Pete Hegseth Adviser in Signal Group Chat Suddenly Put on Leave

A top adviser for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was abruptly placed on administrative leave after he was connected to an information leak at the Department of Defense, Reuters reported Tuesday. 

Dan Caldwell was escorted from the Pentagon Tuesday and is being investigated for an “unauthorized disclosure” of classified DOD information, an anonymous U.S. official told Reuters. 

It’s unclear what leaked intelligence Caldwell is being investigated for, but he was wrapped up in last month’s Signalgate scandal, in which members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet discussed U.S. military plans to bomb the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal group chat that also happened to include The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. Along with Caldwell, 18 Trump officials were presumed to be part of the chat, including Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and national security adviser Mike Walz. 

The following week, the DOD released a memo requesting an investigation into the “recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information.”  

“This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense,” the memo, written by Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, reads. “I expect to be informed immediately if this effort results in information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure, and that such information will be referred to the appropriate criminal law enforcement entity for criminal prosecution.”

Caldwell’s investigation “remains ongoing,” the U.S. official told Reuters.

Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Tuesday that leaders from cities and states with sanctuary policies could expect to face prosecution very soon.

A reporter outside of the White House asked Homan whether he believed that the leaders of sanctuary states and cities should be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and possibly go to prison,” alleging that they’d violated law prohibiting U.S. citizens from transporting, smuggling, or harboring undocumented immigrants.

“Absolutely, and hold tight on that one,” Homan replied. “’Cus it’s coming. It’s coming.”

Sanctuary cities and states have policies in place that limit coordination and information sharing with federal immigration authorities about noncitizens. This allows noncitizens to be able to report crimes, acquire homes and jobs, and participate in society without fear of being deported.

ICE officials are still able to arrest undocumented immigrants in places with sanctuary polices, and if undocumented immigrants commit crimes, they are processed by local law enforcement similarly to how anyone else would be.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative, anti-immigrant think tank, has identified 13 so-called sanctuary states: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington.

Trump repeatedly and vastly overstated the supposed dangers of sanctuary cities as part of his presidential campaign. At a rally in September, he announced his plan to eradicate sanctuary cities from the state of North Carolina, where there are none.

Last week, Trump said that he was working on a plan to withhold all federal funding for any city or state with sanctuary policies.

“No more Sanctuary Cities! They protect the Criminals, not the Victims. They are disgracing our Country, and are being mocked all over the World. Working on papers to withhold all Federal Funding for any City or State that allows these Death Traps to exist!!!” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised more than $9.5 million this quarter, and none of it came from lobbyists or super PACs.

The New York congresswoman racked in donations from 266,000 individual donors, with each donation averaging about $21, marking this her strongest quarter to date, according to her campaign. 

“I cannot convey enough how grateful I am to the millions of people supporting us with your time, resources, & energy,” she wrote in a post on X. “Your support has allowed us to rally people together at record scale to organize their communities.”

AOC’s funding haul no doubt sends a message to the Democratic Party—which is predominantly funded by billionaires—as it desperately tries to gain footing in the face of Donald Trump’s attack on federal funding, civil liberties, and the Constitution. 

The 35-year-old has spent much of Trump’s first term accompanying Bernie Sanders on his Fighting Oligarchy Tour, which has drawn record-breaking crowds in red and blue states across the country. There’s been plenty of buzz about her future within the party, and she’s been floated as a potential replacement for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who decimated his reputation when he broke party lines and voted to pass the GOP’s disastrous stopgap spending bill last month.

“There is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters following Schumer’s decision. “And this is not just about progressive Democrats. This is across the board—the entire party.”  

In a March CNN poll, the Democratic Party’s favorability dropped to an all-time low, with 47 percent of voters saying the party should be doing more to stop Trump’s agenda. Ten percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said AOC best represents the party’s values. In another poll for the 2028 New York primary released by Politico, AOC led Schumer by 19 points, a sign that Democratic constituents are desperately ready for someone new to rally behind.

The Trump administration admitted Tuesday that it is still exploring whether sending American citizens to prison in El Salvador is actually legal.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said as much during Tuesday’s press briefing after Fox News’s Steve Doocy asked her if deporting American citizens to central American prisons was legal, or if the law needed to be changed. Leavitt’s response was vague and left the door wide open.

“Well, it’s another question that the president has raised. It’s a legal question that the president is looking into, and he talked about this yesterday with his meeting [with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele] in the Oval Office,” Leavitt responded. “He would only consider this if legal for Americans who are the most violent, egregious repeat offenders of crime who nobody in this room wants living in their communities.”

It’s a disturbing response, because no elected official should be willing to sell out Americans to be imprisoned in a foreign country, even if they are convicted criminals. During Trump’s meeting with Bukele Monday, he kept repeating that “homegrown criminals are next,” which would certainly violate the Constitution and lead to a protracted legal fight in federal court.

The Trump administration has already deported more than 200 people, most of them without criminal records, to El Salvador with no due process, claiming that they are gang members without any proof. In a particularly egregious case, Maryland construction builder Kilmar Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison notorious for human rights abuses, in what the U.S. government later called an “administrative error.”

Despite the Supreme Court ruling that Abrego Garcia should be returned to the U.S., the Trump administration has blatantly refused to do so, insisting with zero basis that Abrego Garcia is a violent gang member. Now it seems that Trump wants to introduce this same shoddy legal process to American citizens, shipping them thousands of miles away to a gulag where they’d have little, if any, rights.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt could barely cobble together an answer Tuesday when asked to explain how Donald Trump’s executive order targeting specific individuals wasn’t an abuse of power.

Last week, Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs, his former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who was fired in November 2020 for publicly contradicting the president’s false claims of “massive voter fraud” in the presidential election that year.

Leavitt was clearly caught off guard during a press briefing when The New York Times’ White House correspondent Jonathan Swan asked about the hypocrisy of Trump’s order targeting Krebs.

“The president has long said that it would be an abuse of power for a president to direct prosecutors to investigate him. Last week, President Trump explicitly directed the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs to see if it can find any evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” asked Swan. “How is that not an abuse of power, to direct the Justice Department to look into an individual—a named individual?”

“Look, the president signed that executive order. It’s the position of the president in this White House that it’s well within his authority to do it, otherwise he wouldn’t have signed it. And he signed it, and that’s his policy,” Leavitt said.

According to Leavitt’s logic, Trump’s order to investigate Krebs was not an “abuse of power” for the simple fact that Trump was the one doing it. It doesn’t get more authoritarian than that.

Trump had previously railed against former President Joe Biden after Trump became the subject of multiple federal lawsuits and was indicted for allegedly mishandling classified documents and alleged election interference. Both cases have now been dismissed. Trump also claimed that Biden was “virtually leading” Trump’s hush-money case in New York, in which he was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records.