The top Pentagon spokesperson appeared on Fox News to eviscerate a New York Times story that said Elon Musk was set to be briefed on secret plans for a potential war with China.
“On the record, this is completely fake,” Sean Parnell, holding up a paper print-out of the story, said Friday on Fox & Friends. “This is egregious, this is fake. The New York Times should retract this story—five anonymous sources.”
“This type of garbage from The New York Times undermines [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s] process and undermines our mission,” he added. “It shouldn’t happen at all.”
President Donald Trump also slammed the report, calling it “Fake News,” “disgraceful,” and “ridiculous,” as did Hegseth, who said the conversation would be “an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production,” not China.
Musk, for his part, called the story “pure propaganda.”
“I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” he added. “They will be found.”
Musk, the world’s richest man and a White House adviser, did meet with Hegseth on Friday after the Times story broke Thursday night. What they discussed is unknown.
The paper has stood by its reporting, however, that Musk was set to review a presentation of about 20 to 30 slides with classified information about how the U.S. would approach a war with China. The Wall Street Journal also independently confirmed the Times report.
“Whatever the meeting will now be about, the planning reflected the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump,” the Times wrote in an article that followed the denials from Trump’s administration.
In his appearance on Fox & Friends, Parnell emphasized that the Defense Department was eager to work with an “innovator” like Musk.
“This is a guy that shot a rocket thousands of miles an hour, that’s thousands of pounds, and as it landed back on the earth, it was grabbed out of mid-air by a giant robot arm,” Parnell said, referring to a project undertaken by Musk’s SpaceX. “We want a guy like Elon Musk in the Defense Department to help us come up with creative solutions to the problems we face of the day.”
Hegseth also met with Trump in the Oval Office later Friday morning.
