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White House reportedly told Pete Hegseth's team to stop doing polygraph tests after complaint
As Hegseth became embroiled in the Signalgate scandal, his team began administering polygraph tests in April to those in his inner circle, U.S. officials, and others with knowledge of the matter, according to The Washington Post.
The White House's intervention came after Hegseth's senior advisor, Patrick Weaver, raised concerns to officials that he could be the next target of the defense secretary 's polygraph campaign, the sources said.
Weaver, who held posts in the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Council in Donald Trump 's first administration, allegedly grew irate after learning he might be ordered to take a polygraph test.
Weaver remains an adviser to Hegseth, according to The Post.
The alleged spate of polygraphs came during a tumultuous period where Hegseth fired three senior Pentagon appointees – Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll and Darin Selnick – who he accused of leaking classified and sensitive information to the media.
The men deny any accusations of wrongdoing, and Hegseth's team has presented no evidence to back its claims.
Just days later, the defense secretary was engulfed in Signalgate after top officials mistakenly included The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal group chat, giving him a front-row seat to discussions about impending U.S. strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen back in March.
Multiple tests were carried out over several weeks, with approval from Hegseth and his private attorney, Tim Parlatore, the sources said. However, a Trump administration official intervened with a phone call, instructing the Defense Department to halt the campaign.
Members of the Joint Service Interagency Advisory Group, a specialized Pentagon team assembled to address national security issues like drug cartels, had already been administered tests prior to Weaver's complaint, the sources added.
Senior Hegseth advisor Colonel Ricky Buria took a polygraph test and received inconclusive results, the sources said, which officials first told the Guardian in May.
Navy Admiral Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, the director of the Joint Staff, have also faced the threat of polygraph tests, those with knowledge of the matter said.
The Pentagon declined to provide a comment to the newspaper on reports of polygraph testing, citing an 'ongoing investigation.'
'The Fake News Media's obsession with months-old workplace gossip is a reflection of the sad and pathetic state of 'journalism' in Washington,' spokesperson Sean Parnell said.
Despite facing multiple scandals, Trump continues to publicly support Hegseth.
'A lot of people swirl shit to try to take him down, honestly — but talk of drama with him is overblown,' a senior White House official told Politico on Monday. 'What I know is that everyone who matters has his back completely, currently.'
However, some Trump allies and MAGA supporters have expressed concerns that the defense secretary's controversies could damage the administration's credibility.
One source close to Hegseth said he is being urged to make peace with the employees he has ousted.
'If there's any chance at Pete resetting and ensuring that whatever time he has left in this position is well served, he's got to do it — otherwise Pete is just doubling down on the lie,' they told Politico.
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The Independent
11 minutes ago
- The Independent
Sen. Josh Hawley wants to exclude ‘Biden voters' from $600 Trump tariff rebate checks
Senator Josh Hawley says the legislation he proposes will send $600 tariff rebate checks to Americans, but not to 'Biden voters,' only to 'Trump blue-collar voters.' 'Well, you wouldn't give it to everybody, you'd give it to the working people,' the Missouri Republican told far-right podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on Tuesday. 'You'd give it to our people.' 'I mean, you know, the rich people don't need it … what I mean by that is all those Democrat donors of Wall Street, all these hedge fund guys, who all hate the tariffs, by the way.' The senator introduced the American Worker Rebate Act of 2025 on July 28. It proposes refundable tax credits of at least $600 per adult and dependent child, funded by tariff revenues, with a phase-out for incomes exceeding $75,000 for singles and $150,000 for joint filers. Checks could exceed that if revenues are higher. He said on Bannon's War Room podcast, 'We're on track to raise over $150 billion from tariff revenues this year alone, this calendar year alone.' 'My view is, we ought to give a portion [of] that back to our working-class blue-collar voters who powered the Trump revolution, who got this president into office multiple times, and who are the backbone of this nation.' Tariffs are imposed on imports by U.S. companies, which then pass much of the increased costs on to American consumers through higher prices on goods. Any rebate check would likely be swallowed up by those price increases. In the first half of the year, companies rushed to stock up on goods and inputs from overseas in preparation for the impending imposition of tariffs. This has so far prevented large price hikes, but those inventories will begin to dwindle, and soon the cost of goods is expected to start creeping up. 'Biden has crushed these people,' Hawley claimed, turning his ire toward the previous administration. 'What a legacy for Donald Trump to say, 'I'm gonna take a portion of this massive money' that he's raising on these tariffs, and return it to the people who run this country and are gonna build our future.' Hawley's plan, like the pandemic stimulus checks of the first Trump administration, has strict caps on who is eligible for a rebate payment. 'It'd be $600 for every adult and child, so if you've got a big family, you're gonna get more,' he said. 'And you'd phase it out for income, you know? So again, the wealthy — you start making six figures, you get into the big six figures — you'd phase the thing out.' 'So this is not going to the hedge fund managers or all the Biden voters. This is not going to the Wall Street kingpins. So they don't need any of it,' Hawley continued. Hawley failed to note that President Joe Biden was not on the ballot in the 2024 election. He was replaced on the Democratic Party ticket by Vice President Kamala Harris. Continuing to rail against the previous administration, he said: 'This is going to the Trump blue collar voters, the people who Joe Biden crushed, the people who didn't get a raise under Joe Biden for four long years, the people who cannot afford their gas, because Joe Biden shut down our energy, who can't afford their groceries, because Joe Biden drove up the price of everything.' He added: 'And it is a message from us to them, from Trump to these folks that he is here to deliver for them.' The Tax Foundation reported on Monday that Trump's tariffs will raise the costs of food for Americans in addition to the more widely covered impact on the cost of manufactured goods. In 2024, the US imported approximately $221 billion in food products, 74 percent of which ($163 billion) would be subject to the Trump tariffs. Some popular food products, such as bananas and coffee, are almost entirely imported. Critics of the plan to issue $600 rebate checks to Americans argue that the money should instead be used to pay down the national debt, which has increased by another $3.4 trillion thanks to Trump's 'Great, Big, Beautiful Bill,' according to the Congressional Budget Office. Others note that this is a repeat of the Covid-19 pandemic recovery stimulus measures implemented by both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, which sent out direct checks to individuals. In both instances, there were complaints that the relief provided by the money was short-lived, and Republicans criticized President Biden's $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package, 'The American Rescue Plan,' specifically for stoking rapid inflation. Concerning the Hawley plan, its similarities to earlier initiatives and the inflationary pressure they fueled, opinion writer Josh Barro quipped on X: 'The stimulus will continue until inflation improves.' The U.S. economy experienced a surprising three percent expansion between April and June, offering a temporary rebound from a first-quarter downturn linked to disruptions from Trump's trade disputes. Yet, despite this growth, the report's underlying data suggests a continued apprehension among American consumers and businesses. This caution is rooted in the economic uncertainty created by Trump's tariff plans.
New Statesman
12 minutes ago
- New Statesman
Trump in the wilderness
A video showing Donald Trump dictating social media posts to an aide while watching Kamala Harris deliver a speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2024 offers a glimpse of a magician at work. Seated at a table along with a dozen or so of his campaign team, the presidential candidate – sipping from a bottle of Coca-Cola with what appears to be a plate of chicken nuggets before him – is in charge. His comments are typed up by the aide, corrected and approved, then posted on X and Truth Social. Working as a clairvoyant channelling the American unconscious, he voices the fears that gave him a popular majority. 'We've got to get to the border, inflation and crime,' he says. His tweets may be peppered with exclamation marks and capital letters, but he speaks softly. The mood in the room is calm. The message of the footage – broadcast in October 2024 as part of a documentary series, Art of the Surge, backed by Tucker Carlson – is clear. Trump was the sole author of the regime change that took place with his sweeping victory last November. However, to view him as a mere political thaumaturge, a sorcerer of social media, is to understate his historical importance. If that were so, he would be an anomaly – as liberals would like to believe. But, six months along from his second inauguration, there is no going back to the world as it was before him. Trump, a harbinger of things to come, has released forces that neither he nor the baffled remnants of the liberal order have any idea how to control. In a letter to a friend, Hegel described seeing Napoleon the day before the French emperor crushed the Prussian army in the Battle of Jena in 1806 and recognising him as 'world history on horseback'. Trump on his golf cart has a similar significance – without embodying any emerging rationality of the kind that the windy German philosopher believed was unfolding in history. Driving more erratically than any Napoleon, Trump is unloosing a new logic in politics and history. There will be no restoration of the ancien régime. Another round of liberal lawfare will achieve nothing of substance. The weaponisation of the courts by the Biden administration did not prevent Trump's return to office. Lawfare is a game anyone can play. In his first term, he appointed three conservative judges to the Supreme Court, stacking it in his favour. By making judicial institutions targets for political capture, liberal legalism signed its own death warrant. Trump is eviscerating any institution that could inhibit executive authority. He has shut down the Pentagon's internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, a much-respected organisation founded more than 50 years ago, shrunk the National Security Council and downgraded Fema, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He has fired senior intelligence officials, including the heads of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command. These purges ensure that his successor – Republican or Democrat – will inherit a polity more closely resembling an authoritarian democracy than a constitutional republic. Stale chatter of a rerun of fascism is misguided. The mutation in American democracy is deeper and more enduring. The fascist regimes of interwar Europe and Asia could be decapitated by removing their leaders. But Trump's removal would leave a society too polarised for consensual governance, while the international system in which a liberal superpower could function has imploded. An American-led financial system is already history. In the eyes of the rest of the world, the US is drifting inexorably towards default. As Elon Musk noted after his expulsion from the administration, his Doge department achieved little and Trump's 'big beautiful bill' will add trillions to the spiralling federal deficit. A crisis may have been staved off by the US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, a George Soros associate involved in the 1992 Black Wednesday bet against the pound. But as Musk himself demonstrated, no one lasts long in Trump's inner circle. In recent weeks he has turned his ire on Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve central bank – another institution he aims to gut. The current weakness of the dollar – following its worst year in modern history – is structural, a by-product of chronic American political dysfunction. That does not mean any successor is on the horizon. Attempts by Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) to fashion an alternative have repeatedly failed. China's renminbi is too tightly controlled and illiquid. The president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde's suggestion that the dollar could be overthrown by the euro is unworkable. The second-largest global reserve asset, surpassing the euro, is gold. Around a fifth of the world's production is disappearing into the vaults of central banks. Unlike dollar assets, the ancient precious metal cannot be sequestrated in financial sanctions. Unlike crypto, it cannot be hacked. There is mounting pressure to repatriate gold reserves held by the Fed or Western banks closely associated with it. India and Turkey have already repatriated bars from London and New York, and there are influential voices in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland demanding that they follow suit. A multipolar currency system is emerging, in which Keynes's 'barbarous relic' plays a key role. In domestic terms, Trump's protectionism is a double-edged sword. When properly designed and implemented, tariffs can protect jobs, though always at a cost to the consumer. Trump's tariffs risk inflaming inflation with little benefit to employment. As living standards fall, voters may swing leftwards – not back to Bidenite progressivism, but to more radical versions of Trumpism, which in many respects resembles a reprisal of Argentine Peronism. A premonitory tremor can be detected in the adoption in the New York mayoral primary of Zohran Mamdani, who promises redistribution, rent freezes and welfare spending. Musk has proposed founding a new 'America' party with fiscal conservatism as one of its central themes. But would American voters support the savage reductions in federal entitlements – social security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, food banks – that would be necessary to get anywhere near sustainable levels of federal debt? A time may come when the Argentine president Javier Milei's agenda of slashing the state could marshal majority support, but only after a terrifying brush with national bankruptcy. Whatever comes to pass, pre-Trump America is irretrievable. The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there. [See also: There is one man that Donald Trump fears] Just as Juan Perón courted labour unions and the poor, Trump has mobilised the cast-offs of the neoliberal era. As in Argentina, their hopes may be destined to be disappointed. Visiting Buenos Aires in the Nineties, I asked a former Peronist minister what the next development in world politics would be. Without hesitation, he replied: 'The decadence of market power.' A generation later, the old man's prophecy has been fulfilled. Western capitalism has become a self-undermining system. Great concentrations of wealth exist in China and Russia, but they are subordinate to the objectives of government. Billionaire business leaders who display too much independence are swiftly disciplined. In China they may be charged with corruption and executed, or like the founder of Alibaba, Jack Ma, spend years in obscurity and disgrace before they are rehabilitated in a demonstration of Xi Jinping's power. In Vladimir Putin's Russia, wayward plutocrats have a habit of falling out of high windows or suffering fatal indigestion. Neoliberal capitalism allows its oligarchs to locate their businesses in countries that are not necessarily friendly to the West, as Musk has done with his Tesla gigafactory in Shanghai, while allowing the same countries into critical parts of national infrastructure. A faction of Maga led by Steve Bannon seeks to break the hold of corporate power and prioritise the interest of workers. Mainstream opinion discounts Bannon as an inconsequential, marginal figure. But as Joshua Green showed in Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, Bannon was crucial in rescuing the languishing 2016 campaign. It was he who provided the ideological script – an anti-modernist, ethno-nationalist narrative of Western decline – that opened up Trump's path to power. Trump's rise was political blowback against globalisation. Combined with offshoring production, free trade devastated America's manufacturing capacity. But protectionism cannot revive the patterns of industry and employment that free trade destroyed. Absent an industrial strategy and an educational system that steers young people into science and engineering rather than law and finance, the US will be locked in economic decline. The world-changing technologies that came out of Silicon Valley will be used for financial engineering rather than building new industries. Through his podcast War Room, Bannon continued to shape the current direction of travel in the administration. At the end of May, he described the Department of Justice's decision to close the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein as 'a catastrophic mistake' that could cost the Republicans up to 26 seats in the 2026 midterms, and possibly even the presidency in 2028. Bannon was correct: following the revelation in the Wall Street Journal that Trump is himself named in the Epstein files, the president is facing the biggest revolt of his political career – from within his own base. Having led his supporters into the looking-glass world of fake news and boundless conspiracy, Trump finds himself trapped in it. Unless the populists prevail, Bannon predicts, there will be no fundamental change in the ruling American regime. The casualties of globalisation will be abandoned. The rich will retreat to their gated enclaves, and the post-industrial wastelands will spread. [See also: Donald Trump, the king of Scotland] In 'Gerontion' (1920), TS Eliot wrote of: 'These with a thousand small deliberations/Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,/Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,/With pungent sauces, multiply variety/In a wilderness of mirrors.' Eliot's image – the 'wilderness of mirrors' – was invoked by James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence at the CIA from 1955 for nearly two decades, to describe the labyrinthine world of espionage. A lifelong poetry-lover who knew Eliot, Angleton co-founded a quarterly journal of verse in 1939 when a student at Yale, publishing ee cummings, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and WH Auden. Traumatised by his betrayal by the British double agent Kim Philby, a long-time drinking companion whom he seems to have trusted implicitly, Angleton launched a mole hunt that came close to wrecking the CIA, from which he was forced to resign in December 1974. He died in 1987 of lung cancer, taking his secrets – and his paranoid delusions – with him. But his borrowing from Eliot was prescient about both modern America and a larger fracturing across the West. One school of thought has Trump as a Manchurian candidate. In Richard Condon's 1959 novel of that name, an agent of a foreign power is manoeuvred into the presidency to pursue policies inimical to American interests. Some speculate that the current occupant of the Oval Office may be acting under duress – threats of blackmail relating to financial or sexual impropriety, perhaps. It is true that he appointed figures like Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, who have echoed Kremlin talking points on the Ukraine war, and shut down State Department centres for countering disinformation. Yet Trump has publicly dismissed Gabbard's claim that Iran is not building a nuclear bomb, excluded her from meetings and ridiculed Tucker Carlson's opposition to entering the war against Iran as 'kooky'. Announcing his intention to destroy the country's nuclear programme, he suggested God may have spared him from death by the assassin's bullet for this very purpose. If this reveals the man within, he is moved by epiphanies and emotions as much as by calculation or subterfuge. Global politics is not a maze of secret stratagems and knowing deceptions, as Angleton believed, but a phantasmagoria of reflections and projections. When Trump looks at other world leaders, he sees replicas of himself as he would like himself to be – a hard-headed dealmaker. Putin is a ruthless practitioner of realpolitik; but he is also a neo-tsarist political mystic, aiming to resurrect a fabulous imperial realm. Xi is careful to avoid being drawn into any conflict in which he cannot see strategic advantage; but he is also determined to restore China to what he regards as its rightful place as the Middle Kingdom. Iran's leaders are cautious in their strategies; but they are also possessed by millenarian myths of martyrdom and a messianic saviour. History is driven by impulses more visionary and sanguinary than the pursuit of profit and survival. When liberals look at humankind, they see imperfect specimens of themselves. Some sections of the species – the despised deplorables – may be so retrograde that there is no future for them. A progressive society is best off letting them fade away and die. The rest of humankind yearns to join the ranks of the enlightened bourgeoisie. That was the phantasm of globalisation, and its concomitant – mass immigration. Instead, immigrants have brought with them their ancestral faiths, identities and enmities, while pre-existing populations – including previous generations of immigrants – recoil from the political caste that launched the experiment. Even the progressive nomenklatura are beginning to suspect their future may be cloudy. Strangely enough, an idea of truth survives among the tyrants as a domain of fact that must be unceasingly denied. Putin may be wedded to fantasies of a restored 'Russian world'. In advancing them he continues the Bolshevik practice of vranyo – telling lies he and everyone else know to be lies, but which dictate the terms in which war and politics are understood. For Xi, deception is the heart of the art of war. It is the post-truth West that cannot bear very much reality. Trump's strike on Iran illustrates this interplay of illusions and realities. The Iranian nuclear project has likely not been ended, only delayed for a few years. The US finds itself in the same bind it has been locked in since the collapse of British and French power in the Middle East after Suez and the fall of the shah in 1979. Trump's outburst against Israel and Iran at the breach of his ceasefire – 'They don't know what the fuck they are doing' – was a telling moment. Like many American presidents before him, he can neither dominate the region nor extricate himself from its intractable conflicts. Trump is trapped in a 21st-century version of the Great Game, the shifting imperial rivalries that preceded the Great War of 1914. There is reason in history, though not of the Hegelian variety. When liberal ideologues enabled Trump's rise, an irreversible process was set in motion. He and the defunct progressive ruling class are mirrors of one another. Trump's economic nationalism is the perfect inversion of an unfettered global free market. A seemingly immovable economic orthodoxy has been upended to prioritise the well-being of those injured by globalisation. Will this revolution amount to anything more than political rhetoric? The deep cuts in Medicaid and funding for treatment of opioid addiction made in the 'big beautiful bill' suggest that the collateral human damage of neoliberalism is being quietly written off. But is this politically sustainable? Before they fade away, America's deplorables may exercise their right to vote – chiefly moved by a worsening economy, but possibly rallying round the Epstein deceit. The former middle class may not accept their descent into endemic insecurity. Millennial professionals will struggle to avoid obsolescence, the nemesis of surplus elites. The figures who channel the fear and anger of these sections of the population – whether JD Vance, Bannon, Mamdani – will shape post-liberal America. Trump's most lasting inheritance will be a hodgepodge of populisms more radical than any he intended or imagined. On the global stage, Trump's 'realist' geopolitics is releasing forces – mystical imperialism, millenarian fervour, ungovernable impulses of hatred and revenge – that are derailing his would-be deals. His transactional schemes are as unreal as the progressive utopias he has casually brushed aside. Liberal rationalists avert their gaze from the world they have unknowingly made. Trump conjures with chaos, while a fateful logic unfolds around him. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe [See also: Trump's gangsterism towards the EU is working] Related
Daily Mail
12 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Three arrested over Cincinnati mass brawl that sparked widespread fury...and one of them was out on bond at the time
Cincinnati cops have arrested three people in connection with a savage mass brawl that left two injured over the weekend. Jermaine Matthews, 39, Montianez Merriweather, 34, and Dekyra Vernon, 24, were taken into custody this week after a couple were violently set upon in the downtown area of the Ohio city on Saturday. Search warrants have also been issued for two other unidentified people accused of jumping into the shocking melee. Footage of the altercation swept social media as the couple were seen being beaten on the street near the LoVe nightclub as a crowd gathered. Cincinnati Chief of Police Teresa Theetge said during a press conference on Monday that around 100 people descended on the brawl, but only one called 911. 'That is unacceptable to not call the police,' she said. 'Traffic was horrendous. People saw this. They were fighting in front of traffic. Why didn't people call us?' Matthews was charged with aggravated riot and assault, however charges against the other individuals are not immediately clear. Daily Mail has contacted Cincinnati Police Department for more information on the charges, with Theetge adding that other arrests may come as cops continue investigating the clash. Theetge added in her press conference that anyone involved in the fight should turn themselves in, and warned that more charges may follow. 'Anyone who put their hands on another individual during this incident in an attempt to cause harm will face consequences,' she said. 'I don't care which side of the incident or the fight they were on.' In shocking footage of the fight, a man in a white t-shirt was shoved to the ground and beaten by two men as other members of the crowd jeered and joined in. The gang beat the man for nearly a minute as he lay in the middle of the street, with the attackers appearing to step on his head multiple times. When the barrage temporarily stopped, the man was seen attempting to stand - but immediately fell over in apparent disorientation. One attacker yelled out 'my man's drunk'. A woman in a black dress rushed to his aid, but was attacked by the crowd, suffering two blows to the face. The impact caused her to fall, with her head slamming onto the pavement. Blood spewed from her mouth. The footage quickly gained traction among conservatives on social media, with a number of leading Republicans condemning the violence this week. The couple that were seen being attacked by the mob have not been named, although Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy had identified the woman in the clip as 'Holly.' He said on social media: 'I spoke to Holly earlier today (the woman tragically assaulted in Cincinnati this weekend). 'She's a single working mom who went to a friend's birthday party. It's unconscionable that there were no police present in that area of Cincinnati on a Friday night, or even an ambulance to take her to the hospital.' Vice President JD Vance waded in on the clip captured in his home state on Monday, saying anybody involved should be thrown in prison. He said: 'I don't know the full context, but the one part that I saw that was really gruesome is you had a grown man who sucker punched a middle-age woman. 'That person ought to go to jail for a very long time - and frankly, he's lucky there weren't some better people around because they would've handled it themselves. 'We have got to make great American cities safe again for families and children, the only way to destroy that street violence is to take the thugs who engage in that violence and throw their asses in prison.' Elon Musk also took to his social media to question what he suggested was a lack of response to the incident. 'Why zero stories?' the Tesla CEO asked Sunday, retweeting a post from the End Wokeness X account alleging that the attack wasn't being covered by news outlets. End Wokeness posted a tweet early Sunday afternoon claiming CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox News, The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others, had failed to cover the attack. By late Sunday evening the terrifying assault had been covered by several local and national media outlets, including the Daily Mail and Fox News.
