Colin Carroll, chief of staff to deputy secretary of Defense Steve A. Feinberg, was placed on administrative leave on Wednesday, a U.S. defense official told The Hill. The department did not have any more information to share.
Carroll’s suspension came just a day after two of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s advisers were suspended and escorted out of the Pentagon.
On Tuesday, the Defense Department suspended and escorted out Dan Caldwell, Hegseth’s senior adviser, and Darin Selnick, the department’s deputy chief of staff. Caldwell and Selnick formerly worked at Concerned Veterans for America, a nonprofit group previously headed by Hegseth.
The department officials said in March that the building had begun an investigation into “recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information.”
“This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense,” Hegseth’s chief of staff Joe Kasper wrote in a March 21 memo. “The report will include a complete record of unauthorized disclosures within the Department of Defense and recommendations to improve such efforts.”
Leaks under probe by the DOD include the movement of a second aircraft carrier to the Red Sea, military operations plans for the Panama Canal, tech billionaire Elon Musk’s visit to the department and halting intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
Carroll, a Marine Corps intelligence officer, deployed to Afghanistan four times before working at Anduril Industries, a defense contractor specializing in autonomous systems, according to his LinkedIn. He also worked at Applied Intuition, a software company headquartered in California.
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
