White House denies report on replacing Pete Hegseth
The White House is aggressively pushing back on a report claiming that a search has begun for a suitable candidate to replace Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth after it was revealed that he’d been involved in yet another group chat to discuss sensitive defense information with people who had no need to know anything about it, News.Az reports citing The Independent.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took to X at 1:32 pm on Monday to denounce an NPR report, citing a single U.S. official, that stated how the White House was starting the process to find a successor for the former Fox News weekend host, who Trump tapped to lead the massive agency shortly after winning the 2024 presidential election.
She called the NPR report “total FAKE NEWS based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about” and referenced Trump’s statements from earlier in the day when he reiterated his confidence in Hegseth, despite the newly-unearthed Signal chat scandal, which was reported on over the weekend by The New York Times.
Hegseth’s tenure at the Defense Department has been mired in controversy from the start, but the Pentagon leadership was rocked this past weekend not just by the Times report on how Hegseth had shared details of an upcoming airstrike against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen with his wife, brother and personal lawyer, but also by a first-person op-ed by his former top spokesperson describing “chaos” at the headquarters of the U.S. defense establishment.
Similar news
