Pete Hegseth’s New Move Will Make It Harder for Congress to Stop Him

The Department of Defense now requires department staffers to channel all communications with Congress through the Pentagon’s central legislative affairs office.

A October 15 memo, obtained by BreakingDefense, marks a change in policy for the administration, further limiting access to military HQ. The only exception to the rule will be the Pentagon’s inspector general office. All other DOD personnel will be required to coordinate exchanges with members of Congress and state elected officials via the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs.

Using the Trump administration’s unofficial moniker for the department, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg wrote in the co-signed memo that the Department of War “relies on a collaborative and close partnership with Congress to achieve our legislative goals.

“This requires coordination and alignment of Department messaging when engaging with Congress to ensure consistency and support for the Department’s priorities to re-establish deterrence, rebuild our military, and revive the warrior ethos,” the memo reads.

“Unauthorized engagements with Congress by DoW personnel acting in their official capacity, no matter how well-intentioned, may undermine Department-wide priorities critical to achieving our legislative objectives,” they add.

Members of the House Armed Services Committee were less than thrilled by the development.

“Congress decides who Congress will talk to, and the continued efforts of the secretary to wall off the department is not consistent with past tradition, and I frankly don’t think it’ll fly with the members or leaders of the committee,” California Representative George Whitesides told BreakingDefense.

A congressional aide who spoke with the military-focused publication said that the new policy could “potentially backfire” on the Defense Department, especially as Congress chips away at the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act—a process that can sometimes require the Pentagon to supply details “within minutes.”

It’s the latest in a larger Pentagon clampdown on transparency under Hegseth’s helm. Last week, 40 to 50 members of the Pentagon press pool packed up their desks at the department, loudly rejecting a 21-page pledge that, in part, forbids journalists from soliciting any information from government employees without express permission from the Pentagon. Just a handful of journalists remain—roughly 15 out of hundreds of credentialed reporters—representing blogs, freelancers from foreign publications, and One America News.

Graham Platner, an upstart Democratic candidate running to challenge Republican Maine Senator Susan Collins, reportedly acknowledged that his skull-and-crossbones tattoo is a Nazi military symbol.

Jewish Insider reported Tuesday that an acquaintance of Platner’s had heard the former Marine refer to his chest tattoo as “my Totenkopf,” a German term referring to a specific skull and crossbones symbol used by a branch of the Nazi S.S. military that has since been resurrected by white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

In a statement to Jewish Insider, Platner said that he “absolutely would not have gone through life having this on my chest if” he knew the tattoo resembled the Nazi symbol, and he was “already planning” to have it removed.

Platner first publicly admitted he had the tattoo on his chest during an appearance on Pod Save America last week, after images of it had surfaced on social media. He claimed he got the tattoo in 2007, while he was “very inebriated” on leave with some fellow Marines in Croatia.

“We chose a terrifying skull and crossbones off the wall because we were Marines and skulls and crossbones are a pretty standard military thing,” Platner said. “And then we all moved on with our lives.”

Platner denied holding antisemitic beliefs. “I am not a secret Nazi. Actually, if you read through my Reddit comments, I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism and antisemitism and racism in general,” Platner said.

Online, Platner has a history of making controversial statements, which he claims he made to “get a rise” out of people—but has seemingly made no comments targeting the Jewish people or faith.

Genevieve McDonald, Platner’s former campaign director, who resigned last week, suggested Tuesday that the candidate must have known about the image’s origins.

“Graham has an antisemitic tattoo on his chest. He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff,” she wrote in a post on Facebook. “Maybe he didn’t know it when he got it, but he got it years ago and should have had it covered up because he knows damn well what it means.”

McDonald, a former state representative, blamed the “D.C. consultant class” for the public relations disaster that could cost Democrats the Senate election. “The vault is open for the GOP to crush any fucking dreams we had in the general,” she wrote.

Donald Trump is reportedly trying to loot the federal government to the tune of $230 million. That’s how much he’s demanding from the Department of Justice in compensation for past federal probes of his misdeeds, according to a Tuesday report in The New York Times.

The Times’ sources say that before he returned to the White House, Trump filed administrative claims, or formal requests for relief from a government agency, which often precede a lawsuit. One 2023 claim seeks damages for investigations into Russian election interference and ties to the Trump 2016 campaign—another, filed in 2024, for the 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents.

The president reportedly expects to be paid a settlement but, so far, has not gotten his nine-figure payday.

The potential settlement, being for an administrative claim, would not need to be publicly announced, and would simply need the approval of one of two Trump-friendly officials: Todd Blanche, who is the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, or DOJ civil division chief Stanley Woodward Jr., who has represented many of the president’s aides and allies—from Trump’s co-defendant in the classified documents case to participants in the January 6 Capitol attack.

Compensation in such cases is “typically covered by taxpayers,” the Times reports.

Of the unprecedented situation, Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace Law School, told the Times that “the ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”

Trump seemingly acknowledged the abysmal optics of his stickup during a press conference last week: “I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, ‘I’m sort of suing myself. I don’t know. How do you settle the lawsuit?’ I’ll say, ‘Give me X dollars,’ right? And I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit. It’s a great lawsuit, and now I won, it sort of looks bad. I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know.”

It looks like former CIA Director John Brennan is next up on Trump’s long list of political retribution targets.

As the conservative magazine The Federalist first reported on Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday referred Brennan to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on the grounds that he “knowingly made false statements” to Congress about Trump’s collusion with Russia during a hearing in May 2023.

Brennan, who led the CIA during an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, has been historically critical of Trump on Russia. Just before his tenure as CIA director ended in 2017, he warned that he didn’t think Trump had “a full appreciation of Russian capabilities, Russia’s intentions and actions that they are undertaking in many parts of the world.”

“Brennan made numerous willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact contradicted by the record established by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the CIA,” Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan wrote in his letter to the Justice Department on Tuesday.

The committee also added that Brennan “falsely denied that the CIA relied on the discredited Steele dossier in drafting the post-election Intelligence Community Assessment,” “falsely testified when he told the Committee that the CIA opposed including the Steele dossier in the ICA,” and “provided false testimony during a HPSCI hearing in 2017.

“In sum, Brennan’s testimony before the Committee on May 11, 2023, was a brazen attempt to knowingly and willfully testify falsely and fictitiously to material facts. We therefore make this referral for the Department to examine whether any of Brennan’s testimony warrants a charge for the violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001,” Jordan concludes.

Brennan is on his way to join fellow Trump adversaries such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey in a spiteful legal battle with the president.

Republicans are still playing the blame game on the subject of political violence—even as a pardoned January 6 rioter attacks one of their colleagues.

House Speaker Mike Johnson brushed off assassination threats against Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday, claiming that—despite the wannabe assassin’s conservative politics—the left is still at fault.

When asked directly about the incident during his daily shutdown press conference, Johnson initially said that he was completely unaware of the plot to “eliminate” Jeffries at New York City’s Economic Club Monday.

“Terrible. That’s the first I’ve heard of that. I don’t know anything about it,” Johnson said. “But anybody who threatens to kill any political official, we denounce it, absolutely.”

Christopher Moynihan, a 34-year-old from upstate New York, was arrested Saturday for threatening to kill Jeffries.

Moynihan was convicted in 2022 for participating in the Capitol riot. Video evidence captured him breaking through fences, entering the Capitol, and rifling through documents in the Senate Gallery. During the riot, Moynihan said, “There’s got to be something in here we can fucking use against these scumbags,” according to court documents. Moynihan was also depicted standing behind the Senate well alongside Jacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon Shaman.

He was sentenced to nearly two years in prison in 2023 but was prematurely released, thanks to a blanket pardon from Donald Trump that freed 1,500 January 6 rioters on his first day back in office.

Moynihan is the first pardoned Capitol rioter to be rearrested over alleged political violence, but he’s not the only January 6er to run afoul of the law since they were granted clemency. In February, former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio was arrested by Capitol police after a woman accused him of attacking her. In May, Zachary Alam was arrested for allegedly breaking into a home in Virginia.

However, given the chance to elaborate on his statement about Moynihan’s recent attack, Johnson chose to throw the responsibility back at America’s ideological left.

“I will tell you this, the violence on the left is far more prevalent than the violence on the right,” Johnson said Tuesday. “The assassination culture that’s been advanced now—this is the left, in almost every case that is advancing this, and not the right. Let’s not make this a partisan issue, you don’t want me to go there.

“The rhetoric that you saw on display Saturday, we highlighted yesterday, it plays into this. There are people that get triggered—there are deranged people in society when they hear elected officials participating in a rally that was paid for by [George] Soros and sponsored by Communists, with signs and placards and mantras that were repeated that, ‘We should bring death to fascist politicians.’ They call every Republican a fascist now,” Johnson said, referring to the peaceful No Kings protests that took place across the country this past weekend.

Jeffries said in a statement Tuesday that he is “grateful to state and federal law enforcement for their swift and decisive action to apprehend a dangerous individual who made a credible death threat against me with every intention to carry it out.”

Political violence is a phenomenon that persists in and defies both major parties, failing to fall neatly into a convenient, sellable narrative that can be repackaged for voters or donors. In truth, recent spikes in political violence have harmed both public figures (Charlie Kirk, Melissa Hortman, etc.) and regular Americans alike.

Historically, political violence has been far more common from the right, and 2025 marks the first time there has been a significant spike in violence from left-leaning individuals in more than 30 years, though it still remains at a much lower level than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing attackers, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The only common denominator in all recent political violence is wide public access to guns, a detail that sets the United States far apart from the rest of the developed world.