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DOJ Launches a Hunting Party for Pentagon Leakers — 48 Hours to Comply

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a video to his X account on July 14 announcing a joint task force between the Pentagon and the Department of Justice dedicated to one mission: finding and prosecuting the people who have been leaking classified and sensitive information from inside the Defense Department.

The back door just got a deadbolt.

Under the new directive, the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel now has sweeping authority to request all information, support, and records related to leak investigations from every component of the Department of Defense. Every Pentagon employee must treat those requests as priority. The deadline for a "full and complete" response is 48 hours.

"Access to confidential and secret information is a sacred trust, and those who betray that trust will be met with the full force of the law," Hegseth said in the announcement. The task force will coordinate directly with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to pursue legal action against offenders — meaning this isn't an internal HR exercise. This is a criminal referral pipeline.

The timing isn't accidental. The Pentagon has spent the better part of a year tightening the screws on a leak culture that operated with near-total impunity under previous administrations. Three Hegseth aides — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen A. Feinberg — were already removed as part of the broader crackdown.

The DOJ side has been just as aggressive. Subpoenas went to the Wall Street Journal over Iran reporting and to the New York Times targeting four reporters over a Qatar plane security story. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi reversed a Biden-era policy back in April, resuming the seizure of reporters' phone records in leak investigations. The old guardrails that treated media leak recipients as untouchable are gone.

The press is framing this as an assault on journalism. David McCraw, an attorney for the New York Times, offered the standard defense: "Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public's right to know how their government is operating." That's the boilerplate. It's been the boilerplate for decades.

What it doesn't address is the difference between reporting and receiving classified material that someone inside the Pentagon illegally exfiltrated. The First Amendment is broad. It is not a blanket immunity for handling stolen secrets, and McCraw knows that.

Former Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot called Hegseth's position "very rich," pointing to Hegseth's own Signal app incident involving Yemen strike details. That's a fair shot, and it landed. But one person's hypocrisy doesn't invalidate the policy — it just means the policy should apply to everyone, including the boss. If the task force is serious, that standard has to hold.

The Pentagon also revoked press access as part of the broader posture shift. Roughly 40 to 50 journalists departed in October 2025 rather than sign the new media policy.

This task force is the most structured anti-leak apparatus the Pentagon has stood up in recent memory. It has subpoena coordination with DOJ, mandatory compliance timelines, and a direct line to criminal prosecution.

For years, leaking from the Pentagon was a career move — a way to shape coverage, settle scores, or undermine policies you disagreed with. The cost was theoretical. The reward was a flattering quote in a prestige outlet and a reputation as a "senior official familiar with the matter."

The cost just became a 48-hour clock and a DOJ case file.

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