Pete Hegseth said Monday that the Pentagon and the US Department of Justice have created a joint taskforce to identify and prosecute unauthorized leaks to the press, giving the Pentagon’s office of general counsel new authority to demand help across the department on leak probes. He said the move takes effect immediately and is meant to meet what he called the dangers posed by leaked information.
The announcement lands just as the dispute over leaks has already reached New York Times journalists. Over the weekend, the newspaper said several of its reporters received subpoenas after stories about Donald Trump’s Qatari-gifted plane, including a report that he left Turkey on the old Air Force One after the Secret Service urged a security precaution and another that the new aircraft lacked some of the older plane’s advanced security features.
Hegseth cast the new arrangement as a hard line inside the Pentagon and said access to confidential and secret information is a sacred trust, warning that those who betray it will face the full force of the law. He thanked acting US attorney general Todd Blanche for his help and said he was proud the departments are working together more closely than ever before.
That is the friction point in the case. A Justice Department spokesperson said the reporters are not the targets and that the leakers are, even as the subpoenas were issued to several New York Times journalists and were meant to compel testimony before a federal grand jury in Manhattan this week. David McCraw condemned the subpoenas and said the appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects.
What comes next is narrower than the rhetoric suggests but far more consequential: the new taskforce now gives the Pentagon and the Justice Department a formal lane to pursue leak investigations together, while the subpoenas test how far that crackdown reaches when press reporting itself becomes the trigger.
