The Pentagon’s acting inspector general has launched an investigation into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to discuss war plans.
In a memo addressed to Hegseth, IG Steven Stebbins says he wants “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.” It will also review Hegseth’s compliance with classification and records retention requirements.
The Signal app allows you to set messages to expire after a certain period of time. In this case, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz set the Yemen messages to expire after one week and later four weeks.
The probe was launched after Sens. Roger Wicker and Jack Reed, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote to Stebbins raising concerns that the chat—which inadvertently added Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Rosenberg—”included classified information pertaining to sensitive military actions in Yemen.”
“If true, this reporting raises questions as to the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know,” the senators wrote.
The Signal group chat included Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. After the story broke, Gabbard and Ratcliffe appeared before Congress and denied that anything they discussed was classified. Hegseth also insisted that “nobody was texting war plans.”
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Rosenberg subsequently released the full text chain, in which Hegseth shared plans to kill a Houthi militant leader just two hours before the operation on March 15. The defense secretary also informed everyone when the F-18 fighter jets and sea-based cruise missiles would launch.
When asked about the probe, President Trump dismissed it. “Oh, you’re bringing that up again?” he said to a reporter on Air Force One. “Don’t bring that up again. Your editors probably. That’s such a wasted story.”
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Stebbins is asking the DoD to designate two points of contact in the next five days. His investigation will take place in Washington, DC and at the US Central Command Headquarters in Tampa, Florida. “We may identify additional locations during the evaluation,” he says.
Separately, Trump this week ousted Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh, the Commander of US Cyber Command and second in command at the NSA, and Wendy Noble, deputy director and senior civilian leader at the NSA—reportedly as the behest of conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.
“NSA Director Tim Haugh and his deputy Wendy Noble have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired,” Loomer tweeted. (You may remember that Loomer handcuffed herself to Twitter’s NYC offices in 2018 after it banned her.)
About Jibin Joseph
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