The Pentagon quietly scrubbed an advisory board’s website after a fired aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained that it was stocked with holdovers hostile to President Donald Trump who might be spreading damaging leaks.
The Defense Policy Board’s online roster was erased after axed staffer Dan Caldwell told Tucker Carlson in an interview that its members were “incredibly hostile” to Trump.
Caldwell was fired Friday amid a Defense Department leak investigation that has led to the ouster of several longtime Hegseth confidants.
In his interview with Carlson, Caldwell cast himself as the victim of a behind-the-scenes battle between warmongers pushing for conflict with Iran and skeptics of foreign military intervention such as himself.
Although the Defense Policy Board is an independent advisory group with no powers of its own, he blamed members including Susan Rice, a former Joe Biden aide, as potential sources of leaks for which he had been blamed.
“She and a bunch of other people who are incredibly hostile to the president and his worldview remain on the Defense Policy Board,” Caldwell said. “I would just say, if you want to look where leaks are maybe coming from, that would be a place to start.”
Caldwell did not offer any evidence. His complaints were soon amplified online, however, by former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
By Thursday of this week, the names of Rice and other policy board members had vanished from the Pentagon website. The change happened after Caldwell’s interview was posted to X on Monday, according to Internet Archive captures of the website.
Earlier this week, a Pentagon spokesperson told Responsible Statecraft that the list was “up to date.”
It is unclear whether the board’s members have been removed. The Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request comment.
If Hegseth has sacked board members, however, it would continue a series of dramatic changes to the board’s membership over the past five years.
After remaining largely intact for most of Trump’s first term, the Trump administration pushed out many of the board’s members in November 2020.
The likes of Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright were replaced with Trump loyalists such as Newt Gingrich and Scott O’Grady, a former fighter pilot who shared calls for Trump to declare martial law in response to his election defeat.
Biden’s secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, removed all the members of the policy board and 41 other boards just weeks into his tenure.
He eventually replaced Trump’s lame-duck appointees with establishment D.C. figures associated with former Democratic and Republican presidents, drawing heavily on Washington’s deep bench of liberal and neoconservative hawks. At the time the site went down, the board included figures like Rice and former ambassador Eric Edelman, who served as a Defense Department under secretary during George W. Bush’s presidency.
They and other board members could not immediately be reached for comment.
Board minutes posted online indicate that it has not met since last June.
It’s unclear why Hegseth, who has rapidly moved to remove officials affiliated with Biden from the Defense Department leadership, would have allowed Rice to receive sensitive information.
Caldwell argued that board membership would have given members such as Rice a pathway because it gave her a “credential and affiliation” with the Pentagon.
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