Pete Hegseth Accused of Relying on Illegal Wiretap to Clean House
White House advisers were reportedly shocked when Tim Parlatore, Hegseth's personal lawyer who was tasked with overseeing an investigation into a series of leaks at the Pentagon, told them that a warrantless wiretap was used to find classified documents on the phone of the secretary's then-senior adviser Dan Caldwell.
Caldwell was dismissed last month alongside the chief of staff to the deputy defense secretary, Colin Carroll, and deputy Chief of Staff Darin Selnick. Hegseth was reportedly counselled to dismiss those three by Joe Kasper, his former chief of staff, as part of a detonating power struggle within their office.
Kasper was reportedly close with Parlatore, who was charged with investigating his enemies at work, according to The Guardian.
In mid-April, White House advisers reportedly caught wind that there was evidence Caldwell had taken a photograph of U.S. military plans for Panama on his phone. After Caldwell was removed, they were disturbed that he maintained his innocence, claiming that individuals with 'personal vendettas' against Hegseth's three ousted advisers had 'weaponized' the investigation against them.
Advisers also heard another rumor that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which had been looking into the leaked document, had focused its search on mid-level aides. They hadn't turned their attention to the three top aides until the weekend after they were fired.
When the White House questioned Parlatore about how he'd determined that Caldwell had the leaked document on his phone, he suggested that a wiretap had taken place. He later denied this, and said all information he'd received had been passed to him from officials at the Pentagon. The Guardian noted that a warrantless wiretap, as this allegedly was, would 'almost certainly be unconstitutional.'
While White House advisers found this claim to be untrue, The Guardian reported that the incident significantly undermined Parlatore's credibility. The investigation was transferred to deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, while Parlatore went to work on another case.
Concerns over leaks within the Trump administration have been escalating since before Hegseth's humiliating Signalgate scandal. As the administration has begun to wheel out the lie detectors, morale has plummeted. Carroll, one of Hegseth's ousted aides, said on a podcast last month that his former boss and his team had become 'consumed' by leaks. 'If you look at a pie chart of the secretary's day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably a leak investigation,' he said.
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