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Secret Musk Pentagon Briefing Nixed by Trump Led to Ouster of Longtime Hegseth Associates

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Two longtime associates of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, appointed to senior roles at the Department of Defense at the outset of President Donald Trump’s second term, were escorted from the Pentagon on Wednesday amid an escalating investigation into leaked intelligence that reportedly included classified information.

Deputy Chief of Staff Darin Selnick and Dan Caldwell, a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Defense, both previously worked at Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), where Hegseth served as CEO from 2012 to 2016.

“The leaks under investigation include 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,” Politico reported.

But Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin reported that the leaked intel investigation was launched “on March 21 after a March 20 New York Times story detailed plans to allow Elon Musk to attend a briefing in the ‘Tank’ with members of the Joint Chiefs to hear about future China war plans.”

RELATED: ‘This Is a Big Deal’: Top Hegseth Advisor ‘Escorted’ Out of the Pentagon Amid Leak Probe

According to Axios, news of the planned secret Musk-China briefing angered President Trump.

“Musk or Hegseth didn’t just decide to call off that briefing after the leak. President Trump himself ordered staffers to kill it,” the news outlet reported.

“What the f— is Elon doing there? Make sure he doesn’t go,” Trump said, Axios reported, citing a top official.

Caldwell was “being investigated for ‘unauthorized disclosure’ of classified information,” according to Griffin’s reporting.

Selnick, who was installed at the Pentagon on January 20, was recently promoted after serving as the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. He worked at CVA from 2013 to 2017, and again from 2019 to 2024, according to his LinkedIn page and his Pentagon biography. He also served in the first Trump administration and the George W. Bush administration.

Caldwell had served at CVA, first as policy director starting in 2013, and later as executive director, according to the Associated Press.

Caldwell “was the staff member designated as Hegseth’s point person in the Signal messaging chat that top Trump administration national security officials, including Hegseth, used to convey plans for a military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen,” the AP added. “The chat, set up by national security adviser Michael Waltz, included a number of top Cabinet members and came to light because Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, was added to the group.”

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene to Constituents: ‘Sit and Listen’ at Town Hall or Be ‘Thrown Out’

ABC News’ Martha Raddatz described (video below) Caldwell as “so close to Hegseth [that] the Secretary made him the point of contact with the White House for strikes on the Houthis in Yemen during that Signal chat last month.”

Critics weighed in.

Former Republican and former federal prosecutor Ron Filipkowski, the editor-in-chief of the MeidasTouch Network, alleged that Caldwell is “going to be fired because he outed the fact that Musk arranged with Hegseth to get a top secret briefing at the Pentagon. Trump and his Chief of Staff didn’t even know about it.”

Veteran and veterans’ activist Paul Rieckhoff observed, “This CVA network, where they were/are in place, and what’s happened to them today should be a much bigger story.”

He pointed to a previous post where he had written: “Maybe overdue accountability is finally starting after SignalGate. Dan Caldwell is well-known in Washington as the former head of Hegseth’s former partisan political group, Concerned Veterans of America.”

“They are not just radical,” he added. “They are sloppy and incompetent. That puts our national security at risk. And has our enemies celebrating.”

Watch video from ABC News below or at this link:

READ MORE: Trump Agenda Mirrors Founders’ Grievances Against ‘Mad King’: Legal Experts

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Trump Is Screaming Another Coup Out Loud: Columnist

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President Donald Trump has a plan to steal the midterm elections, argues The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Will Bunch, and he’s “screaming it out loud.”

Bunch writes that “nothing is scarier than when the 47th president speaks the truth about what’s really on his mind. Because the only thing that’s in Trump’s brain right now is stealing the November midterm election, by changing the rules in his favor…or worse.”

It should not have been surprising that Trump called the bipartisan housing bill he is now refusing to sign a “big yawn,” before he embarked on promoting his SAVE America Act legislation, which critics call a voter suppression bill.

Trump has made clear that that bill is his top priority, and has said so repeatedly. He’s even declared that if the SAVE America Act becomes law, Republicans will not lose an election for the next 50 years.

On top of the SAVE America Act are Trump’s executive orders, Bunch notes, which include effectively ordering an end to most mail-in voting.

“That effort suffered a bit of a setback Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can continue to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive after the polls have closed,” writes Bunch. “But that will not stop the Trump regime from politicizing the U.S. Postal Service ahead of November.”

“Last week, Postmaster General David Steiner told Congress that USPS plans to not deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t turn their voter rolls over to the Trump regime, a demand that many governors have resisted so far.”

Then there is Trump’s use of the Intelligence Community.

“The Trump regime has been signaling for months that it sees the U.S. intelligence community — spy agencies like the CIA — not as a tool for finding out what comes next in the Persian Gulf, or if or when China is invading Taiwan, or when Vladimir Putin’s Russian empire will fall,” says Bunch. “No, Trump wants secret agents who can creatively invent theories of foreign-born election fraud that would demand a strongman response.”

Bunch points to then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s appearance in Fulton County, Georgia, “to oversee an FBI raid of voting materials from the 2020 election that Trump, with no evidence, continues to dispute. That link made clear that the regime is looking to create links to foreign actors.”

Gabbard’s replacement, Bunch notes, is Bill Pulte, who has no requisite experience for the job. Pulte “showed up Monday and immediately began firing current staffers, with a rumored list of hundreds. The steep reduction in eyeballs on the world’s trouble spots is disturbing, but what’s even more alarming is the one person Pulte has hired.”

Bunch points to the newsletter SpyTalk, which describes Pulte’s new chief of staff, Christina Norton, as “a party-loving MAGA activist with no background in national security issues” who previously ran what she called “the largest election integrity operation the Republican Party has ever seen.”

He surmises that Pulte and Norton “will have one job: investigating fantastical ‘foreign election plots’ that will be cited to justify radical measures like sending troops to polling places, seizing voting machines, or worse.”

“Now Trump is not only staging another coup, but he is yelling about it, in your face,” Bunch concludes, writing that there is nothing Trump will not do to prevent Democrats from “investigating how he and his family have made billions of dollars off the American presidency.”

 

Image via Reuters 

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One Group Will Decide the Midterms — Democrats Must ‘Do the Work’ to Win Them: Strategist

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A Democratic strategist is warning Democratic voters against complacency, arguing that the “blowout” midterm many are expecting could vanish — and the fix rests with one key demographic.

Writing at The Hill, Celinda Lake says that Republicans still have a massive war chest, Trump loyalists are still winning big, and redistricting efforts are likely to benefit the GOP.

“Democrats should be worried,” says Lake. “Although President Trump’s approval ratings have been in the doldrums and inflation is angering MAGA voters, the fragile agreement with Iran might help Trump’s numbers and revive Republicans’ chances in November.”

Lake says that Democrats should not rely on Trump administration “missteps” to take back control of Congress in November, but rather must “swell” their turnout at the ballot box.

That turnout relies on women voters — and specifically, those women she calls “skippers” and “flippers.”

Skippers are Democratic voters who did not turn out in 2024. Flippers are disaffected Republicans who could choose to vote Democratic.

“Trump has a serious problem when it comes to women’s votes,” says Lake. Citing a recent New York Times-Siena poll, she notes that nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of women disapprove of Trump’s performance. Another poll showed Democrats with a 21-point lead among women over Republicans. And 60 percent of young women disapprove of Trump as well.

There were millions of Democratic skippers, says Lake. And even convincing a small percentage of flippers to vote Democratic could “swing the outcome” of the election, as they’re not just adding one Democratic vote but reducing one Republican vote.

“My team’s analysis of 2024 exit polls showed that if less than 2 percent of Trump’s White non-college educated voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had gone for Harris, she would have won the election,” Lake writes. “It’s likely that flipping a similarly small percentage of women would make the difference this year, even in newly-minted Republican districts.”

Other polls show “a majority of non-college-educated White Americans now disapprove of Trump’s performance.”

Lake warns that while Republicans ought to be frightened by these numbers, bad polling numbers do not automatically translate into votes for Democrats.

“We need to reach and persuade these women to turn out, especially if the Iran war actually ends and gas prices fall,” she writes. “Democrats must do the work to mobilize skippers and create flippers. If we want to lock up a victory in November, these women hold the keys.”

 

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Trump Floats a New Workaround for His Latest Supreme Court Defeat — It Has a Problem

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President Donald Trump, appearing not to grasp the legal effect of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion that struck down his executive order on birthright citizenship, just hours later floated a workaround.

“The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship.”

Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney responded to the president’s message, writing, “Trump incorrectly suggests Congress can act to limit birthright citizenship without a constitutional amendment, which the majority foreclosed.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 6-3 majority, said, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community.”

“The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” he added. “We keep that promise today.”

As The New York Times noted, Trump “wrongly asserted that ‘no long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary.'”

And as NBC News reported, a constitutional amendment would be required to change the law. That means a two-thirds majority in the House and the Senate — plus ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, noted that he was “very disappointed” with the ruling, as Alternet reported. But, contrary to Trump’s take, Johnson said that it is time to amend the Constitution over birthright citizenship, which he argued has been “grossly abused in recent years.”

Noting that Trump had attended oral arguments for the birthright citizenship case, journalist Gabe Fleisher wrote that “Trump has now responded to the birthright citizenship opinion, but does not seem to have understood its holding. Trump says that birthright citizenship could still be undone by statute, without a constitutional amendment, even though a 5-justice majority said the opposite.”

Forbes’ Mark Joyella responded to Trump’s claim, writing, “Ya gotta love how little Trump understands how this country works.”

Journalist Michael McGough asked, “Did he even consult with a lawyer before coming out with this?”

 

Image via Reuters 

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