A proud MAGA reporter says she was fired after she dared to criticize Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Gabrielle Cuccia, the chief Pentagon correspondent for the far-right network One America News (OAN), was axed after she wrote a scathing Substack post tearing into the Pentagon for limiting journalists’ access.
“The Commander-in-Chief welcomes the hard questions… and yes, even the dumb ones,” Cuccia wrote. “Why won’t the Secretary of Defense do the same?”
The article was headlined “The Secretary of Defense-sive.”
Cuccia, 30, said that the Pentagon began to shut out reporters in March after Signalgate, the headline-grabbing scandal that saw Hegseth accidentally reveal details of a military operation in a group chat with a prominent journalist.
“The Pentagon stopped all press briefings moving forward and simultaneously decided to lock one of the doors that connects journalists to the DoD’s Public Affairs Officials, a door that has always been wide open,” Cuccia wrote.
She observed that the Pentagon has only held one press briefing during Hegseth’s tenure—and none since the scandal.
Cuccia said that the breaking point was a new Pentagon policy, announced last week, that reporters could only access Hegseth’s office if accompanied by public affairs staff. She disclosed the official explanation for the change, noting that it would “reduce the opportunity for in-person inadvertent or unauthorized disclosures.”
“But let’s be honest—since January, the real leaks from the Pentagon haven’t come from the press. They’ve come from Hegseth’s own team and other senior officials,” she wrote.
In April, Hegseth fired three top aides whom he claimed had spilled information to the media. Leaks have seemed to weigh heavily on the secretary’s mind—so much so that he has threatened to have his colleagues submit to polygraphs. One of the aides who was ousted, Colin Carroll, said that Hegseth would spend “50 percent” of his time investigating leaks.
As she offered the criticism, Cuccia repeatedly pointed to her impeccable MAGA credentials. As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania—the president’s alma mater—she faced being called “a racist, a fascist, a bigot” because she refused to march in Black Lives Matter protests, she wrote. Later, she landed an administrative role in Trump’s first White House administration.
“Some call it loyalty. I call it conviction,” she said.
But she nevertheless declared the Pentagon situation emblematic of “the death of the MAGA movement.”
“Somewhere along the way, we as a collective decided—if anyone ever questioned a policy or person within the MAGA movement—that they weren’t MAGA enough,” Cuccia wrote.
Her intention, she emphasized, was not to “tear down” Trump’s defense secretary.
“This is me wanting to keep MAGA alive,” she wrote, urging the movement’s members to “love your country, not your government.”
It didn’t matter.
Cuccia published the post on Monday. On Thursday, she was asked to turn her Pentagon badge in to her boss, she told CNN. And on Friday, she was fired.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Cuccia via her social media. The Pentagon and OAN did not return requests for comment.
Previously a White House correspondent for OAN, Cuccia took on the Pentagon role in February after Trump’s administration gave OAN a coveted press corps workspace spot, demoting NBC News. The move was part of a broader push to bring more pro-Trump outlets into the fold.
Since her firing, Cuccia has continued to stand by her words. On Saturday, she posted the Substack post to her Instagram.
“I was once told that a former peer feared I was too MAGA for the job,” she wrote alongside it. “I guess I was. I guess I am.”
