Vice President JD Vance is blaming the media for continuing its long-running crusade against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with the latest attacks on hosting Signal chats.
"I have 100% confidence in the secretary; I know the president does, and really, the entire team does," Vance told reporters on the tarmac in Agra, India.
"It's one of the most bizarre things about the Hegseth nomination: From the very beginning, the media seemed to want to tank it, and when they failed, and he got confirmed, they decided they wanted to keep on that effort to destroy Pete Hegseth as a man, as the Secretary of Defense.
"I think he's doing a great job."
Hegseth's leadership has restored a "warrior ethos" to a struggling military that focused too long on woke politics under former President Joe Biden, Vance hailed.
"I think that he's brought a certain spirit back to the Department of Defense, and if you look at our military recruitment numbers, in my view, that's testament to his leadership of the military," Vance continued. "It's that for the first time in a very long time, we don't have terrible recruitment problems in the Army, in the Navy, in the Air Force."
Ultimately, the media is carrying obstructionist Democrats' water in attacking Hegseth's leadership with anonymous sources from disgruntled fired former staffers who Hegseth rebuked this week as "leakers," according to Vance, who lamented the media deflecting from the reality of a rebuilt military.
"That's a great testament to his leadership, and I wish, frankly, that the press talked more about that and not about anonymous sourcing from random staffers," Vance concluded.
Hegseth, the Pentagon staff that has not been put on leave over the Signal leaks probe, and the White House have rejected media attacks.
"Those folks who were leaking, who have been pushed out of the building, are now attempting to leak and sabotage the president's agenda and what we're doing," Hegseth said Tuesday. "And that's unfortunate. It's not what I do. It's not how we operate.
"Disgruntled former employees are peddling things to try to save their a**."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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