US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice have established a joint task force as part of efforts to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information to the public.

Hegseth stated that the Office of the General Counsel (OGC) of the Department of Defense will have the authority to request and receive all information, support, and records across the Pentagon related to media leak investigations.

The Defense Secretary noted that all departments and personnel within the ministry will prioritize these requests. He added that a complete and comprehensive response to any instruction issued by the OGC under this authority must be provided within two days of the submission of the request.

“Leaked information risks lives. These new tools and processes will greatly assist us in protecting our collective strength. Our nation’s security cannot be a bargaining chip for those chasing instant headlines,” Hegseth said in an approximately two-and-a-half-minute video message published on the social media platform X.

Hegseth also stated, “Access to classified and confidential information is a sacred trust, and those who betray this trust will face the full force of the law.”

The announcement of the task force came a few days after the Department of Justice issued subpoenas to four New York Times reporters. The journalists, summoned to testify before a federal grand jury, had reported on security concerns regarding President Donald Trump’s flight to Türkiye for a NATO summit on an aircraft donated by Qatar.

The subpoenas drew sharp criticism from The New York Times and press freedom advocates. Opponents argue that the government is attempting to intimidate news organizations.

“Our journalists report the facts and defend the American public’s right to know how their government operates and how taxpayer dollars are spent,” New York Times attorney David McCraw said in a statement. “This brazen action is nothing less than an attempt to deter journalists from doing their jobs, thereby preventing the public from learning what is happening in the country.”

Hegseth has been taking steps to prevent leaks to the press since the beginning of his tenure at the Pentagon. Last year, the department launched investigations into personnel alleged to have leaked classified information to the media and threatened to administer polygraph tests.

Leak allegations were also directed at some of Hegseth’s advisers last year. Former senior adviser Dan Caldwell and former deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick are among those individuals. Caldwell, Selnick, and Colin Carroll, the former chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen A. Feinberg, were first suspended and subsequently dismissed from their positions and removed from the Pentagon as part of the internal leak investigation.

A government official, speaking to The Hill in mid-March, stated there was no evidence that Caldwell, who began working at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) earlier this year, had leaked information from the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Hegseth has previously been the target of criticism himself for allegedly sharing sensitive information. Last year, Hegseth discussed planned US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen in a Signal group chat to which an editor of The Atlantic magazine had been mistakenly added. A report published in December by the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General determined that Hegseth had compromised military security and violated department policy by using the Signal application on his personal mobile phone.

“It is highly ironic that Hegseth himself shared sensitive national defense information with his wife over Signal last year and faced no consequences, yet now speaks of the need to protect this information,” said former Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot. “In 2012, CIA Director David Petraeus resigned from his post for a similar situation involving his girlfriend, and was sentenced in federal court to two years of probation and a $10,000 fine.”

Ullyot, who also served as the spokesperson for the National Security Council during Trump’s first term, told The Hill on Monday: “The President deserves better from his national security leaders. Hegseth should start holding himself accountable before holding others accountable.”

Reporters have been largely blocked from entering the Pentagon after Hegseth revoked access to most of the facility. Pentagon correspondents returned their press credentials in October, refusing to sign a new media policy that required a commitment not to solicit unauthorized materials.

Hegseth and his supporters argue that the policy will protect national security by preventing the leak of classified information. Press freedom groups and critics, conversely, characterize the practice as a violation of the constitutional rights of journalists.

Most recently, the department further restricted press access by declaring the Pentagon building a classified space and banning journalists from entering.

Offering historical references in his statement on Monday, Hegseth said, “Leaking sensitive national defense information and secrets is a betrayal of the men and women who wear the uniform of our country. This is a principle as old as the history of warfare, reaching back to the founding of our republic in the United States. George Washington himself combated leaks, insider threats, and espionage.”

Shares of the American aerospace company SpaceX fell to as low as $136.78 at the trough of the trading session on Monday, July 13, representing a 5.87% decline compared to the close of trading on July 10. According to data from the US-based NASDAQ exchange, this retreat marks a depreciation of approximately 40% from the company’s historic peak of $225.64, which was recorded on June 16. With this latest decline, the company’s shares have approached their initial public offering (IPO) price threshold of $135.

As of 21:25 Moscow time on the trading day in question, the shares continued to trade at $137.4, down 5.4%.

The downward trend in the shares was driven by reports that the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had concluded its investigation into the emergencies and malfunctions during the May 22 launch of Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket model developed by SpaceX.

According to CNBC, the agency reviewed and approved the findings and corrective measures submitted by the company following its internal investigation into the incident.

The Starship project, a massive, reusable rocket designed to carry crew and cargo to the Moon and Mars and to perform other space missions, is considered one of the most critical elements of Elon Musk’s space program.

In a statement issued by the FAA, it was noted that following the approved corrective actions, SpaceX is permitted to begin preparations for the Starship Flight 13 flight, provided that the company meets all safety requirements and licensing conditions.

The FAA had previously issued a statement regarding the malfunction during the launch attempt at the end of May. The statement noted: “The anomaly occurred during the Super Heavy booster’s flip maneuver over the Gulf of America.”

The region referred to as the Gulf of America by US authorities in official correspondence is commonly known as the Gulf of Mexico.

According to official data, the booster parts fell within the boundaries of pre-established hazard areas. Six flights were delayed and five aircraft remained in holding patterns for a period due to the incident, though no changes were made to flight routes.

SpaceX shares, which began trading on the NASDAQ exchange at the beginning of June, gained 25% at the opening. As part of the initial public offering, the company offered 555.6 million shares for sale at a fixed price of $135 per share.

The SpaceX IPO was recorded as the largest initial public offering in financial history. The company initially raised $75 billion, and the total funds raised reached $85.7 billion after consortium members exercised their over-allotment option to purchase an additional 83.3 million shares.

In a statement to his employees, company founder Elon Musk stated that going public was necessary to generate capital during a phase of rapid growth. It was announced that the proceeds would be used to complete the development process of the Starship rockets, bring them to commercial readiness, and expand the Starlink satellite network.

The post-IPO surge in SpaceX shares had briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Bloomberg had estimated Musk’s wealth at $1.05 trillion, while Forbes valued it at $1.1 trillion.

However, with the decline in share prices and the company’s market value that began in late June, Musk lost his trillionaire title after holding it for 12 days.

According to an analysis by Bloomberg, the decline was driven by SpaceX’s preparations to issue at least $20 billion in bonds to finance artificial intelligence projects, alongside the signing of a multi-billion-dollar agreement with AI startup Reflection AI to provide computing resources.

Assessments by S&P Global projected that SpaceX will continue to incur expenditures without generating revenue until at least 2029.

Thomas Karat, behavior analyst

The senator died Saturday night of an aortic dissection, at seventy-one, in the middle of a campaign for a fifth term. His communications director cited the medical examiner’s preliminary finding: a rupture in the body’s largest artery, the consequence of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The tributes arrived within hours. Trump called him a true American patriot. Volodymyr Zelensky, who had met him twice in the preceding week, called him a friend who was there when it was needed most. Mark Rutte and Benjamin Netanyahu sent their own. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said there were no words to describe Graham’s impact on the foreign and domestic policy of the United States.

There are words. The obituaries have chosen the wrong ones, and in doing so they have skipped the only question worth asking about a man like this. Not whether he was sincere in his convictions — he was, exhaustingly so — but how a senator whose reflexive answer to every foreign crisis was force spent twenty-three years being handed the committee seats, the airtime, and the ear of four presidents that let him act on it. Graham was not an aberration the system tolerated. He was a product the system manufactured, promoted, and kept in stock because he was useful.

Consider the shape of the career. In March 2003, as the bombs fell on Baghdad, Graham told the country that past disagreements should give way to a shared commitment to see the effort through. The war he blessed that day killed more than a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians by the most conservative direct-death counts, birthed the insurgency that became ISIS, and left the country a wreck. He drew no lesson from it. When Libya was broken open in 2011 and left to its warlords, he had backed the intervention. When Syria was pulled apart, he had wanted deeper involvement. Across two decades, the country would be devastated, and Graham’s response to each devastation was to locate the next one.

By February of this year the next one was Iran. On the twenty-sixth, under his own Senate letterhead, Graham published an essay that reads now like a confession left in plain sight. Iran, he wrote, was facing a Berlin Wall moment. The regime was at its weakest point since 1979, and his ultimate hope was that regime change would be achieved. He described the October 7 attacks, in his own phrasing — as a silver lining, because the Israeli campaign that followed had degraded Iran’s military. He praised Trump for pursuing, in his words, peace, not war, in the same paragraphs that celebrated a bombing campaign already under way. The strikes had a name: Operation Midnight Hammer. Graham called it the largest opportunity for peace and prosperity in the Middle East in over a thousand years.

He said the quiet part in Tel Aviv, to reporters, on February 16, less than two weeks before the strikes began. The United States was on the verge of eliminating the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the region. On Fox News, days into the war, he offered the ledger in its rawest form: when the regime goes down, he said, there would be a new Middle East, and the United States would make a tremendous amount of money. Venezuela and Iran held nearly a third of the world’s known oil reserves, he noted, and the point of the exercise was a partnership with those reserves. Regime change as a real-estate transaction. He had made the trip to Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia the week before to reaffirm, he wrote, that all of it was attainable and would be extremely beneficial to the United States. Weeks earlier he had met with Mossad, telling reporters they would tell him things his own government would not.

None of this cost him anything. That is the part the eulogies cannot hold in view, because to hold it in view is to indict the institutions doing the eulogizing. A senator who spent a career being wrong about the consequences of American force — wrong about Iraq, wrong about Libya, wrong about what would follow the fall of every regime he wanted to fall — was never demoted for it. He was promoted. The record of his committee assignments tells the story in the driest possible language. For years he sat on the Armed Services Committee, from which he lectured the Senate that its love for the troops bought nothing, that only appropriations did, that a colleague worried about the budget was out of touch with the world. By the time of his death he chaired the Budget Committee and sat on Appropriations — the panels that write the numbers and bless the spending. The man who wanted every war was placed, again and again, on the committees that pay for them.

Follow the money and the shape sharpens further. Graham’s donors, across a career documented in Federal Election Commission filings, clustered where his positions pointed. The defense contractors — the makers of the aircraft, the missiles, the systems — routed money to his committees and his leadership PACs. The specific career totals sit behind a paywall that blocks automated verification, and so no single figure belongs in this account. But the pattern needs no exact number to be legible. A senator who votes for every weapons system, who calls insufficient defense spending an emergency, who treats the reduction of the military budget as a moral failure, is a senator worth funding for the people who build the weapons. The contributions were not a bribe. They did not need to be. They were an investment in a man who already believed, and who sat where belief could be converted into contracts.

The media completed the machine. Graham was a fixture of the Sunday shows and the cable green rooms for a reason that had nothing to do with wisdom and everything to do with format. He was quotable, available, and reliably hawkish, which made him the perfect guest for programs that reward certainty over accuracy and confrontation over reflection. The pipeline ran in both directions. The airtime made him a national figure, and being a national figure got him more airtime, and the whole apparatus rewarded the escalation it claimed only to be covering. When he called for bombing Iran regardless of Iran’s involvement in a given attack, and told Israel to finish the job, the remarks drew condemnation abroad and bookings at home. The market for a war hawk was deep, and he supplied it.

What made Graham durable was that his convictions never had to survive an election of ideas, only the tolerance of the institutions that housed them. He denounced Trump in 2015 as a race-baiting xenophobic bigot and a jackass, and by his second term was among the president’s most consistent defenders, having discovered that proximity to power mattered more than the content of the man wielding it. The pitch that helped start this year’s war was delivered, according to reporting on the strikes, over rounds of golf. Iran was a spoiler for everything Trump wanted, Graham told him; collapse the regime and it would be Berlin Wall stuff. The president was persuaded. The bombs fell. And when a reporter asked Graham what the plan was for the day after — the question that Iraq should have burned into every hawk in Washington — he answered that it was not his job to know. The future of Iran, he said, was for the Iranian people to determine. He had wanted the war. The consequences belonged to someone else.

That was always the arrangement. The wars were his to advocate and never his to own. He would appear on the morning shows to demand them, sit on the committees to fund them, take the money from the firms that profited from them, and when they curdled into the next disaster he would be on television again, demanding the next one, his authority somehow enhanced rather than diminished by the wreckage behind him. This is not the biography of an outlier. It is the biography of an incentive structure, wearing a man’s face.

He died with the seat already in motion. Within hours, before any burial, the reporting had turned to the scramble to replace him, to the governor who will name a temporary successor, to what his absence means for a Republican majority counting every vote. Trump told NBC he already had someone in mind. The machine that made Lindsey Graham did not pause to mourn him. It began, immediately, to fill the vacancy — because the position he occupied was never really about the man. It was about keeping the seat filled by someone who would say what he said. There is no shortage of applicants. That is the dread the eulogies are built to keep you from feeling. He is gone, and nothing that produced him has changed.

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Thomas Karat has spent a career in multinational technology corporations and is a behavior analyst holding a Master’s in Science and Communication from Manchester Metropolitan University. His work focuses on the psychology of language in power dynamics, and his graduate thesis examined linguistic deception markers in high-stakes business negotiations. He hosts a YT podcast, SaltCubeAnalytics, and publishes at karat.substack.com