Dan Caldwell, a Marine veteran and former Pentagon advisor, was fired under suspicious circumstances—no polygraph, no device search—just days before opposing a U.S. war with Iran, which he warns could trigger regional chaos, mirroring Iraq’s "monstrous crime" that empowered Iran and birthed ISIS. Gulf allies now avoid conflict, yet Washington’s bipartisan hawkish push ignores past failures in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, prioritizing liberal hegemony over American lives. Caldwell’s dismissal, alongside veterans Darren Selnick and Colin Carroll, exposes Pentagon politicization, where leaks target Trump-aligned officials while critics like Susan Rice face no consequences. His removal underscores how opposition to reckless wars now risks careers in a system where loyalty to interventionism trumps evidence. [Automatically generated summary]
Dan Caldwell is a Marine Corps veteran who wound up until three days ago advising the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, on military policy.
He was one of the strongest voices in the U.S. government, in the Trump administration, against the war with Iran.
And his rationale was simple.
It's not in America's interest, and many Americans will die and billions will be spent on a war we don't need to fight.
And as someone who fought in Iraq, he was able to take that case to the principles with some force.
Then, three days ago, he was fired from the Pentagon.
But not for his views on Iran, no.
Dan Caldwell was fired because, reporters are told off the record, he had leaked classified documents to the media.
But what were these classified documents exactly?
Well, no one at the Pentagon could know the answer to that because Dan Caldwell's phone was never examined.
Nor was he given a polygraph.
So actually, beneath the headlines was nothing other than a false accusation.
Was Dan Caldwell fired because he opposed the push to war with Iran?
You decide.
Here's Dan Caldwell.
So there is an enormous amount of pressure on this administration to participate in military action against Iran.
And the president's position has been, I think, really clear for a long time, which is...
We don't want Iran to get nuclear weapons.
That's bad for everybody.
Yes. He sincerely believes that.
He's against proliferation.
He's very concerned about nuclear weapons in general, I think.
But we would strongly prefer a diplomatic solution.
And he's being attacked up and down, including by a lot of people in the administration in private, and really we're trying to steer him toward military action.
So leaving aside all the, you know, internecine fights going on, just as a real-life matter, what would happen if the U.S. participated in a military strike on Iran's nuclear sites?
So you have to be careful, but that is essentially why the DOD exists.
Now, with that said, there are obviously specifics I can't get into, but I think it is fair to say that a war with Iran risks being incredibly costly in terms of lives and dollars and instability in the Middle East.
The lives of Americans, the lives of Iraqis, of Saudis, of Bahrainians, of Israelis, and of course, Iranians.
It could be an incredibly costly war.
And I think that that is very obvious to anybody who's been watching the region for a while.
And I think that's why over the last few years, you have seen certain countries in the region Change some of their positions on how they want to engage Iran.
There are a lot of Gulf Arab countries, for example, who they by no means view Iran as a benevolent force in the region.
They're very aware of the threats that they could pose, but they also recognize that a war for them would be extremely costly.
And so they're trying to adopt a different posture.
And that's a recognition on their end of the costs that a potential full-out war with Iran could have.
And I think the president, vice president, they know this.
And that is why they are making sure they're prioritizing diplomacy.
And let me just say, thank God we have Steve Whitcoff in the administration.
He is truly doing the Lord's work and trying to stop.
This war through diplomacy and also end another ongoing war in Russia, Ukraine.
And they're making sure that his effort is the main effort, not a military effort at the moment.
So just for people who haven't been following this, what you're alluding to with the Gulf states, there are six of them, but two of the biggest ones and the closest U.S. allies would be UAE and Saudi.
And those are primarily Sunni states run by...
Sunnis. And they are hostile to Iran for a bunch of different reasons going back a long way.
Iran's proxy forces in neighboring countries.
There's a lot here, but they've been basically enemies of Iran or perceived that way.
And so the thought was, well, they would back military action against Iran, but you're saying all of a sudden they wake up and realize, no, they don't back it.
They don't want a major war in the Middle East right now because of what they're trying to do with their countries in terms of economic development, because they're trying to give their people a better life.
It's worth noting that Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi defense minister, was in Tehran, I believe, a few days ago.
And he's the brother of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince.
And they recognize fully the threat that Iran poses.
And they take it seriously.
But just like the Trump administration, They are prioritizing diplomatic outreach and trying to achieve somewhat of a detente.
And that doesn't mean you disarm and you join hands and the Middle East becomes this happy, hippie circle jam band.
It means that people recognize it's in no one's interest to have a major war in the Middle East.
The idea that it could become a major war is kind of absent from American news accounts.
So the idea is that the United States, probably in partnership with Israel or vice versa, Israel in partnership with the United States, would take out the, I think, six Iranian nuclear sites and that would kind of be the end of it.
That it wouldn't become a major war.
I mean, I don't think I've ever read any account that suggests it could become a major war, but you're saying it could.
The threat to American lives is not even mentioned.
And that's, of course, not even considering, you know, the potential for terrorism.
I mean, 9-11 happened because extremists disagreed with American foreign policy.
I mean, they said so again and again and again and again.
You're supposed to ignore that and think they did it because they hated our freedoms.
What they did was evil.
Of course, not in any way.
Excusing it.
But they said why they did it.
We disagree with what you're doing.
And they attacked the U.S. homeland and killed 3,000 Americans.
So, I mean, there's got to be a concern, given how many Iranians came into the country under the Biden administration illegally, like that there are probably agents of the Iranian government here, and there could be acts of terror here if we did this.
I mean, that is a risk with any overseas military...
I do think this is, you know, another reason why we need to take homeland defense and homeland security more seriously.
But yes, that is a real risk.
I will say, you know, backing up to 9-11 comparison is there was a series of mistakes in both American foreign policy and American security policy that paved the road to 9-11.
The inability of the FBI and CIA to work together, the decision through friendly nations to fund certain groups, to allow the growth of certain forces to fight communism, which at the time was probably the right decision because of the threat the Soviet Union posed.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
And one of the reasons why we're in the situation we are in the Middle East with Iran is, we have to be honest, because of the war in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein...
Was a check against Iran.
Is that he forced Iran to devote resources to deterring Iraq that now Iran doesn't need to put against deterring Iraq conventionally or through their own proxies.
Now they're able to put that money into places like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and also devote more resources to its missile program and potentially its nuclear program as well, too.
That is, I think, one of the things that you can't overlook when discussing foreign policy and that not enough people have the conversation about, how did we get here?
It's like people don't want to have the conversation about how we got to where we are in Ukraine.
You know, NATO expansion played a big role in that.
You know, 30 years of failed American foreign policy towards Eastern Europe, the support of certain revolutions, the support of certain political figures, There were smart people from George Kennan to,
you know, even the former CIA director, whatever you think of him, Bill Burns, who warned that this stuff would happen.
And again, these decisions that we make in a certain moment, very focused on one thing, have second and third order consequences that sometimes are very easy to see.
That they're quite obvious.
Like, if anybody had any understanding of the region and the power dynamics in the region in 2003, they would have known, geez, removing...
Saddam Hussein, however awful he was, would inevitably benefit Iran.
There was hardly any discussion of that in the lead-up to the war.
Well, no, I was president of the country when all of that happened, and I didn't know anything, but it just seemed obvious if you have a majority Shiite country, and you force democracy, whatever that is, on that country, and all of a sudden you get a Shiite government, it's probably going to be aligned with Iran,
right? It went from a bulwark against Iran to an ally of Iran, which it remains, I think.
Boy, that could be a three-hour conversation in and of itself.
So I think there's a lot of reasons why we invaded Iraq.
None of them good.
But the one thing that should be acknowledged is that even before 9-11, there was an effort to create the conditions for the United States.
I don't remember.
that George H.W. Bush didn't go all the way in terms of Baghdad.
And then you had this post-Cold War moment where the United States was not simply a superpower.
It was a hyperpower.
And we had nobody who could effectively challenge us.
Russia was a mess.
China was still on the upswing.
Some smart people saw what was coming.
But the assumption was we bring them into the WTO.
We do free trade.
And so, when you have nobody in the world that can effectively Challenge or check you, that can create political conditions domestically that lead people to think that there will be no consequences for American foreign policy.
And I also think, too, that our experience in the Balkans and how those wars went also convinced a large part of the American security establishment that, oh, we can deal with Iraq rather cheaply and quickly, and it'd be no big deal.
And you saw a lot of that in the early days of the Iraq War, people gloating.
People assuming that, you know, once the statue of Saddam in Fido Square fell down, which, by the way, was, you know, pulled down by Marines from 1st Marine Division, that, you know, we'd be out there pretty quickly.
Well, whatever the motive, the actions of the U.S. government under George W. Bush greatly strengthened Iran, Bulwark against their expansion and freed up a lot of cash,
as you just said.
So here we are.
We're facing enormous pressure to go to war with a country that's not Iraq, that's actually more powerful than Iraq.
A lot of this is public information, but to the extent, I know you're doing your best not to reveal anything that's classified.
But to the extent you can kind of characterize it using publicly available information, what is the current strength of Iran, do you think, as a military power?
So, again, though, we can't deny that they have suffered some significant setbacks.
However, they still retain significant conventional military capabilities, an effective missile force.
They have effective proxies in Iraq.
They have a very effective drone program.
And those things, I think the Iranian missile force, more than even a potential nuclear program, and this is based on their experience in the Iran-Iraq war, they very much view their missile force as their ultimate guarantor of regime
and national survival.
And again, that goes back to their experience in the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam Hussein, sometimes with indirect or direct American support, would use his Scud missiles and Tupolev bombers to effectively bomb
and attack Iranian cities.
And the Iranians didn't have really an effective defense against them or even an effective way to counter-strike Iraq.
It's an interesting story.
Gaddafi and Saddam had this kind of rivalry.
So Libya, even though being a secular Arab socialist state, kind of like Iraq, they wound up backing Iran.
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It sounds to me like people who thought a lot about this have reached the conclusion that if we were to participate in a strike on their nuclear facilities, lots of Americans would die.
So the choke point for a lot of the global oil trade is, you know, the very end, you know, the terminus of the entrance to the Arabian Gulf, Persian Gulf, the Straits of Hormuz famously.
And do you think Iran is capable of shutting that off?
So you could see catastrophe both in the form of like a global depression potentially and the deaths of a lot of Americans in that region and here in the wake of a war with Iran.
The third point that I don't think is ever mentioned in any account I've ever read about these plans to just bomb Iran and rid them of their nuclear program is the fact that Iran is now part of a global coalition of big countries that oppose us.
We force these countries together that don't naturally have aligned interests.
Iran is a Shiite theocracy.
Russia is an authoritarian country run by Vladimir Putin and a group of oligarchs, essentially.
China is a quasi-communist, quasi-state capitalist state.
North Korea is one of the last true communist authoritarian countries on the face of the earth.
A lot of these countries should have natural tension.
And there's been points in the post-Cold War era where a country like Russia was willing to do things like not sell weapons to Iran because they didn't want to inflict instability on the Middle East.
Russia also traditionally
So Israelis along the United States were able to convince the Russians at key points, like, hey, don't sell these weapons to Iran or don't do this.
And so while they were growing closer, there were still gaps between them.
And let's also be honest, too, is Russia has had significant problems with Islamic radicalism in their country.
And they don't want to support a regime that in the past has supported Islamic radicals, both Sunni and Shia, across the Middle East and across other parts of the world.
They don't want them doing that in certain parts of the world.
And so why are they pushed together?
Well, it's because we adopted this mindset, and even before the Biden administration adopted this, is that this autocracy versus democracy.
And again, it wasn't well-defined before that, but...
We started just bucketing these countries together.
Here's a great example.
Axis of evil.
When they said, we have this axis of evil of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
Iraq and North Korea broke off relationships in the Iran-Iraq war because they were so close to the Iranians.
And the North Koreans, it appears, may have ripped off the Iraqis in the 90s.
They got them.
This is, again, hasn't been confirmed, but they may have ripped them off when the North Koreans offered to sell them weapons.
And the North Koreans are actually kind of famous for this.
They got the money and said, yeah, we can't give that to you.
They actually tried at one point in the early 90s.
Again, I can't say if this story is for sure, but I read this on a military blog.
They tried to pay for some Russian military equipment with used car parts.
So, I bring this up in that, and again, Russia and China, these are two countries with historical antagonisms.
They have a shared border that they've, you know, during the Soviet times, they fought wars over.
They have the Chinese look at Siberia and its resources, and its population I don't think is growing right now because they killed 100 million baby girls.
But this is an area with resources that they need.
And that there's been in the past conflicts over.
There should be tension between those two countries, but our foreign policy of bucketing them all together, sanctioning them, treating them as one united front, has kind of willed it into existence.
We should be able to pull them apart because they have interests that don't align.
We should be able to be working more with the Russians.
And I hope that...
You know, if, again, Steve Whitcoff is successful and others in the administration, there's a lot of great people in the administration working on Russia-Ukraine right now.
If they're successful, we can hopefully maybe get to a better place with Russia and they can help us with Iran.
You know, I think maybe that's a possibility, but the more I've interacted with some of these people and seen them up close, it's almost giving them too much credit.
You know, in my, albeit short time in the Pentagon, like with Ukraine, a lot of people in the Pentagon wanted to keep doing what we were doing in Ukraine.
Some of them really had an ideological commitment to the Ukrainian project.
So I think that because of their experience, in some ways you can somewhat sympathize with it, is that they did sympathize with Ukraine.
But, you know, I saw a lot of it, and a lot of it was it's easier to say we should keep doing what we're doing than admit that we had been screwing things up.
And think of a different way to do things.
I think that more than ideology.
Now, ideology plays an important role.
The belief that America needs to be the global hegemon to, you know, enforce liberal hegemony.
But really, for a lot of the people, and I think the same applies to the State Department, it's just easier to say.
I think there clearly is a very strong coalition within the United States that wants us to see another war in the Middle East.
And it crosses both parties.
Just to point something out, and I wrote about this in Foreign Affairs with a friend of mine, Reed Smith.
During the campaign, the Democrats attacked Trump for being too dovish on Iran.
And they attacked him for not doing more after killing Soleimani, not doing more after some of the Iranian drone strikes on Saudi Arabia in 2019.
They accused him of being too weak on Iran.
And the Democrat Party trotted out Liz Cheney, of all people, and the endorsement of her father, had her going to battleground states, talking about the importance of staying, quote, strong in the Middle East and continuing to fund an unwinnable
war in Ukraine.
And that was the position they adopted.
So it's kind of transcended the traditional right-left way we think about American foreign policy that came into being at the end of the Cold War, or even before that.
It really predates the end of Cold War.
It really goes back to the Cold War where the, you know, in the...
It really kind of transcends that.
And you have this trans-partisan movement to keep America engaged in the world.
And I think it's good for America to be engaged in the world, but engaged in the world so that their primary purpose is not to protect American interests or safety or the conditions of American prosperity, but to ensure that America...
Is enforcing liberal hegemony.
So getting back to Iran, there's a lot of reasons why people want war with Iran.
I think when it comes down to it, is a lot of people still think you can do regime change wars successfully in the Middle East.
Because they're essentially, I mean, some of the biggest advocates of war with Iran, whether it's groups like Foundation for Defense of Democracy, writers at certain publications, essentially they are saying the problem with diplomacy is it doesn't lead to regime change,
is that the policy should be regime change.
It's almost like the nuclear...
This issue is really about creating a pathway to regime change.
And it really still goes back to this idea, as a lot of them deep down inside believe, and some of them say it out loud, that we could have made Iraq successful.
The most deadly forces in the middle, the forces that pose the most risk to the United States, United States forces, are the popular mobilization forces in Iraq.
They are an official arm of the Iraqi government that we created after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which we fund through aid, and whose troops that we train, still with...
A couple thousand troops in Iraq.
So American troops in Iraq right now are getting attacked by people who are part of the same government that American troops are helping to support and whose security forces are helping to train.
It is the most counterproductive and insane foreign policy mission in the globe right now.
And I hope the administration will make changes to that.
Yeah, I mean, some of them do say it out loud, yes.
Is that they think, oh, the Shah, you know, the Shah's son has reemerged.
I mean, this guy is the, he's the ultimate failed son, in my view.
And then you have groups like the MEK, People's Mujahideen of Iran, who pay a lot of American politicians to advocate for them and advocate for regime change.
They are essentially saying, hey, we have governments in waiting that can just swoop in there and everything will be fine if you just get rid of the mullahs.
Yeah. It goes back to what I was saying about what I observed in the Pentagon, I think, is that it's easier to advocate for the same things over and over again than to say we should do something different.
I mean, maybe you have a different experience, but I just hear constantly about Republican senators, I'm sure there are Democrats too, but I hear about the Republicans, Lindsey Graham being the most obvious, but many others.
We're constantly applying pressure to the administration to have a regime change war against Iran.
I'm not going to confirm your nominees.
We're going to hassle you.
I mean, like, threatening the Trump administration in order to force them to lead a regime change war against Iran.
Look, I think, and I've talked about this before in my past jobs, I think there's a disconnect.
In Washington, D.C., among elected Republicans, with the exception of those in the White House currently, between the base, with the base actually believes on foreign policy.
The Republicans, in a lot of cases, were now less hawkish overall.
Polling doesn't tell the whole story all the time, but you saw voters...
Generally, the Democrats are getting more hawkish primarily because of Ukraine, but you saw Republican voters and independent voters becoming more and more wary of foreign wars.
However, because foreign policy, for a lot of voters, is often not a highly...
It's not in their top three.
A lot of Republicans and Democrats are able to get elected despite having horrible records on foreign policy.
Now, there are elections where it makes a difference.
2016, for example, there's real evidence that the fact that Donald Trump was viewed as less hawkish than Hillary Clinton played a decisive role in him winning Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
The counties that flipped from Obama to Trump, they had higher levels of what you call military sacrifice, so troops deployed, wounded, or killed than some of their adjacent counties.
So that likely contributed both to his 2016 and possibly his 2024 victory.
Now, I have good, dear friends of mine that, you know, they're much smarter than me on polling and social science.
They may disagree with that, but there have been times where actually the political incentives Are to be less hawkish.
But those don't show up in most elections.
So you have a lot of Republican leaders, in particular, that are just disconnected from the base.
Now, I think the good news is, though, is you're starting to see that change.
And you saw that play out with Ukraine aid, where I think the last major Ukraine aid vote, and it may actually be the last major Ukraine aid vote ever, is I think you had...
Over half of Senate Republicans vote against it, and more than half of House members vote against it.
And that went from, like, you only had six Republicans voting against the first big Ukraine aid package in 2022, and only 40 House Republicans to now, I believe, about 26, 27 senators, and then nearly 110,
113, somewhere in that range.
House Republicans voting against it.
So you've seen changes.
And definitely, the Republicans elected since 2018 in both the House and Senate, they're far less hawkish than people elected before then.
No, and I think this goes back to a simple belief of what is the purpose of American foreign policy.
I believe, and I think President Trump, Vice President Vance, I believe even Secretary Rubio, Secretary Hegseff, and others in the administration fundamentally believe the purpose of American foreign policy is to ensure American safety and the conditions of our
prosperity. That doesn't mean we're going to ensure 3% GDP growth.
It's the things that enable us to be prosperous.
So like, for example, prioritizing the defense of the Panama Canal over the negligible issue of which Eastern European oligarch gets to
Like, they believe, they believe that, that...
You know, that is more important because the Panama Canal indisputably is more important to us than who controls the Donbass or who controls some desolate patch of desert in the Middle East.
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So I was a senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense.
I was focused on policy.
I was the senior advisor in the front office for policy.
And so my job day-to-day was advising the Secretary on policy, making sure that he was prepared for meetings, making sure that he was prepared for giving certain speeches and talks, and then providing him policy advice as needed.
We had a very smart policy team.
The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who just was confirmed, thank God, Bridge Colby.
He's doing a great job.
The way the Pentagon works is you need somebody in the front office that can connect the secretary effectively to policy.
And policy has so many jobs and so many things they have to focus on that you need somebody in the front office that can help be that immediate policy advisor that is able to walk in and talk to the secretary right away.
He had dropped out of Arizona State University and enlisted in the Army as a paratrooper like his dad and was attached to 101st as part of the Pathfinder unit.
And he was in Iraq in the summer.
He went to Iraq near the fall of 2005.
And I remember him on AOL Instant Messenger sending me a message saying, my team almost got hit by an IED.
And I was kind of like, what am I doing here?
I need to get in the fight.
Because growing up, you asked me what I wanted to do, is I was very interested in military history.
And my grandfather, who is very important to me, he was a paratrooper, but I became obsessed with the Marine Corps.
Yeah. And all due respect to them, but there was a saying in the infantry, it's like, if you ain't infantry, you ain't shit.
Yeah. And everything the Marine Corps did- From its fighter squadrons to its artillery to its tanks was in support of the enlisted riflemen locating with and destroying the enemy and repelling enemy assault by fire maneuver.
And so everything was in support of the 0311 doing its job.
And so I love being in the infantry.
And there was kind of this thing like if you were infantry like...
You felt, whether it was true or not, you were cut above the rest.
Your life sucked more, but that was a point of pride.
Afghanistan was kind of on a simmer, but it was still bad before getting much, much worse.
So my first two years, in boot camp, I was selected for a program called Yankee White.
And this is the Presidential Support Program.
So if you've ever seen the Marines saluting in front of the White House, they're part of the Presidential Support Program.
And as part of that, I went to be part of the Marine Security Force at Camp David.
So I spent, I think, almost two years up there about that while President Bush was president.
And that was a great duty station.
I loved it.
Closest friends still to this day I served with up there.
And it was a great command.
I had a great first sergeant, great commanding officer, great platoon sergeant.
So I spent two years there.
And then once my time was up there, I went to 2nd Battalion, 1st Marines, which was very lucky.
I got put in another great company, Fox Company 2-1.
And we did a workup.
And we needed a deployment to Iraq.
And this was end of 08, 2009.
I'll be honest.
It was not as bad as it was in Ramadi and Fallujah a few years before.
And it was mostly an uneventful deployment with some exceptions.
There was some incidents and things like that.
But you kind of left Iraq at that time thinking, okay, this isn't going to be like the new, you know, this isn't going to be Scottsdale, Arizona anytime soon.
But this could kind of work.
You know, this could kind of be like Tijuana, Mexico.
The strip clubs!
Yeah, but five years later, with the exception of Al-Assad, every place that I was at in Iraq was under the control of ISIS.
You know, you really try to navigate this topic without being filled with hate.
You don't want to become a hater.
But it's hard when you hear stuff like that and you think of someone like David Frum, not even an American, screaming at people, calling them bigots for not wanting to...
It's a disgrace that he is allowed in good and proper company.
I think the Iraq War was a monstrous crime.
That's the only way I can describe it.
It was a crime first and foremost against the Iraqi people and then the Syrian people because those two wars are clearly connected.
You know, ISIS essentially was formed in American prisons.
Well, ISIS sprung out of Zarqawi's group, but the leadership like Baghdadi.
And even the new president of Syria, Jolani, they were in American prisons and they met people that would eventually help form their core leadership teams in al-Nusra, which is the al-Qaeda branch,
and then ISIS.
Baghdadi met in prison, an American prison.
Iraqi military leaders and started to learn more about military tactics.
And a lot of those people he was in prison with would be the people that would help him take over most of Iraq and Syria.
You're not the first person I've asked this of, but what did it feel like as someone who actually served there, who wanted to serve there, dropped out of college to enlist, not go into ROTC, but to enlist in the Marine Corps?
What did it...
You gave your whole life to it, and then to see the carnage...
The Americans whose lives were destroyed and then realized this was all kind of fake.
It started really pushing me to where I'm at now in foreign policy.
We need to do something differently.
And it kind of radicalized me in a certain way on this and really...
There's an argument that when you're talking about foreign policy, you kind of need to be cold and detached.
Some people say that realists need to be cold and detached.
I don't necessarily buy that.
But when I hear about launching a new military operation and somebody talk about something, my first thought is, what's it going to be like for the guys?
What's it going to be like for the boys that are going to be in the front?
You know, men, women too.
It just, that's kind of the, you can't help but look through it for that prism.
And it's, sometimes you do have to detach yourself from it.
But yeah, that's, you know, that's what I really think of.
But the big thing is, like, we have to stop this from happening again.
And we did, at Concerned Veterans for America, we did a lot of polling when I was there, and we consistently found that the veterans and military family population was more opposed to new wars by pretty noticeable margins than the general population as a whole.
Well, that's the first thing I noticed when I started covering all this stuff or going over there.
It's like these guys were doing like a crazy number of deployments, and I just think you're gonna destroy a man over time if you keep sending him to war, no?
You know, my first few months out of the Marine Corps were tough.
There was some stuff in my personal life that was happening.
My father, this is when the economy was really bad.
My father passed away from a drug overdose.
And then leaving the Marine Corps, leaving...
A group of guys you had thought were your brothers and living in an apartment by yourself, that had a negative.
Like, that was not a fun time.
I thought it was going to be a blast.
You know, I have a bunch of money saved up from deployment.
I'm going to go on the GI Bill.
I'm going to, you know, a party school.
And I just eventually just said, hey, I'm just going to get through college.
I want to get a job.
I got married.
And so I just blew through college.
And then...
I got a job working for a member of Congress out in Arizona, and I was primarily focused on veterans' constituent work at first, and that was actually fulfilling, helping veterans get benefits.
And I learned a lot about how dysfunctional the VA was and how dysfunctional the Department of Defense was, too, because, you know, helping guys with problems with the DOD.
And after two and a half years there, you know, just to be candid, I needed to make more money.
By that time, I had a child.
And so a friend of mine...
Introduced me to Concerned Veterans for America, which at the time was run by Pete Hegstaff.
And I was recruited there first as somebody doing some field work, and then eventually as legislative and one of the policy directors.
When he was with Concerned Veterans for America, yes, we worked very closely together, along with Darren Selnick, who's another individual that left the Pentagon last week.
And I was primarily working with him on policy and comms, mainly focused on our efforts to fix the Department of Veterans Affairs.
So early on, even before the election, it was very informal because, you know, President Trump didn't initially do a formal transition that you'd seen before, which actually I think in some ways was a good idea.
At the time, I maybe...
I didn't understand why, but because of all the leaks and stuff that had hurt him in the first campaign, it ultimately became a much better run transition.
And I think a lot of the credit goes to, of course, the president himself, but Susie Wiles and I think Sergio Gore as well, too, was heading personnel.
So I was working with a group of people early on to identify people that could serve in the Department of Defense.
And one day I get a call from someone and...
I was told, hey, what do you know about Pete Hegseth?
I give, you know, a few bullets about what I know about him.
And then, you know, I call Pete.
And we had not, I mean, we had still stayed in touch, but we weren't, you know, working as closely together as we watched before.
It was like, hey, just so you know, the transition was asking questions about you.
And he says, yeah, I know I'm being considered for the role of Secretary of Defense.
I was like, wow, okay.
That's cool.
And so a few days later, through Veterans Day weekend, he gets the job.
And I started working with him during his confirmation.
I helped him during the confirmation, helped him defend against a lot of the attacks that were made against him, helped with strategy.
But what I eventually took over was being his main link to the personnel operation.
So helping to vet.
And place personnel within the Department of Defense.
And so I'd fly down to Florida a lot and work with some really great people on the PPO.
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So you're paying your way down to help Pete Hegseth.
You're obviously strongly in favor of Pete Hegseth.
And I would just say, you know, there's a lot of stories eventually written about me and the personnel that I was, you know, the puppet master and that I had ultimate decision rights and that I was trying to block people that supported this or that or opposed this and that.
It was all nonsense.
I mean, let me tell you, again, I've already used this already.
But there were people on the PPO team that were much more hardcore in foreign policy than I was.
And so in a lot of cases, I didn't even need to block unaligned people.
They were already getting blocked by people earlier in the process.
And I just sort of point out is that one thing that was amazing about working on the transition, it was tough sometimes, it's frustrating sometimes, and then in the administration was...
There are so many good people in this administration.
I remember I worked a lot.
I never went in, but I worked a lot with the first Trump administration.
And you can see me on the Internet.
I was standing behind the president when he was signing veterans bills all the time.
The president tweeted about one of my media appearances once.
I remember where I would have people from the White House and from the VA trying to talk me and Concerned Veterans for America out of supporting something the president wanted.
Particularly VA choice.
It's giving choice to veterans or making it easier to fire bad VA employees.
These are political appointees saying, why do you want to do that?
That's too radical.
We need to fix this or that on the margin.
And this time around, you have, I think, just like any administration, there are people that aren't on board with the president.
But one of the coolest things, I would just say, working in the administration, was having friends and people that share your mindset.
Across the interagency.
Yes. And being able to call them up and bounce ideas off each other.
And that was a really good experience, I will say.
But it seems like the fastest way to derail the whole project, the Trump administration and the United States of America, War with Iran.
And that's why I've just been watching it as carefully as I can because I feel like, again, if you hated Donald Trump and you hated what the administration is doing on immigration, trade, anti-wokeness, whatever, and you wanted to stop it, the first thing you would do is apply pressure to have the U.S. military engage in a war with Iran.
As a man and as an instrument of peace and a figure now out of history.
Okay, so...
You did make, just from an outsider's perspective, one maybe career mistake by giving on-the-record interviews before you went in, describing your foreign policy views, which I think are fully within the mainstream of the world in the U.S., but out of the mainstream among,
you know, warmongers in Washington.
So, like, people knew that you weren't fully on board with the regime change program.
No. Sitting here right now, myself and Darren Selnick and Colin Carroll, the other two individuals that were escorted out of the Pentagon, initially placed on leave and then fired on Friday, we have not been told as of this recording.
One, is there what we were being investigated for?
Two, Is there still an investigation?
And three, was there even a real investigation?
Because there's a lot of evidence that there is not a real investigation.
But again, sitting here right now, there are a lot of unknowns about this.
As a former Secretary of Defense would say, there's a lot of unknown unknowns.
There are some things that are pretty clear, but we have no idea what specifically we're being investigated for.
I'm trying not to use the F word here because the lying is just driving me insane.
You're being accused of leaking classified information, but the people accusing you would have no way of knowing whether you did that or not because they haven't polygraphed you or taken your devices, your private devices, correct?
You know, sometimes I think it just hasn't fully set in with me and what's going on.
And, you know, I just...
I want to talk about, too, the two other gentlemen that are going through this with me.
And what's going on with them in some ways is more infuriating because, as you said, I have a public profile.
I took some what shouldn't be controversial positions but are.
And, you know, I was out there, you know, advancing things that a lot of people in the foreign positive establishment didn't want.
Doesn't justify what's happening to me, but let's just be honest.
That is the nature of the games played in D.C. You know, Darren Selnick and Colin Carroll are patriots.
Let me talk about Darren a little bit.
Darren's another person that worked with Secretary Hegseff for over a decade.
He is somebody who's spent decades working around veterans and military health issues.
He served in the first Bush administration at the VA.
He served a critical role in the second...
Or excuse me, the first Trump administration.
He was a key player in advancing the VA Mission Act, one of the greatest accomplishments of the first Trump administration, which fundamentally reformed how the VA delivers health care.
Darren, I think, can go to bed every night saying he saved thousands of veterans' lives because of the reforms he helped advance.
He's an Air Force veteran.
In between his stints in government, he worked at Concerned Veterans for America with me and Pete, helping develop.
Revolutionary reforms to the VA that in large part were implemented by the first Trump administration.
To come back, he picked up, left his nice life in Oceanside, California.
His wife stayed behind and he got a crummy apartment in Arlington, Virginia, and worked sometimes 16, 17-hour days to advance his secretary's agenda.
He played a key role in ripping out woke and DEI nonsense.
Depending on, DOD is the largest human organization in the world.
It has more people than any, I think, in the history of the world.
And there's a lot at stake.
The future of the world is at stake.
It's DOD.
They have nuclear weapons.
And so the pressure exerted on that agency from outside, but also the fighting within it, make it one of the most complicated and treacherous work environments ever created.
I will say the one thing we had in common, there's a couple things we have in common, was we were threatening a lot of established interests in our own separate ways.
And we had people who had personal vendettas against us.
So I just want to restate, because this is why you're here, because you got bounced out and you're being accused of betraying your boss, your president, your nation.
You have...
I don't want to speak for you.
Not leak classified information to the news media.
You've never undergone a polygraph exam and you've never handed over your personal phone.
And let me just say, actually, my first instinct when they came and escorted me out of my office was I actually thought that they were going to try and get me to testify against the secretary because the secretary over the whole signal gate stuff.
Is under an Inspector General investigation.
That was my first instinct, was this was part of it.
In fact, the day I was escorted out of the building, I went into, I won't get specific, the highest of high-level intelligence briefings, and up until the minute I was pulled out of my office, I was on highly classified systems doing my work.
Part of my job entailed looking at intelligence, helping make recommendations as a secretary, giving my thoughts, working with a policy team, and most of our work was done on classified systems.
It's from the career staff who don't look like what the president and the secretary and vice president want to do.
There's people on the joint staff that I come to respect, but a lot of them are incredibly hostile to the secretary, to the president, and the vice president's worldview.
It's pretty obvious that that's where most of the leaks are coming from.
There's a less obvious place.
I just want to point something out.
As we sit here today, Tucker, and this could change by the time this is aired, but as we sit here today, Susan Rice, Michelle Flournoy, Eric Edelman are still in good standing with the Department of Defense.
Correct. Yet, as we sit here in April of 2025, about 100 days into the president's first term, she and a bunch of other people who are incredibly hostile to the president and his worldview remain on the defense policy board.
Well, I'm completely convinced that this is nonsense and sinister nonsense.
But if you...
You're the subject of an investigation, a leak investigation.
If the investigators had determined that you were leaking classified information to the news media, you probably wouldn't have continued to receive access to classified information, correct?
It's very obvious to me, having far fewer details than you have, that you're one of the people who is perceived to be standing in the way of a regime change war in Iran.
But based on what has been happening since then, I think that is a factor.
And it is being weaponized against me.
I think that they want to also go after, and I think that had, I can't say this with certainty, but just speculating, that had somebody in the White House not said, okay, we need to put a stop to this, there have probably been more people treated the same way that Colin,
So the fastest way to knock someone out of commission and eliminate his influence, and in your case his job, is to tell the person that he works for that that person's betraying you.
That person's betraying you.
And so, I mean, it sounds to me, again, I keep putting words in my mouth, but it sounds to me like you have felt, it sounds like you still feel that your views are aligned with those of the president.
100%. I wouldn't have joined this administration if I didn't feel that way.
Again, I don't speak for the president, but here's the other thing, too.
I had this attitude in the Pentagon, and maybe this was, you know, I saw this attitude that I was still, you know, in the Marine Corps.
It's like, hey, when a decision is made, when we've decided on a course of action that we're going to do this, we're going to make sure it's executed properly.
Yes. And you still raise concerns.
You still, if you see something happening, then you can do that.
But if you are so repulsed by what's happening, then you should resign.
I said earlier, sometimes I feel like it hasn't fully set in because it does feel like a dream.
It's like, when am I going to wake up at 0430 and just get ready for work and walk my dog, drop her off at doggy daycare, and then roll into the river entrance back in the Pentagon?
I feel like on some level that's happening.
I feel like it hasn't fully hit me, but it's been awful.
The impact on my family.
You know, I'll just say I wanted to try and hide this from my mom as long as possible because I was worried.
She's a worrier.
I love her to death.
She's a saint.
I didn't want to tell her.
Then an hour later, somebody leaked to Reuters describing exactly what had happened to me.
And then six hours later, they pulled the same stunt with Darren.
And then 12 hours later, they pulled the same stunt with Colin.
And so, you know, it's been devastating and it's caused a lot of stress to my family.
Just one thing I want to say is I've been a friend and supporter of Pete Hegseth for a long time and I'm just personally devastated by this.
Oh, I have to say, this is interesting you bring him up.
Chairman Dan Raisin-Cain, incredibly impressive.
And I actually think, if I'm being honest, one thing that has incited the building against President Trump and the Secretary was the selection of him.
A lot of people wanted the Secretary and the President to go the normal route, including some people in the administration, and pick a combatant commander, a General Carrillo, or an Admiral Paparo.
I actually like Admiral Paparo, but they wanted him to go that route.
No, instead, they did something that needed to happen, is they pulled a very accomplished guy out of retirement, somebody who didn't...
Do all the right things and check all the right boxes in his career, but who's incredibly smart, who's incredibly thoughtful about how he approached his problems to be the chairman.
And that upset so many career paths.
If you look at these books where they kind of lay out how you promote generals, they have little maps about where people are going to go.
And there's a lot of people that are going to go to...
This role in the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, the vice chairman, they're going to be the chief of staff of the army.
And by elevating Kang, they upset so many career paths.
And it's hard to overstate how much of a middle finger that was to a lot of the uniform leadership of the United States military.
And I think that was one of the reasons why we started to see more leaks, really starting around the middle of March.
Tucker, it's been an honor to be here, and I just want to say I think you should feel proud because you have played a key role in helping stop some really bad stuff in foreign policy.
really helped turn the tide, I think, in a lot of different ways.
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