Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth’s adviser was escorted out of the Pentagon on Tuesday and placed on administrative depart amid a probe into data leaks on the division.
Dan Caldwell, one among Hegseth’s senior advisers, was positioned on depart after being recognized throughout an ongoing investigation into the leaks on the Pentagon, a protection official advised The Hill.
It’s unclear if Caldwell made the disclosure to a reporter or another person.
The Pentagon stated final month that it began an investigation into “current unauthorized disclosures of nationwide safety data” and that it might make the most of polygraphs as a part of the probe.
“This investigation will start instantly and culminate in a report back to the Secretary of Protection,” Hegseth’s chief of workers Joe Kasper stated in a March 21 memo. “The report will embody a whole report of unauthorized disclosures inside the Division of Protection and proposals to enhance such efforts.”
Even exterior of the Protection Division, President Trump’s administration has sought to crack down on data leaks.
Caldwell, who was a public coverage adviser at international policy-focused assume tank Protection Priorities, was picked by Hegseth as the perfect level of contact in a Signal group chat the place prime U.S. officers mentioned upcoming strikes towards Houthi rebels in Yemen, as was revealed by The Atlantic’s prime editor, who was inadvertently added to the thread final month.
Previous to serving on the Pentagon, Caldwell was an govt director of Involved Veterans for America, a registered 501(c)(4) entity that was beforehand headed by Hegseth.
Caldwell, a Marine Corps veteran who was deployed in Iraq, has come beneath criticism from some conservatives for believing that the U.S. ought to downsize its army presence in Europe and a few parts of the Middle East.
“And I feel our pursuit of primacy has finally made us weaker as a rustic,” Caldwell stated late final yr.
“It has led us to undertake international misadventures just like the Iraq Warfare, to remain for much longer in Afghanistan and to try to show some of the tribal nations on the earth, a nation with a historical past of rejecting exterior interference and affect for millennia, right into a liberal democracy, to repeat the identical errors time and again in locations like Libya and Syria,” he stated in an interview with the Financial Times revealed in December 2024.
Reuters first reported on Caldwell being placed on depart.
Ellen Mitchell contributed to this report.
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