Three leading officials at the Pentagon have been fired (placed on “administrative leave”) and responded with a protest message. These are not the only people under investigation, but they issued a protest. EIR will follow this story.
The three are:
• Dan Caldwell, a senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was escorted out of the Pentagon by security officers and had his building access suspended pending further investigation, Politico reported on April 15, citing two unnamed officials.
• Darin Selnick, the Pentagon’s deputy chief of staff, was also suspended as part of the same probe and escorted out of the building, according to one of the officials.
• A day later, Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was reportedly suspended from his job.
According to Politico, all three are targets of a leaked investigation involving military operational plans for the Panama canal, a second carrier headed to the Red Sea, Elon Musk’s controversial visit to the Pentagon, and pausing the collection of intelligence to Ukraine, one of the unnamed officials said. According to the April 15 Politico report, Hegseth’s Chief of Staff Joe Kasper signed a memo asking the Pentagon’s director for defense intelligence to look into unauthorized disclosures, and approved the use of polygraphs.
As to who these three guys are, Politico reported the following:
• Caldwell, a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War who previously worked at the Defense Priorities think tank, played a key role in advising the Pentagon on Ukraine. Hegseth—in the now infamous Signal chat with national security leaders that accidentally included a journalist—named Caldwell the Pentagon’s primary contact to coordinate U.S. military strikes on Yemen.
• Selnick, earlier this year, also performed the duties of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. He served in the White House and the Department of Veterans Affairs in the first Trump administration. He’s also a former senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America, which Hegseth used to lead.
• Carroll, a Marine Corps Reserve officer, recently worked at Anduril, a defense contractor that specializes in autonomous systems. Politico has reported that he was fired by the Biden administration for creating a hostile environment while chief operating officer of the Pentagon’s former Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.
Then on April 18, Politico reported that Chief of Staff Kasper will be leaving his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to an unnamed senior administration official. Supposedly, some at the Pentagon had started to notice a rivalry between Kasper and the fired advisers. “Joe didn’t like those guys,” said one defense official. “They all have different styles. They just didn’t get along. It was a personality clash.”
The three fired officials issued a joint statement on X: “We are incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service at the Department of Defense ended,” they said. “Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door. All three of us served our country honorably in uniform—for two of us, this included deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, based on our collective service, we understand the importance of information security and worked every day to protect it. At this time, we still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with.”
Also, a five-and-a-half-minute video posted on X on April 15 by someone calling himself Shadow of Ezra, reports that “Caldwell didn’t toe the usual line on foreign policy. He openly challenged the Washington consensus on Israel, saying the U.S. hasn’t had an honest conversation on the topic in over two decades.” Caldwell “also opposed dragging America into war with Iran, famously stating that when Israel is attacked, it’s Israel—not America—under fire. Tucker Carlson called Caldwell a man of ‘genuine integrity, high intelligence, and principle,’ praising his deep commitment to the country and describing him as ‘a wonderful person.’”
In the video, Caldwell said “it is absolutely not in our interest to get involved in another major war in the Middle East. That would be disastrous for us. It’d be disastrous for Israel as well, too. People in northern Israel who are in range of Hezbollah rockets would pay a huge price.” He ridiculed “people like Nikki Haley” who claimed “that when Israel was attacked, America was attacked. That is not true. Israel was attacked. This was not an attack on the United States. Yes, Americans were killed. There are American hostages, but this is not the same as an attack on the United States. And I point that out because when you start adopting that mentality where an attack on every one of our partners or allies or everything bad that happens around the world, that’s how you get into situations like we were in the early 2000s with Iraq and other places like that.”
