Pentagon Creates Task Force To Prosecute The People Who Told Americans Their President's Donated Jet Might Not Be Safe To Fly, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Public Could Still Learn What Its Government Already Knew

WASHINGTON. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Monday the creation of a joint Pentagon and Justice Department task force to identify and prosecute the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information to the news media, resolving a long-standing concern that Americans were still occasionally learning things about their own government from people who knew those things to be true.

Under the arrangement, the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel may demand any record from any component of the Department of Defense in connection with a media leak investigation, and every office so tasked must produce a "full and complete" response within two days. Officials described the two-day requirement as a necessary safeguard against the possibility that a fact might reach the public before the government could finish deciding whether the public was allowed to have it.

The task force arrives days after the Justice Department subpoenaed several New York Times reporters over their coverage of security flaws in the President's new Air Force One, a Boeing 747 donated by the government of Qatar. Administration officials stressed that the reporting posed a grave threat to national security, chiefly the security of the arrangement, and noted that a story about whether the President's airplane is safe to fly is precisely the category of information a free country cannot afford to let its citizens weigh for themselves.

Hegseth pledged to pursue leakers "with the full force of the law," a phrase officials clarified referred to the law as it applies to the people who reveal government conduct, rather than the law as it applies to the government conduct being revealed. One source within the administration said the distinction had been "lost on the press for some time now."

The initiative caps a broader effort to ensure that the flow of information about the federal government originates with the federal government. Press freedom groups called the policy a violation of the First Amendment, an objection the administration said it would take under advisement as soon as it determined who had leaked the objection.

At press time, the task force had opened its first investigation into how the American people had come to learn that the task force existed.