Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon's 'month from hell'

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The Washington Post

True Crime, News, Politics

4.1 • 4.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this episode, The Washington Post's Libby Casey, James Hohmann and JM Rieger discuss the latest allegations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared information about military plans on a group chat – this time, one that reportedly included his wife, brother and personal lawyer. The crew breaks down Hegseth's attempts at damage control, and why he's still in the job.

Then, we go inside the reported chaos, screaming matches and proposed DOGE cuts at the Pentagon. And a former Hegseth aide says he was pushed out by a faction of Defense Department employees with an ulterior motive.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Look what happened.
0:02.0	Is this crazy?
0:04.0	We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history.
0:08.5	Make America great Hickley.
0:11.6	How can you be against them?
0:16.9	Welcome to a brand new episode of Sidebar from The Washington Post.
0:20.1	I'm your host, Libby Casey,
0:21.6	here with James Holman, columnist, and editorial writer and J.M. Rieger, senior video journalist covering
0:28.3	a lot of politics. All right, check out these words, total chaos and the month from hell is how
0:36.9	a former Pentagon spokesman describes the Department
0:39.8	of Defense under Pete Hegeseth. And the guy saying this is so Trumpy that he wrote a book last
0:46.7	year called the Biden-Harris betrayal, Weak and Woke on the World Stage. So the point of that is,
0:52.6	this is not a Biden holdover.
0:54.4	This is not a quote unquote deep state guy.
0:57.8	This is someone who left the Defense Department and is now talking about his concerns about
1:02.7	how Pete Hegsseth's Defense Department is doing.
1:06.0	And Hegset is back in the group chat.
1:09.3	Again, this is not an old news story.
1:11.7	This is a new news story, a signal group chat sharing details of U.S. military plans.
1:16.2	This time, gentleman, with his wife, brother, and personal lawyer, that story from the New York Times on Sunday.
1:22.9	Now, Hegseth denies sharing anything classified just like the last time this was a story, but there's a lot to
1:28.6	dig into here. So we're going to talk about why people are leaving the Department of Defense,
	...

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