Senate Standing Committee on Veterans, Homeland Security and Military Affairs – 03/04/2025

A former federal prosecutor warned on Wednesday that President Donald Trump is hiding the enormous cost of his most heinous scandal right under the noses of Americans.

Harry Litman, a former deputy assistant attorney general, argued in a new Substack essay that Trump's "[lurching] from scandal to scandal like a drunken sailor" had effectively distracted the American public from his intensified bombing campaigns in South America. He added that the strikes have not only killed close to 200 people, but also "violate the law and bring our country into disrepute."

"We are already giving this tinpot dictator far more attention than he deserves, and yet not nearly enough to keep vigil over the enormous costs of his lawlessness," Litman wrote.

Litman noted scandals like Signalgate — when multiple top Trump officials leaked sensitive military operation plans to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, through a private encrypted messaging platform not approved for government use — and the heavily redacted Jeffrey Epstein files have been largely swept under the rug by Trump's repeated lawlessness.

Litman added that the bombing campaign carries an enormous cost and highlights the need for a more wide-ranging oversight regime once the Trump administration is out of office.

"Two hundred people killed in secret, in international waters, without legal authority, without evidence of effect, at a cost of nearly five billion dollars. It is still happening, under our noses as it were, but we’re focused on other things," he wrote.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers hand-picked by a board of senior admirals, removing all women and most minority candidates from the list of nominees for promotions.

The intervention left a slate of 22 one-star admiral nominees that includes no women, despite females making up roughly 21 percent of the active-duty Navy, and only two nonwhite officers, despite racial minorities accounting for approximately 38 percent of the force, reported the New York Times.

At least two of the removed officers are women, two are Black men, and three are white men.

Four current and former defense officials, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said Hegseth's actions are highly unusual and appear to breach Pentagon rules, which permit the defense secretary to remove officers from promotion lists only when new information raises specific questions about their fitness to serve — not on ideological grounds.

Internal records suggest some officers were targeted because their names appeared on a website devoted to identifying "woke" military personnel, with infractions as minor as having served as a diversity liaison officer two decades ago. One highly regarded officer — a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer and former aide to a four-star admiral — was pulled from the list shortly after her name surfaced on the site for that decades-old role.

Hegseth also pushed senior Navy officials to place Capt. William Francis Jr., a Navy SEAL who serves as Hegseth’s special assistant, on the one-star list, but his lack of command experience made him ineligible for promotion and he was not selected, according to current and former Navy officials.

Since taking office, Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior officers. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, noted in recent Senate testimony that nearly 60 percent of the senior officers Hegseth has dismissed are female or Black — a group that currently makes up fewer than 20 percent of all generals and admirals.

Among those previously pushed out were General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second African American to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman ever to lead the Navy.

Hegseth has repeatedly declined to explain individual dismissals or removals, telling lawmakers he does not discuss such matters "out of respect for those officers" while speaking broadly of correcting years of what he called "gender and demographic engineering."

The Pentagon denied that race or gender played any role in promotion decisions, and the Navy declined to comment.

President Donald Trump told NBC News's Garrett Haake by phone Monday that he'd be okay with the Iranians suspending peace talks.

The post Trump Tells NBC He’d Be OK With Iran Going Radio Silent On Deal Negotiations: ‘I Think We’ve Been Talking Too Much’ first appeared on Mediaite.