The Witness Chronicles, 3/28/2025

Will heads roll?

Mar 28, 2025

low angle view of air contrail — Photo by Richard R. Schünemann on Unsplash

Pete Hegseth Is In Total Panic Mode

When he starts yelling at the press, it’s obvious

So, imagine you got kicked out of your unit in the military for extremist tattoos, are a serious bad drunk, have been through numerous ugly divorces, and been accused of attempted rape by a woman you paid off to drop the charges. Life is pretty screwed up, and then a miracle happens.

The President, out of the blue, nominates you for Secretary of Defense and the Senate lays down and confirms after you lie through your teeth. You must be feeling unbelievably lucky right? But there’s a problem.

You’re an arrogant idiot and you are unbelievably careless and it only took you two months to commit two incredible screwups in the most public way possible. You insulted all our European allies while conceding huge concessions to Russia in a speech. And now you have commited a crime by sending highly classified military secrets via an insecure chat group to a journalist, a highly respected journalist.

The editor in chief of The Atlantic, in fact. And a huge shitstorm ensues. And now even Republicans are calling for your resignation, just as all that bad shit in your life had gone away, at least temporarily, very temporarily.

I don’t know about you Pete, but I’d be in panic mode and you obviously are. But there is something in the military called coolness under fire and you obviously don’t have it. Because you are an unstable drunk and a jerk and you know it.

And now your life is falling apart, again.

And I for one find it very entertaining but only because no one got killed because of your monumental clusterf**k. Because that could have happened, Mr Super Patriot and lead warfighter. Your own unit didn’t trust you. And now any shred of respect you may have had in the Pentagon, likely very little, has disappeared forever.

Even better, your screwup has galvanized opposition to Trump across the board and you were not in it alone. Virtually the entire Trump intelligence and foreign affairs team was complicit.

Unbelievable. And a wonderful example of how bad this is going to get. I honestly did not think they could top themselves but…yikes.

The stupidity is almost impossible to comprehend. And now you, Pete Hegseth, are the point man and you know it.

Because everyone in the inner Trump circle has been programmed to lie, deny, and blame, including the President himself, their stories of what happened are garbled and inconsistent, changing with every new development. The leak was not classified, or was it? The journalist is a liberal commie scumbag, ignoring the fact that he was added to the group by the National Security Director and was unaware of that until messages started appearing on his phone.

Despite their collective denials and absurd lying, it looks like there must be a fall guy and Hegseth has the target on his back, for good reason. He leads the entire Defense Department including all the military services, the largest piece of the federal government by far. And yet, he ignored all the security protocols and released into the wild attack plans that, if intercepted, could have resulted in those service people under him being killed.

So, if the axe falls, it will likely fall on him and he will become the first casualty of this second Trump term. The last time around, nearly every Trump appointee was out in the first year, but now, just two months in, it looks like heads will start falling.

The details, as we learn them at a fast and furious pace, are appalling. The eight people on the chat were using their personal phones. Signal, the app they used, was not secure at the level required for this information and the Pentagon had warned that it should not have been used. It likely was chosen because the texts were set to be deleted in four weeks, another violation of federal archive laws. And one participant was actually in Moscow as the conversation took place.

So, Hegseth can hardly be called the only guilty one. In a government with any ethics or security protocols, everyone on that chat should be fired, immediately. But that is not this government. However, Hegseth’s priority should have been protecting his soldiers, sailors, and pilots, something he never seems to have considered. And his response, when cornered with reality, was to lash out, yelling at reporters.

It was a disgusting display, unfortunately one of many we have already seen from this administration. But, more seriously, it sent a clear message to our adversaries worldwide that American national security is not secure, in fact it is a sieve. And that will cost us dearly.

So, off with Pete’s head, but everyone else involved should know, you could be next. And your beloved leader, Donald Trump, will not only get rid of you without a qualm, he will go on to blame you for anything that pops into his head. You will become a very very bad person, a bad bad person.

Sounds like a nice place to work, right?

Note: the Atlantic editor, Jeff Goldberg, released the entire chat of the attack plans after being accused of lying and after the President said it was not classified, which it obviously is now that we know specifically what was in it. Goldberg is also the moderator of Washington Week, the PBS political discussion show that airs on Friday nights. Since his story is by far the biggest since Trump started his second term, the show this week should be pretty interesting.

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