President Trump on Friday denounced critics who have raised concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal, a discrete messaging app, to disseminate sensitive military information.
Asked whether his confidence has changed in Hegseth after a second chat controversy thrust him back into the spotlight earlier this week, Trump brushed off the sentiment. Instead, he cast blame once again on the media.
“I don’t view Signal as important,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, en route to Rome for Pope Francis’s funeral. “I think that’s fake news. So, I don’t view it as important.”
His remarks come days after The New York Times reported that the Defense chief in mid-March disclosed sensitive information about military attack plans in a Signal chain with his wife, brother and personal lawyer. Hegseth has argued the messages contained “informal” and “unclassified” info.
The same argument was used to justify an earlier breach on the app, when a top journalist was inadvertently added to a Signal chain with top Trump administration officials containing information about planned strikes in Yemen, which have since been carried out. The president met with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, the aforementioned reporter, earlier this week.
Trump and his allies have contended that the media has made it a bigger issue than it is. Following the first Signal controversy, Trump ripped news outlets for “the never ending Signal story, adding a post on Truth Social that, “They just don’t stop — Over and over they go!”
The White House and allies of the president have rallied around Hegseth, beating back calls for the Defense chief to resign over the fallout. During the annual Easter Egg Roll, Trump doubled down on his support for the secretary.
“He is doing a great job. … Ask the Houthis how he’s doing,” Trump told reporters on Monday, while also pointing a finger at the Pentagon officials who had recently been fired.
“It’s just fake news,” he said. “They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people.”
Hegseth has also blasted the former employees — who were ousted after an internal probe into leaks within the Defense Department, per the administration — in the wake of the Times report.
“What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax,” the Defense chief said Monday.
