Amid many controversies engulfing Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, one was the presence of former UN Ambassador Susan Rice in the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. It was a mystery to many Republicans as to why the Obama confidante was still on the Board at a time when the department was fighting too many leaks.
Her sacking was announced late Thursday evening with the Defense department issuing a statement that read, “changes are needed to support the new strategic direction and policy priorities of the department and to ensure departmental resources are used efficiently.”
Rice was the US ambassador to the UN during Obama’s first term and the national security adviser in his second term. She also spent two years as the director of the Domestic Policy Council under Biden and remained a board member of a Pentagon committee.
Rice described Hegseth’s leaks, including this week’s news that he used an unsecured internet connection to run Signal on a personal computer in his office, as a “huge breach of national security” that puts “our men and women in uniform at risk.” Rice said Hegseth as a “white male Christian cisgender macho MAGA man,” proves that it’s possible that someone “can be as dumb as a rock and be deemed qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense.”
The Signalgate led to a mass exodus of staffers in his department. Trump has continued to back Hegseth – despite a department investigation into staffers leaking information – but Rice said Friday that he should be fired and went even further, saying he never should’ve been running the Pentagon.
She slammed Trump for running the country ‘as if he were a monarch and everybody is subservient to him, and anybody who criticizes or questions the actions or behavior of his team or himself are inherently the enemies.’
