Pentagon watchdog to review Hegseth’s use of Signal app to convey plans
for Houthi strike
[April 04, 2025]
By TARA COPP
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon’s acting inspector general announced
Thursday that he would review Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of
the Signal messaging app to convey plans for a military strike against
Houthi militants in Yemen.
The review will also look at other defense officials' use of the
publicly available encrypted app, which is not able to handle classified
material and is not part of the Defense Department’s secure
communications network.
Hegseth’s use of the app came to light when a journalist, Jeffrey
Goldberg of The Atlantic, was inadvertently added to a Signal text chain
by national security adviser Mike Waltz. The chain included Hegseth,
Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of
National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others, brought together to
discuss March 15 military operations against the Iran-backed Houthis.
“The objective of this evaluation is to determine the extent to which
the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD
policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging
application for official business," the acting inspector general, Steven
Stebbins, said in a notification letter to Hegseth.
The letter also said his office “will review compliance with
classification and records retention requirements.”
Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration are required by
law to archive their official conversations, and it is not clear if
copies of the discussions were forwarded to an official email so they
could be permanently captured for federal records keeping.
The Pentagon referred all questions to the inspector general’s office,
citing the ongoing investigation.
President Donald Trump grew frustrated when asked about the review.
“You’re bringing that up again,” Trump scoffed at a reporter. “Don’t
bring that up again. Your editors probably — that’s such a wasted
story.”
In the chain, Hegseth provided the exact timings of warplane launches
and when bombs would drop — before the men and women carrying out those
attacks on behalf of the United States were airborne.
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a joint news
conference with Japan's Defense Minister Gen Nakatani at the
Ministry of Defense in Tokyo Sunday, March 30, 2025. (Kiyoshi
Ota/Pool Photo via AP)
The review was launched at the request of Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss.,
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rhode Island Sen.
Jack Reed, the committee’s top Democrat.
In congressional hearings, Democratic lawmakers have expressed concern
about the use of Signal and pressed military officers on whether they
would find it appropriate to use the commercial app to discuss military
operations.
Both current and former military officials have said the level of detail
Hegseth shared on Signal most likely would have been classified. The
Trump administration has insisted no classified information was shared.
Waltz is fighting back against calls for his ouster and, so far, Trump
has said he stands by his national security adviser.
On Thursday, Trump fired several members of Waltz's staff after
far-right activist Laura Loomer urged the president to purge staffers
she deemed insufficiently loyal to his “Make America Great Again”
agenda, several people familiar with the matter said.
In his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, Trump's nominee for chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, would not say whether
the officials should have used a more secure communications system to
discuss the attack plans.
“What I will say is we should always preserve the element of surprise,”
Caine told senators.
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