Scandal Surrounds Pete Hegseth As Panama Canal War Plans Are Leaked

We've got another report, another scandal from Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. He fired three officials recently, saying that they had leaked the war plans for the invasion of the Panama Canal that they were working up secretly. However, it has now come to be a rumor that that information was obtained, at least partially from an illegal wiretap by the National Security Agency. According to reports, the Trump advisors say they're no longer able to know who to believe within Pete Hegseth's orbit.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Farron, we've got another report, another scandal from Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. This one's a little more difficult to follow. So he fired three officials recently, saying that they had leaked the war plans for the invasion of the Panama Canal that they were working up secretly. However, it has now come to be a rumor, a somewhat credible rumor, that that information was obtained, at least partially from an illegal wiretap by the National Security Agency. According to reports, the Trump advisors say they're no longer able to know who to believe within Pete Hegseth's orbit.

This really is such a ridiculous scandal. Definitely a scandal. But it's so crazy because nobody knows who to trust. Not that we don't know who's telling the truth. It's that even Trump's people say, listen, all these guys over here at the Pentagon we don't even know anymore, including Trump's former lawyer who happens to be Pete Hegseth's lawyer, Tim Parlatore. So here's what happened and I love how the media also glosses over the fact that they had war plans for the Panama Canal, kind of seems like a bigger part of the story, but you had four members of the Pentagon that knew this investigation into the leak was going on, and they claim to have uncovered information that they, the Pentagon, were illegally wiretapping employees to find out who the leaker was.

These four Pentagon employees were so scared by this, they went to Vice President JD Vance, and they brought him whatever it is they had, and they said, Vice President, they are spying on their own employees illegally. There's no warrants involved. You have to do something, please help us out. So that's when Vance goes to the White House and the White House investigates and says, no, we didn't really see any evidence of this, and we think it's Tim Parlatore lying to us that there was a wiretap. And then Parlatore says, I never said anything about any kind of wiretap to anyone. So it's a very weird situation where we have no clear answers or even inkling on who to even come close to believing at this point. One of the weirdest scandals I've seen in like 20 years of doing politics, because there's no clear answer on any of it.

And Parlatore has just announced he's going to be stepping away because he's got to go defend another one of his clients because he still has an active practice as an attorney in addition to whatever his role is here at the Pentagon. And to be clear, there is no, Hegseth has no chief of staff and no deputy chief of staff. There's just six people, so the $1 trillion organization of the US military apparatus do not have a clear chain of command any longer and this is another in a long line of scandals with Hegseth, famously, the Signalgate scandals where he was leaking information to his wife, to his brother-in-law. His wife has some role in the Pentagon now, but doesn't have security clearance. One of the stories that I saw when we were doing research for the show was that he announced that they were canceling the Defense Department participation in the Women Peace and Security Act of 2017.

He specifically said this was a United Nations program pushed by feminists and left wing activists, that politicians fawn over it and troops hate it. It then came out that this was actually Trump legislation that had been co-sponsored by now DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. So not leftist, but people in the Trump cabinet signed by the Trump presidency. He says it was leftist. They can't get their story straight. He's not done, I think but one press briefing and recently it's just been breaking fairly recently, that an OAN reporter.