Photo: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu/Getty Images

Someone has started building an off ramp for Pete Hegseth to vacate the Pentagon, and it’s not clear if it was the defense secretary himself or frustrated officials within the Trump administration.

As the Fox News personality-turned-defense secretary faces mounting scrutiny over his term, such as  Signalgate, Hegseth is said to have privately floated the idea of running for office in Tennessee, possibly for governor. NBC News interviewed two anonymous sources who say they “spoke directly with him” about these ambitions and said his run, if it happens, could happen as soon as next year.

That would require him to step down as Pentagon chief, teeing up a major leadership change, albeit one that may be welcomed by some in the Department of Defense, where Hegseth’s purported paranoia and erratic moves have  rankled White House officials and alienated staffers. It has all been enough that his allies apparently staged an intervention.

It seems Hegseth himself may not be so certain of his future at the Pentagon, as his team has begun preemptively lashing out at a forthcoming report from the department’s internal watchdog on the Signalgate fiasco that set a disastrous tone for his tenure last spring. While the findings from that report have yet to be released, reports have already trickled out that the inquiry found evidence Hegseth shared information from a classified email in the unclassified group chat where he discussed a U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen, contrary to his assertions that no classified information was shared.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has called the independent inquiry a “political witch hunt” and blamed “Biden administration holdovers” for reports that the final report contains damning findings against Hegseth. Hegseth himself is said to have made his distaste for the internal review clear to those conducting it, telling them in a statement that he believes “this entire exercise is a sham, conducted in bad faith and with extreme bias.”

The inquiry appears to have overlapped with Hegseth’s purported discussions of a Tennessee political run, which one source said took place within the last three weeks. The discussions were described as serious enough that they got into eligibility requirements, and what exactly it would take to launch and run a campaign.

Tennessee voters will elect a new governor in November 2026. Candidates are required to have lived in the state for at least seven years, however, and Hegseth falls a few years short of that requirement. Parnell called the report  a “made up story” and said the defense secretary’s “focus remains solely on serving under President Trump and advancing the America First mission at the Department of Defense.” Other sources quoted by NBC News said they’d asked him about the Tennessee rumors and been told they weren’t true, with Hegseth calling those plans “totally off the table.”

President Donald Trump has so far stood by his Pentagon chief throughout mounting turmoil at the Defense Department, even though a slew of new scandals connected to Hegseth have erupted since Trump first predicted the secretary would “get it together” three months ago. Those include an initiative, purportedly by some of Hegseth’s own employees, to expose him as unfit to lead, an embarrassing episode for Trump in which Hegseth apparently kept him in the dark on a halt to aid for Ukraine, and growing discontent within the Defense Department over a frenzied purge of top aides last spring.

Hegseth, who’s clashed with senior military officers since taking the helm at the Pentagon, has also initiated a new policy requiring that candidates for promotion to four-star general meet with Trump, a break with longstanding tradition. The White House confirmed the change, which some officials have said complicates the promotion process while it also, conveniently for Hegseth, gives him more time face-to-face with the president.

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