Pete Hegseth says evidence from leak probe ‘will be handed over to DOJ’ for potential charges

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ripped the “hoax press” and recently fired aides “spinning” lies for the turmoil now engulfing the Pentagon on his watch — vowing in a Fox News interview Tuesday morning that all persons found to be leaking sensitive US military plans will be referred to the Justice Department for prosecution.

“When that evidence is gathered sufficiently — and this has all happened very quickly — it will be handed over to DOJ, and those people will be prosecuted if necessary,” Hegseth told host Brian Kilmeade on “Fox and Friends.”

“We don’t think, based on what we understand, that it’s going to be a good day for a number of those individuals because of what was found in the investigation,” he said. “Once a leaker, always a leaker.”

The Pentagon chief said the probe is seeking to uncover who may have divulged operational plans for the Panama Canal as well as who shared details about a private briefing with tech billionaire Elon Musk to go over war preparations against China — which President Trump himself nixed after The New York Times reported on it, according to Axios.

Hegseth also confirmed that several of his ex-staffers including senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, chief of staff to the deputy defense secretary Colin Carroll and top spokesman John Ullyot — who penned a scathing op-ed in Politico about his “month from hell” serving inside the Defense Department — had been “let go” as a result of the initial probe’s findings.

“We identified there was sufficient evidence,” he said, before taking a swipe at Ullyot in particular: “Anybody that knows John knows why we let him go.”

Hegseth, however, side-stepped his own possible disclosure of classified material in a private text chat that reportedly included his wife and his brother — as well as the inadvertent sharing of US airstrikes against Houthi militants in Yemen with Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

“I said repeatedly, ‘No one’s texting war plans,’” he told Kilmeade. “I look at war plans every single day. What was shared over signal, then and now, however you characterize it, was informal, unclassified coordinations.”

“At this point those folks who are leaking, who have been pushed out of the building, are now attempting to leak and sabotage the president’s agenda and what we’re doing, and that’s unfortunate,” Hegseth also said. “It’s not what I do.”

Former national security officials previously told The Post that the Houthi strikes were “about an ongoing mission” and “classified” — even if the plans discussed weren’t “top secret.”