Hegseth aide upended Pentagon leak inquiry with false wiretap claims

The Guardian

6 days ago

Days before Pete Hegseth fired three top aides last month over a Pentagon leak investigation into the disclosure of classified materials, according to four people familiar with the episode, a recently hired senior adviser said he could help with the inquiry.
The adviser, Justin Fulcher, suggested to Hegseth's then chief of staff Joe Kasper and Hegseth's personal lawyer, Tim Parlatore, that he knew of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified the leakers.
Fulcher offered to share the supposed evidence as long as he could help run the investigation, three of the people said. But when he sat down with agents over a week later, it became clear he had no evidence of a wiretap, and the Pentagon had been duped.
The problem was that before investigators debunked the claims by Fulcher, who was previously found to have embellished his resume, the damage was done: Trump advisers had been told by Parlatore about 'smoking gun' evidence incriminating three aides, and Hegseth had already fired them.
The Guardian revealed last month that there were unsubstantiated NSA warrantless wiretap claims underpinning the leak investigation, but its origin story and the involvement of Fulcher in the controversy has not been previously reported.
Fulcher has said this account is not correct. In a statement, he said he never suggested there were NSA wiretaps or that he had access to wiretap records. 'I never approached Parlatore, Kasper or anyone else offering 'surveillance evidence' and did not ask to join an investigation on that or any other basis,' he said.
The extraordinary episode adds to the growing portrait of dysfunction inside Hegseth's front office, which is involved in setting the direction of a department that has a budget of nearly $1tn and oversees more than 2 million troops around the world.
The investigation prompted Hegseth to fire senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief Darin Selnick and the deputy secretary's chief of staff Colin Carroll, creating a leadership vacuum filled by Ricky Buria, the ex-junior military aide to Hegseth considered by the White House to be a liability.
And with the implosion of the leak investigation adding to the fraught tensions among his aides, Hegseth is expected to face bruising questions about his ability to manage the Pentagon when he appears at a series of so-called defense posture hearings starting this week on Capitol Hill.
A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on the reporting in this story. A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Fulcher started at the Pentagon on the first day of the Trump administration as the lead staffer for Doge ('department of government efficiency'), armed with a top secret/sensitive compartmented information clearance and a mandate from Elon Musk to oversee mass cuts at the defense department, the people said.
The Doge team were given offices a few doors down from the defense secretary's offices, and when Fulcher first introduced himself to Hegseth's senior staff, he talked about having once worked for the NSA and how he had run various startups, the people said.
The senior staff's relationship with Fulcher was collegial – unlike those of Doge staffers with other agencies, which were adversarial – and no one checked whether he had connections to the NSA. They also did not follow up on a Forbes article published in March that concluded he had embellished parts of his resume.
Ironically, that close working relationship was initially the cause of his downfall after he was seen by Musk and the Doge leadership, including Steve Davis and spokesperson Katie Miller, as too close to the defense department and not willing enough to make drastic cuts, the people said.
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At the start of April, Musk replaced Fulcher as the Doge lead at the Pentagon. But Hegseth liked Fulcher, who had recently traveled with the secretary on an official trip to Panama, and Fulcher was brought on as a senior adviser.
The details of Fulcher's responsibilities were not clear externally or internally, and he earned the nickname 'Disa' standing for 'director of suspicious affairs' – apparently a play on the acronym for the Defense Information Systems Agency.
Around that time, Hegseth had ordered an investigation into the leaks, with the central focus being on the disclosure to a reporter of an allegedly top secret document that outlined options for Donald Trump to 'reclaim' the Panama canal, including with using US troops on the ground.
It was not immediately clear why Fulcher chose to become involved in the investigation, but several days after he was let go as the Doge lead, he went to Kasper and expressed a willingness to help with the investigation, which Kasper attributed to him wanting to prove his worth, two of the people said.
Kasper told Fulcher to go to Parlatore, who had been tasked with supervising and managing the investigation. When Fulcher approached Parlatore, he suggested that he knew of NSA intercepts supposedly showing that Caldwell had leaked using his personal phone, the two people said.
Looking back on the chain of events, three people familiar with the conversations described Fulcher's claims as conveniently dovetailing with prevailing suspicions at the time about Caldwell printing lots of documents and his efforts to have the leak investigation shut down.
Still, a cursory check at that stage into the NSA claims would have shown them to be false. Pentagon investigators concluded in the weeks after the firings that there was no authorized or unauthorized wiretap through the NSA, which is a component of the defense department.
The claims were relayed to Hegseth and the White House as being accurate. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing the three aides had been fired as they 'leaked against their boss', while Hegseth predicted on Fox News they would be prosecuted although there has been no referral to date to the justice department.