Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a time when it looked like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth might be on the way out the door. Three weeks ago, following the Signalgate scandal and several top staff departures, a former top aide named John Ullyot wrote an op-ed for Politico in which he detailed a “month from hell” inside the Pentagon and predicted that “it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”
Three weeks later, Hegseth remains in place, and the daily drumbeat of bad stories about him seems to have slowed down. But now, a new negative story about Hegseth comes from a surprising place: The Princeton student newspaper.
According to The Daily Princetonian, the newspaper at Hegseth’s alma mater, Hegseth may have plagiarized small portions of his senior thesis from 2003.
New: A review of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s senior thesis by The Daily Princetonian, in consultation with three experts on plagiarism, found eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying. Reporting by Sena Chang.https://t.co/NxxDCsZjWo
— The Daily Princetonian (@princetonian) May 10, 2025
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“A review of Hegseth’s thesis by The Daily Princetonian, in consultation with three experts on plagiarism, found eight instances of uncredited material, sham paraphrasing, and verbatim copying,” the newspaper said. “But while the three experts all said that the passages violated Princeton’s academic honesty regulations, they differed on whether the violations were serious or too minor to matter.”
The Pentagon did not respond to the Daily Princetonian before publication but did issue a statement afterward, with a spokesperson stating, “Secretary Hegseth has written five books. He’s written hundreds of papers and op-eds. During the confirmation process, every word was reviewed by top left-wing law firms working in conjunction with every media outlet in the country. They found no plagiarism because there was no plagiarism.”
Ironically, plagiarism in Ivy League institutions was a significant issue for the GOP in 2023, when Republican backer Bill Ackman launched a campaign to find plagiarism in the work of college presidents and other top academics, which led in part to the resignation of Claudine Gay, who at the time was the president of Harvard University. However, Ackman did not react positively when his wife was accused of plagiarism.
It remains to be seen whether the latest scandal will force Hegseth out of his job when the others did not.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
