. Colonel Ralph Lehr’s name in such a lovely place.

By contrast, his body, when taken home to western Oklahoma, was reburied near numerous relatives in a dry, windy, treeless graveyard in sight of the wheat fields that had brought immigrants to the Oklahoma Land Rush.

Many American soldiers lost their lives in the Market Garden battle after surviving D-Day. The British allies also lost many lives.

I was 18 months old, and my brother was 6 months old. My widowed mother was only 24.

I am horrified
that the United States has Donald Trump, who is a president and convicted felon, who called these soldiers “suckers.” They were heroes who preserved the democracy that we seem to be losing. Equally disturbing is this president’s treating our allies so terribly as he upturns our economy. Maybe his bone spurs make him cranky.

From Sally Lehr, in Houston Texas


And this: My parents lived in Holland during World War II and witnessed firsthand the atrocities and heartache of living under Nazi oppression. I remember my father sharing the stories of liberation and gratitude to those who gave them back their freedom, but I was not aware that the Dutch continue to remember the sacrifices by visiting the Netherlands American Cemetery, placing flowers, saying prayers and honoring each American who gave their all. 

As the Dutch like to say, “Hup Holland!”

From Bill Van Rysdam, in Porter, Texas

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Donald Trump is making dangerous decisions without the advice of any expert advisors: Vice President Vance was a Marine corporal!

When an American president makes an especially weighty decision, there’s some small comfort in knowing that seasoned, steady aides were in the mix, complementing the commander in chief’s instincts with their expertise. Echo essay by Frank Bruni published in The New York Times. 

Donald Trump dropped 15-ton bombs on uranium enrichment sites in Iran with Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary. (As a matter of fact, Trumpzi Diva Tulsi was even bold enough to tell Trump the truth about Iran's uranium enrichment program, in other words, there was no nuclear bomb in Iran.)

I, for one, am not comforted. None of us should believe that Donald Trump is being well served. Rather, his demand for fealty from his advisors is putting the world in danger.  

By some reports, Hegseth wasn’t consulted all that much — which, I suppose, is its own perverse solace. Trump apparently learned his lesson when Hegseth decided that a Signal group chat was the proper venue for an emoji-laden pep rally about imminent military strikes against the Houthis; clue Hegseth in on the Iran plan, and he might wind up divulging it in the form of charades on “Fox (Fake
) & Friends.”

And Gabbard
 🙄Her relationship with Trump is strained, to say the least; he told reporters on Air Force One to pay no heed to her statement several months ago that Iran wasn’t close to or all that focused on developing a nuclear weapon.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump blurted. Apart from how warm and fuzzy that brushoff must have made Gabbard feel, it spoke volumes about the limits of Trump’s confidence in — and use for — her.

So why did he give her such a crucial job? And how did Hegseth land an even bigger one


Because, Donald Trump wasn’t judging prospective senior administration officials on their demonstrated fitness for their positions. Any old president can do that. Shock artists like him want to show how far outside the lines they’re willing to color. The kookier the crayon, the better.

And would-be despots make sure that the people just below them really and truly owe them. Gabbard; Hegseth; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; so many of Trump’s other flunkies — if not for him, they’d never enjoy the titles, the offices, the attention, the entourages they do. That primes their loyalty. It greases their sycophancy.

But while it was one thing to mull the lunacy of many of Trump’s personnel choices as they strutted through Senate confirmation hearings, it’s quite another to confront their inappropriateness when an impulsive, mercurial president takes a risk this enormous, commencing the kind of military intervention he long railed against, in a combustible region that he previously expressed such wariness about.

I found myself transfixed by the tableau late Saturday night when, in nationally televised remarks from the White House, Trump announced that the United States had attacked Iran. 

Like robots, 🤖Vice President JD Vance (a former Marine corporal), Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Fox (Fake❗) News, part time weekend commentator, Pete Hegseth all stood around him with such strenuously blank expressions, such erect postures, it was as if they’d been turned into automatons and feared that any tiny twitch might be interpreted as doubt or disagreement.

If you’ve any doubts about the culture of flattery cultivated by Trump, I direct you to that recent text that he got from Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel, the ally pressing hard for America’s help in defanging Iran. It’s astonishing that Trump posted the text on social media — that he’s so eager to exhibit his acolytes’ praise, so insecure. But it’s no less astounding than the amplitude of Huckabee’s adoration. An evangelical Christian pastor, Huckabee wasn’t offering Trump diplomatic counsel. He was giving him an ecclesiastical massage.

Huckabee wrote that God had saved Trump from an assassination attempt “to be the most consequential President in a century — maybe ever.” “The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else,” he continued, in the best prose equivalent of genuflection that I’ve ever read. He added: “I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.” What a mammoth broom it must take to sweep that much history under the rug.

Concerns about who’s advising a president and how well they’re doing that certainly predate Trump. Most presidents seek affirmation, most have no trouble getting it, and all are pliable because all are human. Vice President Dick Cheney infamously egged on President George W. Bush. President Joe Biden’s protectors shielded him from the truth of his declining health and falling polls.

And the advisers with Trump’s ear right now include people of greater acumen than Gabbard and Hegseth. I’d put Vance and Marco Rubio in that group.


But from the moment they pledged their fealty to Trump, they grew less serious by the week. To track their time with him is to notice ever more performative demonstrations that they share his grudges and will act on his grievances

Vance (a self described "Catholic convert!) berates Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in the Oval Office- because he was scripted by Trump to create an echo chamber.

Rubio channels Trump’s xenophobia and animus toward elite universities with a puffed-up panic over international students. 

But what Donald Trump and the world needs at a juncture like this are confident confidants who can play devil’s advocate, not a coterie of toadies 🐸
 who whisper sweet nothings in his ear — or have nothing valuable to whisper at all.

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Sunday, June 22, 2025

Donald Trump and the Republicans owe the truth to Americans instead Trump invents one crises after another

Echo opinion letter published in The News-Gazette an Illinois newspaper: "distractions and distortions" and now we can add the unprovoked attack in Iran to this dangerously growing category. 

Question  Are Americans any safer today because of what Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing to destroy our democracy

Answer- Of course not. Americans are all less safe, regardless of where we are in the world, even while living in our own nation as legal citizens.

Trump's misuse of troops is just a ployWhat Donald Trump is busy creating in Los Angeles was so predictable. In fact, Kamila Harris predicted it during her 2024 campaign. 

Trump is aving a terrible time. A former ally (Elon Musk) attacked him and his policies, a loud clamor for the release of the Epstein files was heard, a bad series of economic reports was not released, Republican senators balked at his “big, beautiful bill,” and the Ukrainians kept fighting on.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump played the proverbial big guy card by calling on the U.S military to launch a devastating bombing on the soverign nation of Iran, without provocation to cause this aggressive attack. 

Faced with all these negative events, the Trump playbook calls for one approach — go on the offensive with distraction and distortion. In spite of the fact that the Los Angeles police thanked protesters for practicing their First Amendment rights in an overall orderly and peaceful manner, and Governor Gavin Newsom saw no pressing need to take additional steps, Trump decided to send in the National Guar

What better way to distract people from all the negative stories Trump doesn’t want the voters to focus on. It’s too bad he didn’t make the unilateral decision to send in the National Guard on January 6, when a truly violent protest took place at our nation's Capitol.

From Scott Davis in Champaign Illinois

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Attacking Iran will not make the world safer and the Pentagaon is now a cauldron of paranoid personalities

This echo report published in the New York Magazine Intelligencer, by Kerry Howley.  Based on this article, with multiple quotes from those invoved, clearly Pete Hegseth has quickly created an environmnent of confusion and paranoia in the Pentagon. 

As war looms, Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is beset by infighting over leaks, drugs, and socks. How long will Trump stand by his man?
(But, update alert, based on the Saturday illegal bombing of Iran the operation conducted on June 21, it appears as though a sobor Hegseth might be keeping his job because he is a rubber stamp for illegally using the military against anybody who Trump wants to have targeted, including American citizens. Every American is at risk of being caught in the Donald Trump vortex right now.)

On Dan Caldwell’s 87th day as a senior official at the Department of Defense, he read some intelligence reports and prepped for some phone calls and ordered from the secretary’s mess his favorite Pentagon lunch: “steak bites” with asparagus and mashed potatoes.

It was April 15. Pete Hegseth, Caldwell’s friend for more than a decade and the reason he had been elevated as a 38-year-old to the role of senior adviser, spent that particular Thursday at the White House rather than in the office. The two had met while working at a Koch-funded nonprofit. They’d knocked on doors in the Capitol Building years before Hegseth became a weekend host on Fox (Fake) in 2017. 

Hegseth always said that if you want to talk to the president, you go on Fox (Fake & Friends, and as co-host, he invited Caldwell on to press for Koch-approved reforms at the Department of Veterans Affairs. 

When there was a chance that Hegseth might be named secretary of Defense, it was Caldwell he asked to help with the transition. Caldwell coached Hegseth for his combative confirmation hearings, and once confirmed, Hegseth told transition officials it was “crucial” that Caldwell be in the building as soon as possible.

I
n policy circles, Caldwell was known as a serious analyst, a veteran committed to nonintervention and military restraint in ways that worried the bipartisan foreign-policy Establishment. 

When Mitch McConnell declined to support Hegseth’s nomination, he singled out Caldwell, who had written in support of “retrenchment” from the Middle East, a retreat from interventionism that alarmed the senator. 

Caldwell is six-foot-two with dark circles under his eyes and a military haircut, polite and professional, fluid in conversation but not given to laugh. On the day we met, he carried in his backpack a book called Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, but he did not want me to mention that because the truth was he hadn’t yet started it; he was reading a different book on “NATO expansion and the end of the Soviet Union.” 

Caldwell is slightly tuned up, vigilant, a quality that may or may not be the result of his four years in the Marines.

On that Tuesday in April, when Caldwell was about to leave his office in pursuit of his steak bites, an aide told him three men had arrived to escort him out of the building. The aide seemed perplexed. Caldwell thought it was a joke.

“Are you fucking with me?” he asked.

“Can we come in and talk?” one of the men said. They walked into his office, and they walked slowly because one of them had a gold-topped cane; he’d injured his leg pulling people to safety when the Pentagon was hit on 9/11.

“We’re relieving you of your duties,” one of the men said, “and we’re escorting you off the premises. Collect your things and follow us.”

There was only one person with the immediate authority to throw him out of the building: his old friend, Pete Hegseth. 

Unable to think clearly, Caldwell began packing up random things. He had an extra stick of deodorant on his bookshelf. He put it in his backpack and zipped it up. As Caldwell followed the men to the elevator, the deputy secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, came upon them.

“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going, Dan?”

“We’ll find out, sir,” Caldwell said.

In the drama of Hegseth’s January confirmation hearings, it was easy to get distracted by the financial settlement for an assault allegation, by the multitudinous accounts of heavy drinking on the job, by claims of misogyny from both his mother and his sister-in-law, by the fact that Hegseth, while married with three small children, had fathered a child with a Fox News producer who was also married with small children, during which pregnancy he had slept with the woman who later accused him of assault, and thereby miss some straightforward information about his managerial experience. Pete Hegseth had run a nonprofit called Veterans for Freedom for several years, an organization that employed fewer than 20 people, and resigned after alleged financial mismanagement nearly bankrupted the organization. He had run a group called Concerned Veterans for America, which employed around 160 people, and resigned amid allegations of misconduct and, once again, financial mismanagement. 

In choosing Hegseth, Donald Trump did not choose from the large set of people who had never managed an organization, or the considerably smaller set of people who had managed an organization without incident, but from a smaller still set of people who had managed multiple bureaucracies and resigned multiple times under complex circumstances. The Department of Defense, which oversees 3 million people, is one of the largest employers on earth, comprising the four main branches of the military as well as the National Security Agency and dozens of other agencies of which most people have never heard. Pete Hegseth assumed office on January 25.

In the beginning, Hegseth was positive and inquisitive, demonstrating a healthy curiosity about the job he had miraculously acquired, and it was possible to believe that he and his fresh-faced staff would change all they thought wrong with the department: the overspending, the inertia, the tendency to engage in endless foreign entanglements to no clear national purpose. 

Caldwell loved the work. These would be the most fulfilling 12 weeks of his career. Caldwell had served in Iraq, where he handed Jolly Ranchers to Yazidi boys at dusk. The boys were maybe 6 and 8; they had round little-boy paunches; their shadows stretched long on the expanse of desert sand. The boys put the Jolly Ranchers in their mouths still wrapped in plastic; Caldwell showed them how to tug the yellow corners and reveal the candy inside. Five years after that, ISIS took over that area. The boys, he thought, were almost certainly dead. ISIS, Caldwell told me, was an organization forged in American prisons as a result of the American-led invasion. The war had been a “monstrous crime,” but for a very, very long time, no one in public life would admit the obvious.

Caldwell was always going to be a Republican: a Marine from a deeply Republican family, a gun enthusiast, a divorced father of two who considers the military’s equity initiatives “nonsense.” 

In 2016, he was watching the South Carolina Republican-primary debate. “The war in Iraq was a big fat mistake,” Donald Trump said. “We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives … obviously it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake … We should have never been in Iraq.” “It took guts to say something like that in 2016,” Caldwell told me. “It was an absolute righteous takedown of the Republican foreign-policy Establishment that still put Bush on a pedestal. And you had all these ghouls saying it was going to destroy him in South Carolina and he went on and had a blowout victory.”

Caldwell was fully invested in a foreign policy of restraint. When I pointed out that Pete Hegseth is not a man one would typically associate with the word restraint, Caldwell emphasized that Hegseth had “evolved” and had staffed a department distinct from that of, say, Paul Wolfowitz. The opportunity to stop the cycle of endless war was more important than any individual person’s behavior. He was working with people he liked and trusted; people he had helped Hegseth hire in the first place, such as Darin Selnick, another Concerned Veterans for America alum who had known Caldwell and Hegseth for more than a decade. They were joined by Feinberg’s chief of staff, Colin Carroll, who had been fired for lowering morale during the Biden administration (“I can be abrasive”) but came back under Hegseth to “get shit done”: “I was of the opinion,” Carroll said, “that a person who doesn’t know jack shit about the department actually could be beneficial given the ability to build a team that knows what they’re doing.”

This had in fact been Pete Hegseth’s argument during the confirmation hearings: He had no relevant experience and was therefore, almost tautologically, a “change agent.” 

In his first term, Trump had left the Department of Defense mostly to men with what Hegseth called “supposedly the right credentials … retired generals, academics, or defense-contractor executives.” “And where has that gotten us?” Hegseth asked. He had come to deliver something new, and he would.

The Pentagon is an isolating place to work. In sensitive parts of the building, personal cell phones must be kept in drawers and storage lockers, rendering the outside world eerily distant: no messages from home, no news of a sick child or a package on its way. At the center of this shared exile Hegseth sat behind a giant wooden desk in his low-ceilinged, fluorescent-lit office, swiveling on a chair on top of plastic laid over bright-blue carpet. Hegseth is not skeptical of military intervention. He has argued at length that our failure in Iraq was a failure of will, an unwillingness to double down. But his office was ideologically diverse: Caldwell’s office was nearby, as was Selnick’s. These two men were among his top four advisers, his core team. Down a wide wood-paneled hallway lined with portraits of former defense secretaries one came upon Feinberg’s suite of offices, where Carroll worked. Sometimes Hegseth shut down the hallway so he could film himself and post. It was clear from the beginning which parts of the job Hegseth most enjoyed: working out, posting about working out, and discussing the imminent removal of trans servicemembers. He liked the word lethality almost as much as he liked the word warfighter. He posted pictures of himself mid-push-up, tattooed biceps taut in the effort, and videos of himself running among younger, uniformed men. 

As one of his first acts in office, Hegseth put out a memo stating that “individuals who exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.”

It was clear, too, what worried him: disloyal operatives hiding in plain sight, whispering to his enemies under cover of anonymity. “The leaks seemed to come as fast as we had meetings in the building,” one source told me. (Relatedly, this account is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen people with close knowledge of Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon.)

On March 13, Courtney Kube of NBC News published a story in which two anonymous officials shared plans the military was developing to “reclaim” the Panama Canal. Hegseth had been talking about Kube ever since she published a story in which his second wife’s sister, who, confusingly, was also his brother’s ex-wife, said her sister was so frightened of Hegseth that she had established a safe word to text in times of danger. He was outraged that the Panama leak had happened at all, but it was much worse that it had been to Kube. He wanted an investigation. “I’ve had enough,” he told Joe Kasper, his chief of staff, and put him in charge of finding the leaker.

Kasper was an unusual choice. “I’ve known lots of chief of staffs,” one source said, “and like, this guy doesn’t act, look, or talk like any chief of staff I’ve known.” A bearded, amiable, gravel-voiced 44-year-old from working-class Connecticut, Kasper had gotten his start as a press liaison for Duncan Hunter, a disgraced congressman sentenced to 11 months in prison for misusing campaign funds. When Hunter spent $625 of those funds on air travel for his pet rabbit, it had been Kasper’s job to explain this to the press. At the Pentagon, he called members of the military by the wrong rank, a habit those around him could only assume was intentional because he had been a mechanic in the Air Force. He referred to his military assistant, Colonel Kevin Ward, as K-Dog. He could be hard to follow as he jumped from subject to subject.

“I think that’s arbitrary and subjective,” Kasper told this magazine. “You know who else is hard to follow? Elon Musk. But would you say he doesn’t have creative elements of opportunity to incite and excite you?”

Kasper did not, for the first six weeks, wear a tie. He sometimes failed to wear socks, which struck some inside the Pentagon as unprofessional. (“Rare for me to wear no socks! It’s gotta be the right shoe, man. There are people in there wearing SpongeBob socks.”) He used large vocabulary words other officials were not sure he knew the meanings of, words such as supposition. (“I don’t pretend to be a Rhodes scholar,” he says in his defense, adding that he has never used the word supposition. “Innocuous means harmless. Banal means boring. Indigenous means local. Constituent means something.” - *I knew he was a moron- 🙄ya'think?) 

Kasper was the kind of “bro vet” to whom Hegseth gravitated, whereas Caldwell could be stiff, oddly formal; he called Hegseth, a man he had known for more than a decade, “Mr. Secretary.” 

Kasper, on the other hand, shared few of Caldwell’s convictions about American foreign policy, but he had constant access to Hegseth, a commodity for which various factions of the office were now competing. For some, the tension was immediate. *“I knew he was a moron,” Colin Carroll tells me, “within 30 seconds of meeting him.”

A typical leak investigation would be referred to the relevant investigative body, be undertaken in secret, endure for months to years, and likely result in suspects being put on administrative leave for an extended period. Kasper took a different approach. “This investigation will commence immediately,” read a memo he put out March 21. The following week, about eight men gathered around a long table in Hegseth’s office. Everyone, Kasper said, would be subject to polygraphs, and the FBI might get involved. He said all this, he told me, mostly to see how people would react; he did not actually know how to procure a polygraph or how any of that worked. Someone who reacted was Dan Caldwell. Caldwell, in his stiff way (“Mr. Secretary”), said he had concerns about bringing the FBI into the office. Kasper noticed. Meanwhile, another leak: Elon Musk, reported the New York Times, was to be briefed on secret war plans, according to “two U.S. officials.”

Kasper, according to six sources, was holding up Pentagon business. He did not, as the others did, arrive early and stay late. He was not scheduling meetings, and when other people scheduled them instead, he seemed offended. Someone who worked with Carroll in Feinberg’s office told me Carroll was “the most effective, driven person brought onboard in this administration” but no one thought he was a man with much patience. Sources said Carroll, Selnick, Caldwell, and the White House all complained about Kasper to Hegseth, but Kasper remained chief of staff.

Another leak: The Pentagon, according to “two defense officials,” had ordered a second carrier to the Red Sea. Kasper seemed, a source said, “jittery.” In Hegseth’s office he’d be constantly at the coffee machine, “bouncing off the walls.” “I don’t know what drug users look like and how they act,” Carroll later told Megyn Kelly. “I can say that Joe was super-erratic and he would be totally normal on one thing and then totally not normal on another thing within the same 30-minute period. I’ve been told by other people that seems like the mannerism of a substance abuser. But I’m not going to allege that here.” (Kasper denies using drugs.)

The leaks were damaging Hegseth with the only person who mattered. “What the fuck is Elon doing there?” Trump reportedly asked of the leaked Musk briefing, which was quickly canceled. 

Who was talking to the press, scoring little hits against him day after day? Was it a Biden political appointee? The “deep state”? Or one of his closest allies, committed to what one source called “some weird policy theology, the New Right”? “I’ll hook you up to a fucking polygraph!” Hegseth said to Admiral Christopher Grady, an exchange we learned about in the pages of The Wall Street Journal because the Pentagon failed to contain leaks about the leak investigation itself.

With Kasper distracted, Hegseth needed someone to do the work a chief of staff would normally do. He turned to Selnick, an ambitious, rail-thin, soft-spoken 64-year-old who had mentored Hegseth in the workings of the VA. A certain faction of Republicans had hoped Selnick would end up running the VA, but Selnick was, according to one Republican operative, “a bad self-promoter.” He took a pay cut and flew weekly from San Diego to D.C., where he rented a small apartment, soulless in a way particular to Pentagon City, leaving his wife back on the other coast. Selnick says he did not plan to come back to D.C., but “Pete’s my friend. He asked me to do it. He said he needed me, needed my experience.”

Hegseth did in fact need him. Selnick understood the government, how to get what you wanted through a slow and steady protocol. He was someone with the patience to learn the details. When Selnick met with me at his apartment, he handed over a printed two-page biography tidily stapled to a business card. When the Pentagon banned trans servicemembers from serving, it was Selnick’s name on the order.

Hegseth asked Selnick, essentially, to do Kasper’s job without the job title. Kasper, a source says, resented it when others picked up the slack. According to another source, Hegseth would not fire Kasper because Hegseth “sees everything through the lens of media” and knew that the media would spin Kasper’s dismissal as “an early L.” This would be precisely the argument, as the department descended into chaos, that seemed to best explain why Trump did not get rid of the increasingly embarrassing Hegseth.

Sources in the Pentagon during these months describe a sustained sense of instability. People quit or were fired and the roles went unfilled. Kasper would speak openly, in front of staff, about the need to root out Biden political appointees. There were also threats from without — activist-influencers who wielded power in strange, sudden bursts. On April 2, Laura Loomer met with the president in the Oval Office and gave him a list of around a dozen officials she wanted fired. Laura Loomer’s central wound, her animating trauma, is this: She has been nothing but loyal to Donald Trump; he had, according to her, offered her a job; and yet that job has not materialized. “It really has become quite the elephant in the room,” she told an interviewer later that month, “why I don’t work in the administration.” Trump, she argued, “obviously loves me,” but “oppositional, defiant individuals” are working against her and, therefore, against him.




Signal is an app one uses on a phone connected to the internet. A typical smartphone has what researchers call “a large attack surface”; one can, through any number of apps, hack into it and thereby access the Signal messages. Such a phone is vulnerable to surveillance in all the ways the Pentagon’s boring, time-consuming, compartmentalized systems are intended to prevent, but these are technical minutiae, and Pete Hegseth is a man engaged by something else entirely.

“THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP,” he texted Marco Rubio, J. D. Vance, national security adviser Mike Waltz, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, and 13 other people on March 15 in a series of messages discussing the nominally covert bombing campaign against the Houthis. When Waltz asked for a point person from each department for the operation, Hegseth named Dan Caldwell.

“We are currently clean on OPSEC,” Hegseth added. (“Why would Pete Hegseth say this into the Signal group?” Micah Lee, an independent security researcher, asks me, sounding genuinely puzzled. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and I think he was just trying to sound cool.”)

The leaks up until March 24, when Goldberg published an article about the affair, were embarrassing, stress-inducing, given to create interpersonal chaos in a DoD full of nervous new hires, but they were not this: a fuckup that would enliven the opposition, embarrass the White House, and further sink the already questionable morale in the Pentagon.

Selnick, Caldwell, and Carroll were sympathetic. The story, they thought, was overblown. And it wasn’t Hegseth’s fault in their view; Waltz had invited Goldberg into the chat. But Hegseth did not seem to know how to respond to the allegations. One longtime official tells me the culture of DoD was to “accept full responsibility, learn from mistakes, and move on.” Instead, Hegseth, just off a plane in Hawaii, his shellacked hair barely moving in the breeze, tensed up and laid into a journalist. “You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called” — and here Hegseth raised his eyebrows, as if amazed that anyone could be so dishonest — “journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia” — with each repetition of the word Russia he leaned in, as if threatening to bite — “or the fine people on both sides hoax or the suckers and losers hoax.”

The journalist pressed; why were they texting war plans on Signal? “Nobody! Was texting. War plans,” he said, “and that’s all I have to say about that.”

That same day what anyone would colloquially call “war plans” were available to see, in a series of damning screenshots, on The Atlantic’s website. Hegseth’s denial rendered the story bigger in importance and longer in duration. Carroll felt that Hegseth should simply state that he had the right to declassify information and had done so; there was no story. He assumed Hegseth didn’t say this because he had surrounded himself with people who did not even know that he had that power. “They aren’t people who know what to do,” Carroll says.

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. He seemed reluctant to make decisions; scared of doing the wrong thing, paralyzed as he awaited orders from the White House. The Pentagon had ceased, one source says, to be “creative”; it was a mechanism for implementing executive orders. Each new leak contributed to Hegseth’s sense that he was surrounded by moles in league with his enemies. It was “consuming his whole life,” says one source, “when he should have been focused on, you know, our national security.” Unclear on how to move forward, he retreated into spaces where he was comfortable. “Kicked off the day alongside the warriors,” posted Hegseth against an image of himself doing a burpee.

His circle grew smaller and, to people more accustomed to a traditional Defense Department, stranger. Why was his personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, always around? And his brother Phil? Hegseth began including his wife, Jennifer Hegseth, in meetings at the Department of Defense, a development that was reportedly “confusing” to foreign officials. Jenny directed the communications staff to “draw up a PR package” in a way that offended them; they did not work for her. In the secretary’s office are a half-dozen prints known as “jumbos.” Typically these would be pictures of tanks and troops in battle. In Hegseth’s office, instead, are seven giant pictures of Jenny Hegseth, many of them showing her in the same pink dress. “Without those two J ’s,” Hegseth once said to Megyn Kelly, “I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.” The other J was Jesus.

In late March, Hegseth and his team met with the prime minister of Japan. “Who in their right mind,” asked someone on X, “snags a high-level meeting, in a seat of honor, with the Japanese Prime Minster, and dresses and sits disrespectfully like that, with no socks and casual loafers?” The account posted a picture with a circle around Joe Kasper’s unsocked ankle. It was, as one source close to Hegseth described it, “a minor diplomatic scandal.”

The inspector general launched an investigation into Signalgate. “Starting off the day with a motivating run alongside some of America’s finest,” Hegseth posted, below a photo of himself mid-push-up.

More significant scandals followed, mostly attributable to leaks: Hegseth had a second group Signal chat, with his wife and brother and Parlatore, that could not be blamed on Mike Waltz. He had introduced an unsecured internet line into his office. People in the Pentagon were using an obscure Israeli version of Signal that was even less secure than the normal one and had, according to research done by Micah Lee, been hacked while they were using it. John Ullyot, a former press official and vocal supporter of Hegseth, published a piece calling the preceding weeks at the Pentagon “the month from hell,” stating that the DoD’s top ranks were “near collapse.” He was, like everyone else, talking to the strongman at the top. The president, he wrote, “deserves better than the current mishegoss.”


The mishegoss to which he was referring went like this: Dan Caldwell was dismissed on the morning of April 15. Darin Selnick had just arrived in D.C. on a red-eye from San Diego, where his wife was recovering from surgery. He went from the airport to his apartment to the Pentagon. “I had no idea what was going on,” Selnick says, and he didn’t have time to find out. The man with the gold-topped cane came for Selnick late in the day.

Colin Carroll was at the National Theatre that evening, seated beside his wife, most of the way through a performance of Annie. He had heard about Caldwell and thought, Well, maybe he did leak, or maybe it was somehow related to Signalgate. It was in the second act of Annie that he got a text saying Selnick had also been escorted out of the building. All right, Carroll thought, I know exactly what this is now. Joe Kasper is going to fire me. He got a text from a friend suggesting he would be next on the list; he would, he assumed, be fired at work tomorrow. “Should we leave?” his wife asked, but Carroll thought they might as well finish the play.

Carroll messaged Steve Feinberg to say he was next.

“That’s not true,” Feinberg said.

The next morning in the office, according to Carroll, he was faced with a “minor crisis.” Kasper, he says, had been ranting about how his office was full of “Biden politicals.” His staff were worried for their jobs. Were they about to be fired? Should they quit? Carroll was asked to go reassure them. He said he could not reassure them; he had no say over whether they stayed employed. And anyway, as he told Bob Salesses, a deputy director in the Department of Defense, “a guy with a cane is coming to get me.”

“What do you mean?” Salesses said, shortly before not one man with a cane arrived but, astonishingly, two men with three canes. One man in his mid-60s had a missing leg and a cane in each hand. Salesses shook hands with one of them.

“Bob,” Carroll asked, “why are you shaking their fucking hand? They’re going to fire me.”

“This can’t be right,” said Salesses.

“Look,” Carroll told the men, “I’m already packed up.”

What proceeded was what Carroll calls “the slowest perp walk ever.” The two men with the three canes walked, very slowly, through the second-largest office building in the world. Each man made fun of the other for how slow he was. Carroll encountered many people as he walked through the hallway, onto the escalator, off the escalator, through the mess hall, to the basement, where he was interrogated for an hour. On the way out, in the Pentagon lobby, he saw General Michael Guetlein.

“Mike,” Carroll said, “I got fired.”

“That’s really funny,” said the general.

The man with one cane walked him to his car. Carroll offered to drive him back to the building. The man, he says, thanked him profusely.

The days after the languid perp walks were confusing. No officials put forward charges or explanations. It was in a Reuters report that Caldwell learned he was put on leave for an “unauthorized disclosure,” according to an unnamed source. On X, MAGA accounts rejoiced: “The rat,” said a YouTube host in a post retweeted nearly 1,000 times, “has been found.” His profile picture was circulating, and in this context, Caldwell’s dark-rimmed eyes and bad haircut looked cartoon-villain sinister. “Dan Caldwell … was escorted out of the Pentagon today,” Laura Loomer posted. Elon Musk responded simply: “!” Caldwell was embarrassed and angry and, when social-media accounts started posting pictures of his daughters, afraid.

“Hey Joe,” wrote Carroll in a text to Joe Kasper. “Wanted you to know that you are a fucking coward, and I should have handled you my way a month ago. That’s ok though, I don’t think this is going to end the way you thought it would.”

“Hey man,” said Kasper, “I previously delegated the investigation stuff and have nothing to do with decisions … I have zero insight into the decision space here.”

“I just know I didn’t leak anything,” said Carroll, “and the only person who didn’t like me was you.”

There were many aspects of this affair that would strike anyone familiar with leak investigations as strange. There was a marked lack of curiosity regarding the men’s personal belongings: Their devices and homes were not, they say, searched. There was little effort to prevent the alleged leakers from accessing classified information. Though it appeared that he had been tagged as a security threat at least by that night at Annie, Carroll attended a high-level security briefing the next morning. “There are, I don’t know, seven people in the Department of Defense who get the president’s daily briefing. If someone thought I was fucking leaking, maybe, I don’t know, stop that before they let me go?” None was given a polygraph test, which, while discredited and unscientific, remains a technology of which the Pentagon is fond. They were not taken into custody. From the intensity of 16-hour days among friends in a sealed-off building, the men were forced back into quiet days at home, piecing together rumors and unsourced reports, wondering, as Caldwell puts it, “what the heck happened.” The sudden change in pace reminded Caldwell of his transition from the Marines back to civilian life. On the morning of April 15, he had been at the center of a vast and powerful state; by the end of the day, that same bureaucracy was impenetrable to him. He could get no one to tell him what he had done or how he might prove himself innocent.

It was from the media that Caldwell learned he was specifically thought to have leaked the Panama news, an accusation he says he found almost reassuringly absurd. Why would he leak something about Panama? He supported the president’s plans in Panama; the canal was, to him, a legitimate national interest. “Finally,” people in the office had said, “we found a war Dan likes.”

In the Free Press, Caldwell read something more disturbing: According to three anonymous sources, “Caldwell had photographed secret documents on his phone and leaked them to an NBC reporter.” At that point, he says, he was terribly worried that someone had fabricated evidence. He stopped sleeping. While he was at a friend’s house, he received a phone notification that his home-security camera had gone down. The FBI, he assumed, had shown up and disconnected his system. Should he call his mother and tell her he was going to jail? He drove home in terrified silence to find that it was only a power outage.

Despite all that had happened, it was still possible, until April 21, to think Hegseth would change course, double back, admit that this affair had been poorly handled, and invite the men back into the building. None of the three ousted men was emotionally prepared for Hegseth’s comments at the White House Easter Egg Roll. 

Against the sound of light jazz and the murmur of families on the White House lawn, a reporter asked about Signal. “What a big surprise,” said Hegseth, “that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax.” He was riling himself up, getting progressively more intense, settling into a performance. The change that officials describe in Hegseth’s demeanor was evident to anyone watching his interviews, and it was especially evident here, at an event for children in which it ought to have been easy to say he would not be discussing Pentagon business. “Anonymous smears from disgruntled former employees on old news? Doesn’t matter … This is why we’re fighting the fake news media,” he said, pointing at two of his seven kids, one of whom looked bored and one of whom looked skeptical. “This is why we are fighting hoaxsters. Hoaxsters! … That peddle anonymous sources from leakers with axes to grind.”

The next morning, Hegseth was on Fox (Fake
)& Friends; he was, one could assume, speaking to the president. The pictures popped up onscreen: “Dan Caldwell, Darin Selnick, Colin Carroll,” said Brian Kilmeade. “These are the guys you picked.” “Why would it surprise anybody, Brian,” Hegseth said, “if those very same people keep leaking to the very same reporters … to try to sabotage the agenda of the president?” Hegseth was blaming the leaks regarding the second Signalgate controversy on one of the three ejected men. Demonizing his friends was now part of the story he was telling.

Both Caldwell and Selnick use the word devastated to describe their reaction to Hegseth’s public attacks. “He was a good friend of mine for 13 years,” Selnick tells me. “How could he so callously throw us under the bus like this?” Selnick’s wife was mad; after all her husband had done for this man. “What has he been told?” Caldwell wants to know. “Who put what in his head to get him to believe this?”

On this point, people had their suspicions. “I’m talkative and social and gregarious,” Joe Kasper tells me. “That’s my personality.” Kasper says he handed the leak investigation to Tim Parlatore around April 5, more than a week before the three men were ousted, and is not responsible for what came of it. Kasper’s most compelling point is this: He could not possibly be the source of the chaos at the Pentagon, because after he left, it got much, much worse.

In late April, Hegseth announced that Kasper would no longer be chief of staff and would be relegated to “special projects.” Days after that, it was announced he would leave the Pentagon altogether. “Polygraph Threats, Leaks and Infighting: The Chaos Inside Hegseth’s Pentagon,” read a headline in The Wall Street Journal. “It looks like there is a meltdown going on,” said Representative Don Bacon, the first Republican to call for Hegseth’s resignation; he called the secretary “an amateur person.” “Regular workforce adjustments,” the department’s spokesperson assured the press, “are a feature of any highly efficient organization.”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the leak investigation was the behavior of the accused. If it is generally unwise to assume that the guilty keep quiet, it certainly surprised the White House that Caldwell and Carroll gave full-throated defenses of themselves. When leakers go to the media, it is typically to cast themselves as whistleblowers and establish the importance of the information they’ve disseminated. It is atypical for someone denying leak allegations to say, as Carroll says to me, that if he had wanted to embarrass the president, he would have found something better to leak.

“No more gender confusion,” Hegseth said in a late-April speech to servicemembers. “No more pronouns.” With Kasper gone, Tim Parlatore was the face of the investigation. Parlatore, who has both represented and been sued by Mob Wife Ramona Rizzo and was once allegedly called “unstable” by Donald Trump, now had to field questions from an increasingly skeptical White House. Having seen Caldwell’s public denials, Trump advisers wanted to know more about the picture allegedly found on his personal phone. Where was this picture? How had the Pentagon become aware of it? Parlatore reportedly said that someone at the NSA had “wiretapped” Dan Caldwell’s phone. The advisers were shocked. Wiretapping Caldwell’s personal phone without a warrant would be extremely illegal. It would be a much bigger deal than the leak itself. Could he elaborate? He would not elaborate. The White House had “lost faith” in the investigation. A source close to the White House told me that Parlatore had “cooked up” the “batshit crazy” story about the wiretap and told “ten or 12 people” at the highest levels of the DoD, who seemed to believe it. 

According to the Guardian, the story reached Hegseth.

The narrative people were piecing together became, over late April and into June, increasingly unified. Kasper had suspected Carroll of trying to get him fired through an inspector general’s report into his alleged drug use. The leak investigation he led then landed on Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll — people with whom Kasper had clashed — as suspects. Someone within Hegseth’s inner circle told Hegseth that there was evidence of leaking from Caldwell but did not produce said evidence. Parlatore started telling the story about wiretaps. (Parlatore has denied being the source of the wiretap story.)

The episode seemed increasingly to be a kind of official hallucination. “There is no investigation into those men,” a source close to the White House told me, which is to say that an illusory inspector general’s report might have led to a nonexistent investigation. The men remain in a reputational and legal purgatory. How does one conclude an inquiry that consists mostly of unnamed Pentagon sources delivering quotes to the media? How does one clear one’s name from charges never put forward? What are the career prospects for a bureaucrat best known for being publicly escorted from the Pentagon?

It could have been so simple, Selnick, Carroll, and Caldwell told me recently, when we gathered in Selnick’s apartment. If Hegseth had asked them politely to leave — if he had said “things aren’t working out with Joe Kasper” — they would have resigned. It would have been the same outcome with none of the damage. “That’s what pisses me off the most,” Carroll told me. “I don’t want a secretary of Defense that can’t even fucking fire people properly and not have it rebound back on his ass. Pete can’t even be a good villain.”

Chaos comes to us from the Greek for a “gaping void,” a space prior to order and intent. Whether one feels safe with Pete Hegseth alone in his office surrounded by pictures of his wife in a pink dress depends on whether one fears the void more than one fears a Trump White House forcefully executing its plans. “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.”

“Claims of chaos at the Pentagon under Secretary Hegseth are false,” Sean Parnell said in response to queries from this magazine. “When members of the legacy media lie, they disrespect the brave servicemembers and civilians who selflessly serve our country.”

Hegseth still does not have a chief of staff or a deputy chief of staff; according to new leaks, the department is having trouble hiring anyone with relevant experience. Who actually shared the Panama intel with Courtney Kube remains anyone’s guess. Colin Carroll’s bike is still in the Pentagon, and he doesn’t know how to get it back. Darin Selnick is in San Diego, figuring out what to do with a yearlong lease on a D.C. apartment he no longer needs. Joe Kasper says he somehow has a new job at the Pentagon; he’s just now signing the paperwork. In late April a parked $67 million fighter jet slipped off an American aircraft carrier and disappeared into the Red Sea. Mike Waltz was finally reassigned. (“Loomered,” Laura messaged a reporter.) Less than a week after that, on the day the U.S. announced a cease-fire with the Houthis, another American fighter jet landing on the same American aircraft carrier slipped off the boat and disappeared, which, while unfortunate, was only an insignificant percentage of what had been lost in the attacks in Yemen, months of combat that cost over a billion dollars and depleted American munitions others in the Pentagon hoped could be reserved for a potential conflict with China. No one seemed to know what comprised winning or what had justified the deaths of hundreds of Yemeni people, many of them civilians. The department in any case has moved on; in June, Hegseth approved the deployment of 700 Marines in response to isolated protests in Los Angeles. When Hegseth was asked, in congressional hearings, what law gave him the authority to do so, he could not say.

“No more pronouns,” Hegseth told Special Forces at a conference in Tampa. “No more dudes in dresses.”

Laura Loomer got three more people fired but failed, once again, to find employment herself. She found it curious that the people around Trump, the people presumably opposed to her employment, were not telling Trump about the disloyal operatives around him. Her voice was pure acid. “I mean, we’re told these are the best people, right? We were told, what is it? I only hire the best people. Right? That’s what we were told … Only the best people get to work for Trump.”

* This story has been updated to provide additional information about Pete Hegseth’s knowledge of the alleged wiretapping of Dan Caldwell’s phone.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 16, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.

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As she was talking to Trump, Mike Waltz walked into the room. He defended people Loomer wanted out. By the next day, six people were fired, including the head of the NSA.

As much as anyone, Kasper himself was fearful for his job. By April 3, rumors had begun circulating of an inspector general’s report into Kasper, potentially about drug use. Colin Carroll received a call from Politico about the report. Carroll said “no comment” and emailed chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell to warn him about Politico’s research. No one seemed to have evidence that such a report existed, but in an office already simmering with resentment, the rumor was enough. Any report would have originated with a complaint, perhaps from someone who did not like Kasper. It was interesting to Kasper that Politico was able to reach Carroll so easily and that in Carroll’s email about the report Caldwell was copied. He was convinced someone was trying to “get a headline” on him; news of a report even if a report would reveal nothing. He reached out to the Pentagon’s investigative arm. “No one knew what the fuck I was talking about,” he recalls, but the rumor would continue to haunt him.

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