Inspector general will scrutinize Hegseth’s disclosures in Signal chat

The Pentagon inspector general’s office said Thursday that it will scrutinize disclosures made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth using the unclassified messaging app Signal, as he and other top Trump administration officials coordinated a highly sensitive military operation last month in Yemen, complying with a request from Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

Steven A. Stebbins, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general, said in a memo to Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg that the review will “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.” It also will “review compliance with classification and records retention requirements,” Stebbins wrote.

A Defense Department spokesman declined to comment, saying it does not discuss ongoing investigations.

Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Jack Reed (Rhode Island), its top Democrat, had requested the inquiry last week after the Atlantic magazine published a stunning report indicating its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was unintentionally added to the group chat by White House national security adviser Michael Waltz.

The Signal chat was set up by Waltz in mid-March to discuss with Hegseth and others an imminent U.S. military strike targeting Yemen’s Houthi militants, a group that for many months has terrorized commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea and the consortium of military ships sent there to defend against those attacks. The chat included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and several other senior administration aides.

Hegseth, according to subsequent reporting by the Atlantic, disclosed the vast majority of sensitive details about the impending operation - including the timeline when U.S. forces would carry out strikes, to-the-minute times that F-18 fighter jets would take off from aircraft carriers, the schedule for attack drones to arrive and when Tomahawk cruise missiles would launch from ships in the region.

“Whether intended or not, Secretary Hegseth endangered the lives of American servicemembers through his recklessness,” Reed, the Democratic senator, said in a statement Thursday after the inspector general’s announcement. “Had the intelligence in his chat messages been obtained by the Houthis or another adversary, it would have allowed them to reposition weapons to target our pilots with dangerously accurate intelligence.”

Hegseth has aggressively denied assertions that he divulged classified information in the Signal chat, characterizing what he wrote as “general updates in real time.” What he and other officials discussed contained “no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information,” he told reporters last week.

The group chat transcript published by the Atlantic shows none of the top administration officials involved had detected that Goldberg, a civilian journalist without a security clearance, was receiving their messages. Facing withering public backlash, President Donald Trump, along with Hegseth and Waltz, has sought to discredit Goldberg as a means to deflect from the controversy. Trump himself was not involved in the Signal chat.

Many of the group’s participants, including Hegseth, Waltz and Gabbard, served in the military, where operational secrecy is taught as a matter of life and death. All members of the chat, given their senior status within the U.S. government and access to classified national secrets, are priority targets for foreign counterintelligence agencies that have sought to exploit vulnerabilities inherent to the use of commercially available messaging platforms.

There could have been serious consequences had an adversary intercepted the communications and disclosed it to the Houthis ahead of the March 15 attack, experts and former officials have said. The militants are backed by Iran, a U.S. adversary that also shares a defense relationship with Russia. Had the Houthis gleaned the information shared by Hegseth in the chat group, they could have advised senior leaders to take cover, endangering the entire mission, or potentially intercepted the inbound U.S. aircraft, experts have said.

Waltz also has used his Gmail account to conduct other government business with colleagues throughout the administration, and he has hosted other Signal chats with Cabinet members on various sensitive topics, The Washington Post previously reported.

The inspector general’s announcement does not specify whether any non-Defense Department participants in the group chat also will be scrutinized by investigators. It does say the work will be done both in Washington and at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Tampa.

Trump acted early in his second term to fire the inspectors general of several federal agencies, saying, “I don’t know them” and that “some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing their job.” Democrats and other critics of the move have questioned whether it would erode the independence and objectivity expected of the government’s internal watchdogs.

Stebbins’s memo described his office’s objective as an evaluation, rather than an investigation. Evaluations are focused on operations and policies, whereas investigations probe potential criminal wrongdoing, said Mollie Halpern, a spokesperson for the inspector general’s office. The evaluation will be objective, independent and thorough, she added, and the agency will release unclassified portions when the work is complete.

Separately on Thursday, four Democratic senators demanded from the White House additional details about the episode, including whether administration officials used their personal devices and if they were traveling internationally at the time they sent messages on Signal and other commercial platforms. The lawmakers directed the administration to preserve any such messages and detail whether Trump officials discussed other military operations using nonsecure networks.