The Trump administration has denied NPR’s report that the president’s camp was looking to replace Pete Hegseth as its defense secretary following his recent Signal chat controversies.
“WRONG. Fake News!” the Trump administration’s X account Rapid Response 47 said in a tweet on Monday.
“Lies from NPR — which, as we all know, is a Fake News propaganda machine,” the account added in another post.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also referred to the story as “total fake news.”
“This NPR story is total fake news based on one anonymous source who clearly has no idea what they are talking about,” Leavitt said. “As the President said this morning, he stands strongly behind @SecDef.”
The administration’s response comes after NPR published a story on Monday titled, “The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.” In the write-up, journalist Tom Bowman cited an anonymous U.S. official as a source and detailed that the potential job shift was connected to Hegseth’s recent fumbles in the position, most specifically his accidental sharing of the government’s plans to launch military strikes on Yemen, which were first released by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after he was accidentally added to a group chat.
The White House has denied and maintained that no classified information or war plans were shared in the discussions.
The disputed update came after The New York Times reported that Hegseth also shared details about the Yemen strikes in a different private Signal chat with his wife Jennifer Rauchet, younger brother Phil Hegseth and his personal lawyer.
Hegseth responded to the reports during an interview on Monday.
“What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax, won’t give back their Pulitzers, they got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies,” Hegseth told a group of reporters at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. “This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.”
