Pete Hegseth’s war on leaks has reached a new level of absurdity
Pete Hegseth’s assault on the media continued this week with another bizarre demand.
The defense secretary recently backed a plan requiring credentialed Pentagon reporters to sign a form agreeing not to publish any reports — even unclassified ones — without Department of Defense approval.
Now comes another wacky mandate that, at least indirectly, impacts the media’s getting information to the public. The Washington Post’s Alex Horton, Tara Copp and Ellen Nakashima report that the Pentagon wants to impose strict nondisclosure agreements and random polygraph tests for its workers, including many top officials. The Post writes that it is all a part of Hegseth’s escalation of a war on “leakers and internal dissent.”
The Post wrote, “All military service members, civilian employees and contract workers within the office of the defense secretary and the Joint Staff, estimated to be more than 5,000 personnel, would be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement that ‘prohibits the release of non-public information without approval or through a defined process,’ according to a draft memo from Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg.”
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