How an inside ‘scoop’ revealed Pentagon links to pro-Trump influencer

A Utah software engineer, who runs a massive pro-President Trump social media account that has drawn attention from the likes of Elon Musk, made a sinister declaration in a post on Aug. 21.

The “Deep State” was setting her up to “commit a crime.”

“I have never been more angry in my life,” Jennica Pounds, who is behind the DataRepublican account that has nearly 1 million followers on social platform X, wrote in a recent thread.

Over the past week, the resulting saga around Pounds’s allegations has become an obsession of right-wing social media circles, exposed the blurred lines in Pentagon public relations and raised questions about other MAGA-friendly influencers in the military space.

It all started with an offer from a senior State Department official to Pounds. Did she want to publish documents about allegations of censorship under the Biden administration?

“I wanted to give you the option of ‘breaking’ the story as sort of a gift,” Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers wrote to Pounds.

Pounds initially seemed up for cooperating but later decided the markings on the documents “would have gotten me in big big trouble.”

In a post to her X account, Pounds wrote Friday that “they tried to entrap me” while sharing a screenshot of the text exchange.

Rogers replied to Pounds’s thread that Friday, revealing herself as the official involved.

“lol, these are my text messages and documents. The ‘markings’ are FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] redactions required even for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn’t a ‘trap,’ I will happily disclose the documents myself,” she wrote, posting the documents in an ensuing thread.

Pounds had earlier concluded the documents “were nothingburgers that did not benefit them at all to release in public.”

Once the exchange went public, the aggregators got to work. Right-wing news aggregator AF Post summarized the back-and-forth between the two women, adding further intrigue by writing that Pounds was an active employee at the Pentagon.

A Pentagon official has since confirmed to The Hill and other news outlets that Pounds is a special government employee at the Defense Department, a work status she did not publicly disclose to her massive online following. It’s unclear if Rogers knew about the job when she offered Pounds the internal documents.

The Hill has reached out to the State Department for comment.

After the revelation, Pounds said her Pentagon press credentials had expired in June, that she did not seek renewal and the next month she began working at the department to “serve the country in a more hands-on way.” She said she would defer questions to Joel Valdez, the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary.

The Defense Department declined to comment when asked about Pounds’s role at the department.

Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told The Hill that Pounds should have disclosed her special government employee status to her followers because otherwise it “blurs the line between journalism and government PR.”

Pounds, too, has championed transparency around potential conflicts of interest.

Late last month, Pounds questioned the alleged friendship between the director of military-leadership blog From the Green Notebook, retired Army Lt. Col. Joe Byerly, and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, with whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has clashed since the start of the Trump administration.

The DataRepublican revelations have raised questions around other prominent accounts that often back the Defense secretary.

Adam D’Ortona, an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel, has openly criticized congressional Democrats, backed Hegseth’s push to root out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the Pentagon and highlighted the Defense secretary’s message of going to war against the department’s bureaucracy.

D’Ortona, who has more than 100,000 followers on X, defended Pounds after it was revealed that she works for the Pentagon, arguing those concerned about the ethics of the incident are like a “burglar lecturing the homeowner about property rights.”

Following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, USA Today reported in September that D’Ortona works in Hegseth’s office. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told the outlet at the time that D’Ortona is not an adviser or spokesperson for the Pentagon.

On Monday, D’Ortona wrote in a response to an X user that “ZERO people are paid” by the Pentagon to “post stories.”

The Army referred questions about D’Ortona to the Pentagon. Hegseth’s office did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment.

Retired Col. Thomas Anderson, who writes under the pseudonym Cynical Publius, has backed Hegseth’s anti-DEI crusade and has weighed in on a host of political issues, offering his view to more than 320,000 followers on X.

Anderson defended Pounds’s employment at the department in an exchange with journalist Glenn Greenwald.

“I repeat: you do not understand the parameters of being an SGE [special government employee],” Anderson wrote Monday . “It has a specified legal status that she has stayed well within. I’m not your research assistant, I told you what to look up. Go look it up. The truth is never a ‘cliché tactic.’”

When asked Tuesday by The Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe if he also has an SGE status, Anderson did not respond.