A 16-year Navy civil servant was caught on hidden camera calling Trump a narcissist and vowing to reverse his policies from inside the Pentagon, and the acting Navy secretary suspended him within a day.
Brandon Newsom did not think anyone was listening. The senior official in the Office of the Secretary of the Navy told a man he believed was a date that he planned to stay in his government job specifically to outlast Donald Trump, so that when the president is gone, in Newsom's words, "I can undo whatever's been done." The man across the table was James O'Keefe, the founder of O'Keefe Media Group, filming with a hidden camera. Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao suspended Newsom the same day the footage surfaced.
Newsom has spent 16 years inside the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, the administrative core that runs human resources, IT systems, security clearances and the implementation of executive orders for the entire department. He is not a political appointee. He is the kind of career staffer whose name never shows up in a press release but whose signature moves paperwork that shapes how policy actually reaches sailors and Marines. In the video, Newsom conceded he holds no direct authority to set policy. He said something more revealing instead: "I have the influence."
Newsom called Trump "a textbook narcissist" in the footage and dismissed the strikes on Iran as "completely stupid," telling O'Keefe the operation was "driven by one man's ego," according to the Washington Examiner, which reviewed the recording. He described his strategy plainly: keep the government job, keep the security clearance, keep the access, and wait out the administration rather than resign over disagreements with it. Blaze Media and American Greatness both reported the same core exchange, corroborating the Examiner's account of Newsom's remarks.
Cao did not wait for a lengthy review before acting. In a statement following the video's release, the acting secretary said Newsom's conduct was "inappropriate and incompatible with the standards expected of Department personnel" and ordered him placed on administrative leave immediately, pending a formal inquiry into his conduct. The Department of Defense has not issued its own public statement as of this writing, and a request for further comment on the scope of that inquiry would need to go through the Pentagon press office.
A test case for Hegseth's crackdown
The timing matters. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a joint task force with the Justice Department on July 13 aimed at identifying and prosecuting Pentagon personnel who leak information or, in Hegseth's words, work to "sabotage" the president's agenda, as reported by Fox News and The Hill. That task force was built around media leaks. Newsom's case is different: no classified document changed hands on camera, just a career official's own account of using his post to slow-walk or reverse administration directives he opposes. Whether Hegseth's apparatus treats that admission as fitting the same pattern, and whether it leads to termination rather than leave, is now the open question hanging over the Pentagon's personnel office.
What makes the video land as more than a gotcha clip is the plainness of the admission. Newsom was not accused of foot-dragging by a whistleblower or caught in leaked emails. He described the plan himself, on tape, in his own words, as a strategy he intended to keep executing. For an office that touches executive-order implementation across the Navy, that is not a matter of personal opinion about the president. It is a described intention to use a government post against the government's own elected direction.
Cao's decision to act within a day suggests the Navy is not interested in letting this one linger. The administrative leave keeps Newsom off the job while the department works out whether his conduct amounts to a firing offense, a security clearance issue, or something a formal review board needs to sort out under federal personnel rules. Given Hegseth's public posture toward what he has called sabotage inside his own ranks, a quiet resolution seems unlikely. The next marker to watch is whether the Pentagon's inquiry ends in termination, a clearance revocation, or a referral for further review, and whether other career staff inside the Office of the Secretary of the Navy face similar scrutiny in the weeks ahead.
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