PETE'S GOT A PROBLEM

Pentagon Pete Hit With Demand to Explain Military Fiasco

Lawmakers are demanding answers.

A Democratic senator is demanding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testify on Capitol Hill about the removal of crippling speed restrictions on a military-grade SpaceX system used by Ukrainian defense forces.

California lawmaker Adam Schiff told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that Hegseth should answer questions about a bombshell report from the Wall Street Journal last week that revealed Trump reached out directly to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, demanding he undo the slowdown on Starshield—a defense-focused variant of the Starlink network vital to Ukraine’s front-line war effort against Russia.

“You’ve got the president saying one thing, you’ve got Elon Musk saying another thing, you have them both saying different things at different times,” Schiff told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “Somebody is lying here. Maybe they’re all lying in different ways, but we need to find out.”

Schiff then singled out Hegseth. “Defense Secretary Hegseth should be brought in. Anyone who has knowledge of what happened,” Schiff told Welker.

Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have publicly insisted Musk was acting completely independently to enforce corporate terms of service.

“There are terms of service that ultimately need to be complied to, and that’s where Starlink has the option to make those decisions,” Hegseth claimed to reporters. The Department of Defense did not respond to questions from the Daily Beast.

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Meanwhile, the 80-year-old president repeatedly insisted he had no idea who ordered the throttling or why it happened. “Well, I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me, and I don’t think it was Elon,” Trump told reporters last Friday, brushing off reports that coverage was restricted on White House orders.

By Thursday, Trump changed his tune. “I don’t comment one way or the other,” Trump claimed when confronted about the phone call, before inadvertently taking credit for the sudden about-face: “The bottom line: He put it back.”

The narrative spun further into chaos on Saturday, after Musk accused Ukraine of violating “Starlink terms of service” in a late-night X tirade.

“We simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed,” he said.

Prior to that, Musk had asserted that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

The Starshield sabotage came as Trump’s terse relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has increasingly soured, and as Trump has publicly mused about a summit with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who seeks to end the war in a way that favors the Kremlin.

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Laura EspositoBreaking News Reporter

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