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.”

The Post also added, “The efforts are part of a wider strategy by the Trump administration and the Pentagon to ferret out officials deemed insufficiently loyal or who provide information to reporters.”

OK, so maybe the department’s desire to crack down on leakers is understandable. But the Post also wrote, “A separate document also from Feinberg would establish a program to randomly polygraph those officials. The documents do not prescribe a limit on who would be subjected to these agreements and tests, suggesting it could include everyone from four-star generals to administrative assistants.”

Let’s emphasize that part. They want to subject workers to lie-detector tests.

This feels more like scare tactics than anything else.

The Post wrote, “Former officials and national security lawyers pointed to already existing restrictions and penalties for unauthorized release of information, indicating these new measures were meant to further frighten and deter personnel.”

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Speaking parts

Meanwhile, Washington is still buzzing over the bizarre meeting that Hegseth and President Donald Trump held with hundreds of top military officials on Tuesday.

In an especially notable piece, The Atlantic's Tom Nichols wrote, “The Commander in Chief Is Not Okay.”

Nichols first called Hegseth’s speech “utterly embarrassing.”

“But that wasn’t the worst of it,” Nichols continued. “The assembled military leaders likely already knew that Hegseth is unqualified for his job, and they could mostly tune out the sloganeering that Hegseth, a former TV host, was probably aiming more at Fox News and the White House than at the military itself. What they could not ignore, however, was the spectacle that President Donald Trump put on when he spoke after Hegseth. The president talked at length, and his comments should have confirmed to even the most sympathetic observer that he is, as the kids say, not okay.”

Nichols said Trump was “quieter and more confused than usual,” perhaps because he didn’t get the rousing applause he is used to when giving big speeches in front of supporters. In fact, reports are that the military leaders were especially quiet and expressionless. Trump’s meandering speech went on for more than an hour.

Nichols wrote, “Even if these officers had never attended a MAGA event or even seen one, they were now in the middle of a typical, unhinged Trump diatribe. The president had a speech waiting for him on the teleprompter, and now and then Trump would hunch his shoulders and apparently pick off a stray word or phrase from it, like a distracted hunter firing random buckshot from a duck blind. But Trump has always had difficulty wrestling Stephen Miller’s labored neoclassical references and clunky, faux Churchillisms off a screen and into his mouth. Mostly, the president decided to just riff on his greatest hits to the stone-faced assembly.”

If it was the goal of Trump and Hegseth to light a fire under the military leaders and send them charging out of the room with renewed energy, then by all accounts, they failed miserably.

Shutdown coverage

The U.S. government shut down on Wednesday. There are lots of moving parts, and things could change by the hour. But here’s the latest notable coverage:

• The Wall Street Journal’s Lindsay Wise, Olivia Beavers and Alex Leary with “White House, Lawmakers Float Ideas for Ending Government Shutdown.”
• Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Kimberley Strassel with “Welcome to a Shutdown Like No Other.”
• CNBC’s Yun Li with “Prediction markets see government shutdown lasting nearly two weeks.”
• The New York Times’ editorial board with “The Real Stakes of the Shutdown.”
• Axios’ Alex Fitzpatrick with “The shutdown is cutting off data you paid for.”
• Mediaite’s Alex Griffing with “MSNBC Cuts Off JD Vance Amid Claims Dems Want to Fund Healthcare for People ‘Who Can’t Even Speak English.’”
• And, yes, this seems to be shutdown-related: NBC News’ Adam Edelman and Peter Alexander with “White House freezes $18 billion in New York City infrastructure funding.”

Late-night brothers

Of all the late-night hosts, no one knows what ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel was going through during his suspension more than CBS’s Stephen Colbert. And no one can relate more to Colbert than Kimmel.

Both late-night hosts have run afoul of the Trump administration.

As a result, Colbert’s show is being canceled in May. And while CBS claims it’s for financial reasons, the announcement of the cancellation came immediately after Colbert ripped the network and its parent company for settling a lawsuit with Trump. Meanwhile, Kimmel was suspended after Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, seemingly threatened Kimmel’s show after a monologue that included commentary about who was responsible for Charlie Kirk’s death.

Trump has criticized both hosts and celebrated their suspensions and cancellations.

So, yeah, the two hosts can relate. Which is why it made perfect sense to try something really cool on Tuesday. They appeared as guests on each other’s shows.

Once a year, Kimmel brings his show to Brooklyn. So on Tuesday, Colbert appeared on Kimmel’s show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Kimmel visited Colbert at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Midtown Manhattan.

On his show, Kimmel introduced Colbert by saying, “My first guest tonight is an Emmy-winning late-night talk show host who, thanks to the Trump administration, is now available for a limited time only.” Kimmel also joked, “I am so honored to be here with my fellow no-talent, late-night loser.”

The two traded jokes, but also were serious at times, too. Kimmel told Colbert what he thought when his show was suspended. He said, “I thought that’s it. It’s over, it is over. I was like, ‘I’m never coming back on the air.’”

In the end, appearing on each other’s shows was a smart gimmick. And, Kimmel said, “We thought it might be a fun way to drive the president nuts.”

But Kimmel also said, “I hope we don’t ever have another president like this again.”

Meanwhile …

Another late-night host, Jimmy Fallon, has made it clear that he plans to keep his head down on politics. He said so. Literally.

In a recent interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” Fallon said, “We hit both sides equally, and we try to make everybody laugh, and that’s really the way our show works. Our monologues are kind of the same that we’ve been doing since Johnny Carson was hosting ‘The Tonight Show.’ So really, I just keep my head down and make sure the jokes are funny.”

Fallon said he has never really been political, unlike the show that follows him. Seth Meyers, a “Saturday Night Live” alum like Fallon, is very political and often mocks Trump.

It feels irresponsible during these times to remain so understated. But, in the end, it’s Fallon’s show. If he and NBC want him to keep his head down, that’s their business.

Taking over

In his Status newsletter, media reporter Oliver Darcy reported Bari Weiss of The Free Press (and formerly of The New York Times) will be named editor-in-chief of CBS News “in the coming days.” Darcy and others have already reported that this move was coming, but now we have a better idea of the exact timeline, which is, apparently, imminent.

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Media tidbits

• Mediaite’s Sean James with “Fox News Leads All of TV So Far This Year While CNN and MSNBC Shed Viewers En Masse.”
• NPR has announced that Miles Parks, who has been with NPR since 2014, will join Tamara Keith and Sarah McCammon on the “NPR Politics Podcast.” Parks will continue reporting out of Washington, where he focuses on voting and election security.
• Sunday’s season premiere of CBS’s “60 Minutes” drew 10 million viewers, making it the most-viewed nonsports prime-time program of the week.
• For The Hollywood Reporter, Thomas Doherty with “Threats, Anxiety and Power Struggles: How Hollywood Tangles With the FCC.”
• Axios’ Sara Fischer with “People Inc. acquires Feedfeed.”

Hot type

• GQ’s Anna Silman with “How the Crisis PR Machine Shapes What You Think About Celebrities.”
• For The New York Times Magazine, Bruce Schoenfeld with “The Dodgers United Los Angeles. Then the ICE Raids Began.”
• The New York Times’ Juliet Macur with “A Stranger Shattered Their Lives. At First, They Didn’t Know Why.”

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