Pete Hegseth has canned a top U.S. Army general who was targeted by Trump whisperer Laura Loomer in a social media ragepost.
The defense secretary fired Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia from the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff earlier this week, The Atlantic reports.
Loomer had targeted Sylvia in an online tirade against his son Gavin’s response to the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah campus event in September 2025.
She called on then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to dismiss Gavin from his post as a data analyst at the DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency and urged Hegseth to also “review the employment of Gavin’s father.”
“These people hate us,” Loomer wrote on X. “They don’t belong near the levers of our National Power.”
The conspiracy theorist and longtime Trump supporter’s rage posts have preceded the dismissal of dozens of officials throughout the president’s second term.
The Pentagon has already scrubbed Brett Sylvia’s bio as chief of the Directorate for Strategy, Plans, and Policy from its website, according to The Atlantic. The directorate is known internally as J5.
He is now the second person to be dismissed from the top job at J5 since Trump retook office, after Army Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee was forced to retire from the role in October 2025.
But sources say Sylvia’s departure comes at a critical moment for the military as the 80-year-old president weighs renewed strikes on Iran after the midterm elections next Tuesday.
Trump’s war on Iran was meant to last only a “few weeks” but has dragged on for eight months and proven deeply unpopular with voters because of its impact on oil prices and inflation.
He has repeatedly pledged that the conflict will end almost immediately after the polls as he attempts to dent the roughly 10-point lead it has helped Democrats gain in the race for control of the House and Senate.
“Now is not the time when you’d want to lose the J5,” a former official with the Joint Chiefs of Staff told The Atlantic on Wednesday. “This person would serve as a critical link between the operational force, the department policy, and the White House.”
Hegseth has carried out repeated purges of Defense Department staff since he took the helm in January 2025.
He bragged in his September State of the Force speech that he had axed roughly 10 percent of the department’s top brass and was in the process of dismissing a further 10 percent of senior officers.
That includes at least 26 generals and admirals who have stepped down or been forced to do so under Hegseth’s leadership.
A spokesperson for the Joint Chiefs of Staff previously told The Atlantic that the Pentagon was grateful to Sylvia and his family “for their 32 years of distinguished service to our nation” and that “we wish him and his family the best as they graduate to new opportunities and the next chapters of their lives.”
But the department later told the Daily Beast that it was withdrawing those earlier comments because, “upon further review, we determined that the statement did not appropriately reflect the full circumstances.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff has been contacted again to ask for the rationale behind that decision.
One America News Network journalist Alexandra Ingersoll posted on X on Thursday morning that Hegseth had fired Sylvia for “severe misconduct,” citing a DOD official.
“Sylvia is the subject of an investigation for leaking classified information about the Iran War, the war between Russia and Ukraine, and more,” she wrote, quoting the official. “Due to the Pentagon’s media policy requiring journalists to have escorts in the building, Sylvia began meeting with journalists outside of the Pentagon in order to leak classified information.”
Ingersoll added that “Sylvia failed three polygraphs which questioned him about leaking classified information” and that “the investigation into him remains ongoing and has been referred to the Department of Justice for further action.”
