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“Her involvement in the Defense Department is so unusual that it has led to questions about Mr. Hegseth’s leadership,” the report states.
It seems like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth might have a bit of a puppetmaster — and he’s super into it.
On Wednesday, the New York Times took a deep dive into Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth, and her influence at the Pentagon — including her sway over her husband and how he performs his job.
“Mrs. Hegseth was for years Mr. Hegseth’s producer at Fox News as he built a broadcast career. Now, seven years into their marriage, she is his most influential adviser and his de facto producer at the Pentagon,” Elisabeth Bumiller, a former Pentagon correspondent for the Times, wrote.
Bumiller added, “Her involvement in the Defense Department is so unusual that it has led to questions about Mr. Hegseth’s leadership.”
Bumiller — who began her report by making the bold statement that there “has never been a Pentagon spouse quite like Jennifer Hegseth” — highlights how deeply involved she is with the job of her husband.
“She has prepped him for appearances,” Bumiller reports. “Sat in on his meetings with journalists, interviewed potential members of his staff and brainstormed ideas for the Defense Department videos he — and sometimes she — appears in.”
Jennifer Hegseth was included in the group chat during last year’s SignalGate scandal, in which sensitive war plans for Yemen were discussed.
Although the Wall Street Journal reported last year that Jennifer Hegseth sat in on a highly sensitive meeting with her husband and top British defense officials after the U.S. temporarily stopped sharing military intelligence with Ukraine, Bumiller got a “previously undisclosed” detail about this meeting from an unnamed Trump administration official: Apparently, Jennifer Hegseth’s presence made British officials “uneasy” and they declined to offer more details until she left.
Bumiller notes that it’s unclear if Jennifer Hegseth has security clearance at the Pentagon, but she does have access to an “elevator from the building’s garage that opens directly into Mr. Hegseth’s office” and is “in direct contact with members of her husband’s inner circle,” including his chief of staff.
The same Trump administration official told Bumiller that Jennifer Hegseth also encourages her husband’s “adversarial relationship with the news media” and “has worked with her husband to bar reporters from the building,” despite formerly being a journalist herself.
“It’s bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences,” John Ullyot, who left the Pentagon as chief spokesman after three months working under Pete Hegseth, told the Times. “Any president deserves better judgment from his national security leaders.”
Bumiller notes later in her report that Ullyot was stunned that Jennifer Hegseth actually interviewed him for the spokesperson role — and grilled him for 40 minutes about how he’d handle the hostile media — when he was under the assumption that they were meeting for a friendly “meet-and-greet.”
Jennifer Hegseth also travels with her husband often for work. She was spotted working out alongside the defense secretary with sailors aboard the USS Boxer in Singapore. She tagged along with her husband on a trip to Normandy, France, for a D-Day commemoration with six of their seven children in tow. Bumiller reports that during the event in Normandy, Pete Hegseth played a Defense Department promotional video “with a swelling, cinematic soundtrack” that captured the Hegseths “walking arm in arm on Omaha Beach.”
“The imagery seemed to cast her as the first lady of the Pentagon,” Bumiller notes.
Apparently Pete Hegseth is super comfortable with this dynamic. Another unnamed source familiar with Pete Hegseth’s “thinking” told Bumiller that Pete Hegseth “likes his wife to travel with him to keep him out of trouble.”
The Times story comes amid reports of Pete Hegseth’s mishandling of the situation aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which has experienced a record-breaking deployment in the Arabian Sea that has made life upon the vessel feel a lot like a scene out of “American Horror Story,” at least according to the mother of a service member on board.
It also comes amid scrutiny of the roles that non-elected or unconfirmed figures in the White House play in the Trump administration — like President Donald Trump’s aide, Natalie Harp. Much like Jennifer Hegseth with her husband, Harp has tremendous influence over the president by constantly printing out positive headlines and social media posts about him for him to read — which may explain why he’s confused about the plummeting of public opinion about him — and even drafting some of his most chaotic Truth Social posts.
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