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Artful liar. [1]

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Date: 2025-07-01

from THE DAILY BEAST;

Transcript: MAGA Dope Pete Hegseth’s Tantrum Exposes Trump’s Iran Scam

As Pete Hegseth and other loyalists rage at tough reporting on Trump’s Iran bombing, a veteran national security lawyer separates truth from lies and warns that MAGA’s propaganda on this will get worse.

Pete Hegseth (audio voiceover): There’s a reason the president calls out fake news for what it is. These pilots, these refuelers, these fighters, these air defenders—the skill and the courage it took to go into enemy territory flying 36 hours on behalf of the American people and the world to take out a nuclear program is beyond what anyone in this audience can fathom. And then the instinct … the instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Timesis to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t care what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak. Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of leakers, and what do leakers do? They have agendas.

Sargent: The way Hegseth uses the troops to disparage basic truth seeking by the free press is just despicable. And the idea that he cares about how this reflects on the troops when all he really gives a shit about is how it makes Trump appear is just laughable. That little show was for Trump, who was standing right next to him, and only for Trump. But Brad, you’re a deep-state denizen. What would actually be behind a leak like this? Would it really be about hurting Trump, which again is the only thing they care about? Or would it be more about trying to get the truth out there? What do you think went into this leak?

Moss: So my general premise and default approach in situations like this is to assume it’s a little bit of both. The person who leaked it probably—you can presume, at least for the moment—is at least not a huge fan of the president. And you can also believe at the same time that part of their motive was they felt that the public was being lied to and there needed to be greater transparency on that. Potentially they would void worse policy decisions coming forward, especially as Congress was evaluating what steps it may or may not take in reliance on its own Article 1 powers. So you can assume that the person is probably low- to mid-level ranking; I don’t think this came from a senior official. You can assume that the person has considerable expertise and experience in this field; knows what the information actually showed and what it doesn’t show, particularly with respect to what Trump said, and just couldn’t stand to hear this anymore.

Whether or not that person will ultimately be caught and be punished, it’s entirely possible. Look no further than Reality Winner and what she did during the first Trump administration. She paid for her leak of a single document—which she had done for purposes of transparency, but she also was not a political fan of the president. But she did it for purposes of transparency. She went to jail. That’s the reality of what could possibly happen here. I certainly get, from a national security standpoint, the president, the secretary of defense denouncing the leak in general. Any president is going to do that. Any secretary of defense is going to do that.

But my concern, and you heard some of it in that clip from Hegseth, is the way they’re describing this as an attack on the troops. It’s not attack on the troops. The troops did what they were supposed to do. The guys who flew the jets, people who launched missiles, whatever it was that was involved—they did their job. You don’t have to build them up more. They know what they did. They don’t need a pat on the back. They already did their job. The problem is the opposite of what Hegseth just said. He blamed the media for twisting facts. It’s them, it’s the White House, it’s the Defense Department—and specifically I’m speaking of Hegseth—who are twisting particular pieces of facts to fit a political narrative and not letting the facts speak for themselves. If it was this resounding success, let the facts show that.

Sargent: Exactly. There’s a through line to a lot of this that you got out there, Brad. Let’s listen to some more audio. This one of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Karoline Leavitt (audio voiceover): No president in history could have ever dreamed of such a success, and that’s exactly why the fake news media is now trying to demean and undermine the president. And we’ve seen this playbook be run before. You have hostile actors within the intelligence community who illegally leak bits and pieces of an intelligence assessment to push a fake news narrative.

Sargent: Naturally, she has to go hard into the totalitarian propaganda and depict this as the greatest thing any American president has ever done. But that aside, note that she attacks unnamed intelligence officials for the leak, just as Hegseth did. Brad, are we going to see a real purge here, do you think?

Moss: I certainly think you’re going to, at least in the short term, (1) see a very extensive leak investigation, expect that they’re just going to start issuing polygraphs to everyone they can think of that had access to the document, and (2) start seeing restrictions on how much of this is shared, which has its own problems. Putting aside that they’re already going to start restricting what they give to Congress, which has serious separation of powers issues, they’re going to start limiting how much [access] the low-level and mid-level analysts who do the real work of government, especially intelligence agencies, have to things, which is going to undermine the ultimate sufficiency and credibility of the documents that gets submitted to the senior-level people who make the decisions. The abilities and the credibility of what ultimate policymakers do and conclude they will act on is ultimately premised on the work of the low-level intelligence analysts looking at satellite photos, or the low-level and mid-level intelligence analysts analyzing chemical combinations. It’s not done by those senior guys. It’s done by those low-level guys. And if they don’t have the relevant access, out of some desire to just silo everything off, it’s going to weaken the actual product.

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