WASHINGTON — The drama surrounding Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has a new lead player: a top aide known to his detractors as “Rasputin Ricky.”
Ricky Buria, the defense secretary’s de facto chief of staff, is a rare Biden administration holdover and an internal critic of Vice President JD Vance’s “wackamamie crazy” and “isolationist” views — who has also slammed President Trump’s use of the military for immigration enforcement as “dumb.”
Buria, 43, is also considered “incredibly intelligent and hardworking,” has fashioned himself as a China hawk and is seen by Hegseth as an effective administrator who keeps the office running smoothly — but the White House has blocked him from a permanent chief of staff appointment due to concern about his alignment with the commander in chief.
“There is an ideological component to this,” said one Buria critic. “Hegseth is elevating a Democrat who does not share the vice president or the president’s worldview and who weaponized his position to push out internal rivals, including people who had very strong histories of being supporters of the MAGA agenda.”
Buria’s elevated status has triggered a brouhaha among factions close to Trump, who has had aides hold varying views throughout his terms in office — while often changing his own in response to circumstances.
Trump often vacillates between denouncing military action abroad and ordering its use in specific instances — and Buria has positioned himself on one flank, while those with whom he’s clashed internally have diverse points of view.
“He is more interventionist than most of the people in Trumpworld,” the Buria detractor added. “But everyone wants to distill this story down to one neat narrative. Yeah, Ricky didn’t like the VP’s worldview, I think that’s an element. But Ricky’s ascendency isn’t a part of that clash.”
Though the Trump White House recently turned down Hegseth’s request to make Buria his top adviser, he nonetheless continues as right-hand man to the defense secretary — who last month fired, with Buria’s encouragement, three top aides including well-known non-interventionist Dan Caldwell, who had served as a senior adviser to the defense secretary.
The Post spoke to eight sources inside or close to the Pentagon and White House to investigate Buria’s rapid ascent from serving Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, as a junior military aide — a prestigious but largely bag-carrying role — to reaching the top of Trump’s Defense Department’s leadership.
Buria’s criticism of the administration he serves has not previously been reported, but is well-known within both the Pentagon and White House — and one source speculated that his candor may have been the result of not realizing that he would emerge unscathed from last month’s purge.
“There was absolutely no withholding of his personal sentiments on any of this stuff,” one source said. “He would talk about the ‘wackamamie crazy’ of [Vance] and the New Right. He was a military officer, which makes it even worse.”
Buria, who put in his paperwork to retire from the Marine Corps last month to allow for a possible political appointment that would cement his current role, in February condemned Trump’s decision to use military aircraft to repatriate migrants and to use Guantanamo Bay to facilitate deportations — declaring it a “dumb waste of money” — three independent sources said.
“He hated and loathed the border mission,” one person said. “He thinks it’s a waste of money, resources and time and we got to focus on China — China, China, China … He never said ‘China’ once the first couple weeks.”
The extent of Buria’s influence on implementation of administration policy is unclear and Trump has stood by Hegseth, who is viewed as being on the more hawkish wing of the administration while maintaining good personal relationships with other key figures, including Vance.
Two sources said Buria specifically condemned Vance’s views on foreign policy after the VP expressed internal opposition to airstrikes on Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis in mid-March, a stance which was reported by Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg after he was mistakenly added to a Signal chat that included administration officials.
Days earlier, on March 5, Buria clashed with Vance’s team during a trip to the Mexican border when the VP’s staff denied Buria’s repeated demands to be included on a helicopter flight with Vance and Hegseth despite being told the manifest was full and there was no space for him, four sources said.
‘We don’t like texting the secretary… we don’t know who is responding’
Hegseth’s tenure at the Pentagon has been defined by a series of reports alleging a lax approach to information security — including that he discussed sensitive work with family members and used an insecure internet line to connect to Signal.
The Post’s sources described additional operational security concerns.
Buria’s wide-ranging advisory and logistical roles include managing Hegseth’s personal cellphone, according to three sources, two of whom said they saw him flout security protocols by bringing it into the secretary’s office — which is deemed a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, where personal devices are not allowed.
One source said they personally witnessed Buria bring Hegseth’s phone into the SCIF “at least a dozen times.”
A second person scoffed that such behavior is more common within the US government than the public would know.
A third tipster said: “Ricky has both custody of and access to the secretary’s phone in the workplace. The uncomfortable joke is we don’t like texting the secretary because we don’t know who is responding.”
The Pentagon and White House did not offer comment for this story — or push back on a detailed list of claims made by sources. Multiple attempts to reach Buria for comment via email, phone and through the Defense Department press office were unsuccessful.
Vance’s office told The Post that limited seats were the only factor in Buria not being allowed on the helicopter during the border visit.
“I think the secretary’s calculus on this thing is it’s better to keep Ricky close than to have him out there talking,” said one source, who described Hegseth as reluctant to create yet another issue for reporters to investigate that could generate fresh instability.
While Trump’s Office of Presidential Personnel (PPO) has rebuffed Hegseth’s attempts to install Buria officially, White House leaders have deferred to Hegseth over whether to keep Buria as an adviser.
“PPO, the White House, everybody’s impression was, ‘Look, if [Pete] wants to detonate, sometimes you just got to let him’. They couldn’t understand why or what was compelling this,” said one person familiar with the matter.
“I think this is someone who is largely responsible for putting Pete in the position he’s in,” another source said. “I’m not saying the secretary is blameless, but [Buria] weaponized his closeness to the secretary and his wife [Jennifer Hegseth] to undermine aides who were loyal to the secretary and president’s agenda.”
‘These guys need to go’
Many sources described Buria’s influence with Hegseth as mysterious — with several likening him to the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, who gained influence over the Romanov court through his relationship with Czar Nicholas II’s wife.
Buria — described as a handsome and charismatic helicopter pilot known for wearing his flight jacket around the office — was one of the first officials to greet the Hegseths at the Pentagon in late January and survived an initial purge of military aides close to Austin.
He quickly became close to Jennifer Hegseth, a former Fox News producer who became Pete Hegseth’s third wife in 2019, and has accompanied the couple to their home in Tennessee on weekends, four sources said.
Buria charmed Jennifer, who was deeply suspicious of disloyalty after enduring a grueling confirmation process in which Senate Democrats highlighted allegations against her husband of excessive drinking, mismanagement of a nonprofit and sexual assault — the last of which police determined was unfounded.
In an unusual move, Buria handed over his cellphone for Jennifer Hegseth to peruse in a gesture of reassurance that he was loyal to the secretary and not a leaker.
Some sources said that the handover occurred after Buria told colleagues in late February or early March that he was still in touch with Biden’s defense secretary.
Hegseth proclaimed that, “No, Jen looked through his phone, and there were no Lloyd Austin messages,” one source recounted.
The phone swap was “really bizarre to me because Ricky literally has five phones” and “could have shown her any phone. But Jen didn’t understand,” another source said.
It’s unclear to what extent Jennifer Hegseth vouches for Buria to her husband — but five sources with knowledge of the matter said that he encouraged her to sway her husband to fire Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll, who was chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg.
“He said ‘These guys need to go,’” one source said.
Another said that Buria “would over-embellish the idea that there was all this chaos and this drama … that never really was. Ricky took advantage of all the time and access he had with the family.”
Buria “always felt like he should be in a position of more authority and respect. He’s incredibly intelligent and hardworking, but he was always trying to position himself in a way to gain what he felt he was due,” said a third observer.
The full justification for the terminations has never been made fully clear, but Caldwell, Carroll and Selnick were all suspected of leaks — which they denied — and had a rocky relationship with Joe Kasper, Hegseth’s first chief of staff who left his own role days later amid tensions with Buria.
A fifth official, top Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot, also resigned and penned a blockbuster Politico op-ed on April 20 expressing concern about the direction of department leadership.
Each of the five were longtime advisers or allies to Trump and some, including Caldwell, had worked with Hegseth for years before joining the government.
Buria’s survival — and Hegseth’s attempt to enshrine him as chief of staff — stunned insiders.
Meanwhile, two sources — one from the Pentagon and a second close to the White House — said Buria has openly talked about wanting to run as a Democratic candidate for Florida governor.
“He made it very clear that he wore a different political stripe. And I think that culminated when he, on several instances, discussed his ambition to run for governor of Florida one day as a Democrat. That wasn’t just in front of me — that was in front of multiple people,” one source said.
Public records show Buria donated $100 to a Democratic congressional candidate in 2023.
Detractors, meanwhile, have circulated an image of him applauding the Jan. 12 unveiling of a portrait of Mark Milley, the anti-Trump former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as a LinkedIn post in which he praised Biden Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh, writing, “I can’t wait to serve with you again.”
“This is without question the worst in a string of bad judgment calls recently by Secretary Hegseth,” one source told The Post of Buria’s elevation.
“It’s a big issue,” said another. “All political appointees go through a vetting process, and anyone with Ricky’s past would not make it through step one.”
