Adam D Ortona ARMY
NO apostrophe on label
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yahoo [cda] actually nexstar BS
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.
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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.
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ggl 8 26
An ACTIVE DUTY Army lieutenant colonel. 100K+ ...
Meet LTC Adam D'Ortona, aka @InfantryDort. This comes as we're learning more ... It seems to be a miscommunication somewhere? 4 days ago ...Read more
Missing: 100000 | Show results with: 100000
AI Overview
LTC Adam D'Ortona, known online as @InfantryDort on X, is an active-duty U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon and has drawn public scrutiny for his high-profile partisan social media activity.
Background and Online Presence
- Role and Reach: D'Ortona has amassed over 100,000 followers on X, where he frequently posts about political and military topics. Reports indicate he works inside the Pentagon (associated with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office), though officials have stated he is not an official adviser or spokesperson for the department.
- Controversy: His active social media presence—featuring sharp political commentary, criticism of congressional Democrats, and support for Hegseth's Pentagon initiatives—has sparked debate regarding traditional military nonpartisanship. Critics, including public figures like former Representative Adam Kinzinger, have publicly questioned whether his online activities violate military regulations governing political speech by active-duty commissioned officers.
- Stance: D'Ortona has defended his commentary and pushed back against allegations that he or others are directed or paid by the Defense Department to push specific online narratives.
If you'd like, I can provide more details on:
- The specific Department of Defense guidelines regarding political activity for active-duty personnel.
- Recent media reports concerning influencers inside the Pentagon.
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On the contrary, an obscure lieutenant colonel seems to live rent free in the minds of failed generals and professors alike. Isn’t that right, sir?
Just an Infantryman trying to close with and destroy. Motivated to make the U.S. Infantry lethal again. Active Duty LTC. 11M to 11B to 11A. Views are my own.
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biz times 8 26
The Pentagon has confirmed that prominent pro-Trump influencer Jennica Pounds, known online as DataRepublican, has been working inside the Defense Department as a special government employee, disclosing an arrangement that remained largely unknown while Pounds continued weighing in publicly on politically charged disputes.
The disclosure is drawing renewed attention to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's relationship with supportive online personalities and comes after more than a year of restrictions on the traditional Pentagon press corps. Pounds, who has nearly one million followers on X, previously held Pentagon press credentials before joining the government.
Her employment surfaced not through an official announcement but through an unusual public confrontation with State Department Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers. Pounds initially alleged that an unnamed "deep state" official had attempted to entrap her into improperly handling sensitive government material.
Rogers said she had offered Pounds Biden-era documents concerning Cuba as a potential exclusive, treating her as a friendly reporter who might be interested in the material. Pounds became alarmed after seeing markings on the documents and publicly suggested she might have been maneuvered into committing a crime.
Rogers disputed that characterization. She said the markings reflected standard redactions applied to material that could be voluntarily released under public-records procedures and offered to publish the documents herself to demonstrate that Pounds wasn't being set up.
As the dispute unfolded on X, an account critical of Pounds disclosed that she was working for the Defense Department. The Pentagon subsequently confirmed her employment to multiple news organizations.
Pounds "serves at the Department of War as a Special Government Employee and is no longer a credentialed journalist," the Pentagon said in a statement, using the Trump administration's renamed designation for the department. Officials said Pounds's media credentials expired in June and that she didn't seek to renew them before beginning her government role in July.
The Pentagon hasn't disclosed which office employs Pounds or described her responsibilities. Pounds said after her position became public that she joined the department to "serve the country in a more hands-on way."
That lack of detail has raised questions because Pounds remained an active political voice online while her government status wasn't publicly known. Her recent posts have included criticism of Democratic lawmakers and commentary involving a retired Army officer and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who has had disagreements with Hegseth.
Lauren Harper, who holds the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Pounds should have disclosed her government employment to her followers. The concern centers on whether audiences could distinguish independent commentary from communications produced by someone simultaneously working inside the government.
The episode has also renewed scrutiny of Adam D'Ortona, an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel with more than 100,000 X followers who has criticized congressional Democrats and supported Hegseth's campaign against diversity and inclusion programs at the Pentagon.
D'Ortona was reported last September to have been working inside Hegseth's office. Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said at the time that he wasn't an adviser or department spokesperson, while D'Ortona this week denied that the Pentagon pays anyone to "post stories." The Army and Hegseth's office haven't provided additional details about his role.
The questions surrounding Pounds and D'Ortona come amid a broader transformation of media access under Hegseth. Beginning in May 2025, the defense secretary imposed restrictions requiring journalists to be escorted through Pentagon areas where reporters had previously been able to move independently.
The department subsequently required journalists to sign a new access policy covering the solicitation and publication of information that hadn't been authorized for release, including unclassified material. More than 30 news organizations-including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and Fox News-refused to sign, and dozens of journalists surrendered their Pentagon credentials in October 2025.
That same month, Pentagon press secretary Sean Parnell announced that more than 60 journalists from another group of organizations had agreed to the policy. Those outlets included Gateway Pundit, Turning Point USA's media operation, LindellTV, Timcast and the National Pulse, which Parnell described as part of the next generation of the Pentagon press corps.
A federal judge later concluded that the credentialing policy was intended to remove disfavored journalists, according to the supplied account. An appeals court subsequently allowed a related requirement that reporters be escorted inside the Pentagon to remain in effect while litigation continues.
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the uneasy stalemate between Iran and the United States flared into violence on Sunday after America launched an attack on Iranian rocket launchers. Iran retaliated by launching missiles against Jordan, a US ally. The new round of fighting proves that the Trump administration remains committed to the fantasy that that more violence will force the Iranian government to surrender. In reality, although both sides in the conflict have endured losses, the ability of the US to impose its will with force has steadily diminished. On August 22, retired general Barry R. McCaffrey offered the sober assessment that “the US Armed Forces have probably permanently lost access to 15 Persian Gulf bases. Iran now poised to control access the Gulf States. US will have to negotiate new access in western Saudi Arabia, Israel, southern Europe.”
McCaffrey is an eminently establishment figure, but his pessimistic conclusion aligns with the judgement of thinkers who are more typically seen as critics of the foreign-policy consensus. John Mearsheimer, for example, an international-relations professor at the University of Chicago, describes the Iran War as a humiliating defeat.
Unfortunately, acknowledging defeat doesn’t come easily to either Donald Trump or the ridiculous martinet he nominated to run the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Both Trump and Hegseth are cultural warriors first and foremost, interested in winning battles on social issues by purging trans soldiers from the military, blocking the advancement of women and Blacks in the upper ranks, and overturning anything they consider DEI (a broad category that includes even acknowledging that Black soldiers have served with distinction).
With his focus on culture wars, Hegseth isn’t likely to listen to the criticism of figures like McCaffrey and Mearsheimer. In fact, evidence suggests that he isn’t even willing to listen to his own four-star generals who are offering dire warning that the military is dangerously overextended. As The Washington Post reported on Sunday, “Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland.” Even before the Iran War started, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the White House “that the U.S. lacked sufficient munitions—and support from allies—to conduct an extended large-scale campaign.” The Trump administration ignored this caution, and the US is now in a worse position, lacking the military bases to resupply navy vessels in the region (which has led to crisis conditions on ships such as the USS Liberty) and suffering a shortage of Patriot interceptors.
The Post report noted that “certain generals and admirals were more expansive and frank than is usual in telling Hegseth they disagreed with orders to keep providing equipment and personnel when the operation’s trajectory remains uncertain.”
If Hegseth is disregarding the advice of his top generals, it’s because the culture war is more important to him than the real war. Hegseth has White House ambitions and is gearing up for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination. Losing a war with Iran would tarnish Hegseth politically, but he has developed a simple solution: using the resources of the Pentagon to create a troll army of social-media influencers who could create an alternate reality where all his actions were brilliant victories.
On August 27, Will Sommer of The Bulwark, an astute observer of the right, reported that one of Hegseth’s most vocal online fans was also covertly a civilian employee of the Pentagon. The person in question was Jennica Pounds, who posts under the name DataRepublican. As Sommer noted:
Hegseth has gone to great lengths to limit and muzzle many members of the traditional Pentagon press corps. But secretly employing a shadowy, rabidly online personality for the apparent purpose of going after your enemies is a remarkable illustration of the kind of steps Hegseth appears willing to take to fight internecine political wars. Here’s the thing, though:
Pounds appears to be just one of several people enlisted in such a task.
At least three other prominent pro-Trump social media figures who have either worked for Hegseth or almost gotten jobs at the Pentagon have also come to serve as reliable online allies for Hegseth. Funnily enough, they’ve also all rushed to defend Pounds in the face of the criticism that she’s an undercover federal operative.
On Sunday, the Post published an extensive article that built on Sommer’s journalism, both confirming it and providing additional details. According to the newspaper, “The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.”
One of Hegseth’s troll soldiers, Thomas Anderson (who posts under the name Cynical Publius), repeatedly attacked anti-war Republican Representative Thomas Massie during a primary race that Massie ended up losing. It’s hard not to avoid the conclusion that taxpayer money allocated to the Pentagon was used by the executive branch to influence a congressional election, a direct attack on the principle of keeping the military out of domestic politics.
Shamefully, the Post’s excellent reporting was attacked by the paper’s hawkish columnist Marc Thiessen, a frequently unhinged apologist for Trump’s imperialism, who responded to the report about senior generals dissenting from Hegseth by fuming, “Whoever leaked this is a traitor and ought to be prosecuted.”
In point of fact, the leaker was committing an act of high patriotism, not treason. In a constitutional republic, the military is not the political instrument of either the president or the defense secretary. Rather, the military must always be nonpartisan. If top generals think the military is being pushed to the limits of its fighting capacity, the public deserves to know.
Hegseth is remaking the military into the image of MAGA: an army of white cis-male reactionaries who nurse fantasies of their macho prowess and love the catatonic self-satisfaction of living in a social-media echo chamber.
A perhaps more sympathetic interpretation might be that Hegseth is as much to be pitied as held in contempt. After all, he’s clearly incapable of winning a real war, so has to settle for the illusory victories of his troll army.
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ref wapo
Pentagon secretly installs military influencers in civilian roles
Conservative veterans with large social media followings have been hired by the Defense Department and are amplifying Pete Hegseth’s culture-war fights.
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Wednesday. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
By Dan Lamothe
and
Tara Copp
The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material....$
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🚨 Before Massie’s primary, @CynicalPublius ran a relentless anti-Massie campaign, called him a ‘toxic narcissist,’ his supporters ‘dimwits,’ even linked Massie fans to antisemitism. Turns out he’s Thomas R. Anderson, listed in Pentagon, assigned to a DoD office, the entire time
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media its bewARE
The Pentagon has secretly hired military veterans with massive online followings to act as conservative influencers who can disseminate Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s warrior agenda to the masses.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that although these influencers have been placed in government and some civilian roles, the Pentagon refuses to give details on their assignments, “despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever.”
But the report made very clear that the goal was to “amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.”
The Post’s sources said the influencers include Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel; and Kurt Schlichter, a retired Army colonel.
“Pentagon records reviewed by The Washington Post show that both have active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a ‘.civ’ suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors,” the report said.
It continued:
Both served for decades in uniform and, since retiring, have turned from the military to conservative commentary. Maness has more than 135,000 followers on X, while Schlicter has nearly 620,000. Another retired Army colonel and influencer, Thomas Anderson, was listed in Pentagon records earlier this year with a “.civ” email address and assigned to Tata’s office, according to people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Post. An attorney, he writes online under the pen name Cynical Publius and has more than 323,000 followers on X. He was no longer listed in Pentagon records late this past week, the people familiar with the issue said.
“Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to comment to The Post about whether any of the three are drawing a taxpayer-funded salary, what roles they have or how long those jobs are expected to last,” the report said.
Tata, Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson all declined to comment for the report.
On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Democratic and Republican politicians are paying tens of thousands of dollars for influencers on TikTok and other platforms to push their agendas.
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Background & Office: Originally commissioned as an infantry officer, D’Ortona previously worked within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Secretary of the Army (SECWAR). Media reports confirmed his current placement inside SECDEF Pete Hegseth’s immediate office. The Pentagon later clarified that he is not serving as an official department spokesperson or policy adviser. [1, 2, 3, 4]
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US Army hopes AI can slash troops' paperwork burden
Just FYI LTC Adam Dortona works for the SECWAR. Not kidding. Edit. It looks like he just left working in OSD. Not sure where he's off to yet ...Read more
Missing: active- trump dei
Experienced role players improve JRTC training
https://www.dvidshub.net › image › experienced-role-pla...
Mar 29, 2012 — Adam Dortona, commander for the 2-502 Infantry Battalion Team 3, a new U.S. Security Force Advisory Team, confers with Gholam Dastagir ...Read more
Missing: active- trump dei
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