Ex-Hegseth Aide Reveals Just How Obsessed He Is With Stopping Leaks

In the wake of Pete Hegseth’s massive Signal scandal, the former Fox News co-host’s Pentagon has become a place more concerned with P.R. than directing America’s military.

Speaking with Megyn Kelly, another former Fox News host, on her podcast Sunday, ex-Hegseth aide Colin Carroll attested that the secretary and his team have been “consumed” by the rampant leaks escaping the Department of Defense. Carroll claimed that Hegseth and his team likely spend upward of half their time trying to rein the gossip in.

“If you look at a pie chart of the secretary’s day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably a leak investigation,” Carroll said.

Carroll had served as chief of staff to deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg before he was fired earlier this month amid an ongoing leak probe.

“That’s a bad thing for America. It’s a bad thing for the president’s objectives,” Carroll continued. “And in order to combat that image, it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go work out with the troops.’”

Carroll further argued that Hegseth’s recent obsession with filming his early morning workouts with troops was an effort to counteract numerous reports of Hegseth’s excessive drinking—accusations that nearly kept him from securing his gig fronting America’s military. (In a highly unusual move, Vice President JD Vance joined the vote in January to break a 50–50 tie on Hegseth’s confirmation, ushering the former Fox & Friends co-anchor toward Donald Trump’s Cabinet. Three Republicans—Senators Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins—broke party lines by voting against Hegseth’s confirmation.)

“While that is important—and it’s a thing to do to get out there and helps recruiting and helps morale—if you’re taking a half-day trip to the Naval Academy at the same time the budget is due, and we really need some support here.… Come on, you gotta weigh priorities,” Carroll told Kelly.

Hegseth’s tenure leading the Pentagon has been plagued by a trove of terrible decisions—as well as subsequent damning leaks to the press, exposing the defense secretary’s poor planning.

In March, Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen. The monumental slipup was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t even accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.

The people responsible for conducting Trump’s mass firings at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau are now firing themselves, according to a court filing first flagged by Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

Two weeks ago the CFPB, under the Department of Government Efficiency’s direction, fired nearly 1,500 employees, leaving only about 200 people employed there. Now, as the remaining workers stay up day and night to manage the transition, they’ve begun including themselves in the firings.

“We are three positions off, but we are reconciling it,” read an email from CFPB COO Adam Martinez. “My team doing all of the number/name crunching are running on low fuel and have not slept for a couple of days. They also happen to be RIFing themselves.”

“RIFing” refers to “reduction in force,” a government term for layoffs.

This happening at the CFPB—which is supposed to be the American consumer’s strongest ally—is a dire sign for the already struggling agency. Aside from being gutted by DOGE, the agency will also no longer focus on key issues like protecting consumers making digital payments, people with medical debt, or those using peer-to-peer payday-lending platforms.

Donald Trump is definitely losing the reins on negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.

Trump told reporters Sunday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had requested additional military aid during their meeting ahead of Pope Francis’s funeral in Rome.

“[Zelenskiy] told me that he needs more weapons, but he’s been saying that for three years,” Trump said on the tarmac at Morristown Airport before boarding Air Force One to head back to Washington.

“He needs more weapons, and we’re gonna see what happens. I want to see what happens with respect to Russia—because Russia, I’ve been surprised and disappointed, very disappointed that they did the bombing of those places after discussions,” the president said, referring to Russia’s surprise attack on Kyiv late Wednesday that killed at least 12 Ukrainians amid collapsing peace deal negotiations.

Trump said that he wanted Russian President Vladimir Putin to “stop shooting, sit down, and sign a deal.” The U.S. president’s statements follow increasingly concerned public messages to the authoritarian leader, including one musing that Trump may have been strung along by the war-bent despot.

But Ukraine’s not the only one that is refusing to budge on its demands. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov outlined the country’s list of requirements to end the war in a new interview Monday, and it’s the same exact things they’ve been asking for since 2022.

Lavrov said that Russia requires full control of five Ukrainian regions: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea. Lavrov also insisted that Ukraine must be demilitarized and banned from entering NATO. Kyiv would need to introduce legislation to restore the state of Russian language, culture, and religious institutions, as well.

Lavrov also said that Russia wanted to lift a ban on Kyiv’s ability to directly negotiate with Moscow.

Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, said that Russia was sending Trump a clear message. “Lavrov basically tells Trump to get lost,” Trofimov wrote in a post on X Monday. Trofimov said that Lavrov had advocated a “denazification” that would require a regime change in Ukraine.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted that China isn’t budging in the face of President Trump’s ill-advised tariffs.

On Fox News Monday morning, Brian Kilmeade asked Bessent about progress on talks between the two countries over trade.

“Do you plan on calling your counterpart [in China]?” Kilmeade queried. Bessent’s response showed that he hadn’t planned on it.

“We will see what happens with China, uh, that it’s important, I think it’s unsustainable from the Chinese side, so, uh, maybe they’ll call me one day,” replied Bessent.

Meanwhile, China’s foreign ministry said Monday that President Xi Jinping and Trump have not spoken recently and that there hasn’t been any progress on a trade deal between the two countries, contradicting Trump’s words in Time magazine on Friday that Xi had called him as part of tariff negotiations.

“As far as I know, the two heads of state have not called each other recently,” said Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for the ministry, to Reuters. “I would like to reiterate that China and the U.S. have not conducted consultations or negotiations on the tariffs issue.”

Trump has levied tariffs of 145 percent against China, inciting a trade war between the two countries as China retaliated with tariffs of its own. Trump toned down some of his anti-China rhetoric last week and even claimed that the two countries were working on a deal, only to be immediately corrected by Beijing then as well. It seems China knows that it has all of the leverage with U.S. markets sliding, and will dig in until Trump backs down.

Top GOP pollsters are seeing the forest for the trees in Donald Trump’s tanking approval rating.

Speaking with CNN on Sunday, Republican pollster and communications strategist Frank Luntz described the drop-off as “a significant change.”

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Sunday found that Trump’s approval rating had plummeted to 39 percent—a 6 percent drop from February—while 55 percent of Americans said they disapprove of the job he’s doing in office. That’s the lowest first-100-day rating of a president since modern polling began, roughly 80 years ago.

“The president was upholding some reasonably high numbers—January, February, and early March. And over the tariff situation, it became more and more negative,” Luntz told CNN.

“The agenda still has a majority support,” Luntz continued. “But the way that it’s being articulated is costing the president right now.”

Trump’s whiplash tariff proposals turned the stock market—and Americans’ retirement savings—into a rollercoaster of losses. Still, Trump’s base is weathering the storm. The falling numbers are not stemming from his supporters, per Luntz, but rather a large chunk of the population who helped him secure the White House in November but would otherwise identify as nonpartisan.

“His own numbers, with his own people, have withstood all these pressures,” Luntz said. “It’s those who didn’t like him, now have really turned against him, and among independents, swing voters, people who are not ideological or partisan, those are the people who are saying, ‘I don’t like what’s happening right now.’”

“It’s not his own voters—and what the president and the administration will argue is that he’s just as popular today as he was with the people who voted for him. But in the end, we’re all of America, not just those who supported him.”

The pollster warned that Trump needs to change his messaging strategy on key issues or face the long-term consequences of his sinking popularity.