Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bad week just got worse. That’s after the long-awaited release Thursday of an inspector general’s report on his sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year.
Hegseth claimed Wednesday that the report was “total exoneration.”
In reality, now that we’ve seen it, it’s anything but.
To recap, the investigation dealt with one of the earliest scandals of the second Trump administration, often called “Signalgate.” It was revealed in March that Hegseth had shared operational details of looming strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels on the unclassified app. The information was supposed to be shared only with fellow high-ranking administration officials, but Trump’s then-national security adviser had inadvertently added the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the chat.
Hegseth has defended himself by maintaining that he never shared classified information on the app. But that argument has always been a bit of a straw man, and the IG report makes that abundantly clear.
While the IG report doesn’t establish whether the information was classified at the time – it notes that Hegseth had the ability to declassify it at will – it basically finds that it should have been because it was that sensitive.
And perhaps most crucially of all, it finds that Hegseth violated the rules with his use of Signal, and that this violation endangered both the mission and American troops.
Just to underscore: A defense secretary endangered American troops in a high-profile military action by failing to protect sensitive information like he should have.
No Americans got hurt, and the mission appears to have been a success. But the report indicates that’s in spite of Hegseth’s recklessness.
The report notes that the operational details that Hegseth shared in the chat about two hours before the strikes closely mirrored information from a classified email sent by the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) 15 hours earlier. That email was marked “SECRET” and not releasable to foreign nations, or “NOFORN.”
“The details that the Secretary entered into the chat included information from the USCENTCOM email detailing the types of aircraft, launch times, and strike times for the operation,” the report says. “According to the USCENTCOM [security classification guide], the operational movement of aircraft should be classified as SECRET.”
In other words, this information was classified 17 hours before the strikes, and it was the kind of information that seemingly should have remained classified two hours before the strikes, when Hegseth shared it on Signal.
The report allows that Hegseth could have declassified it. But that would mean he would have been declassifying highly sensitive information about a military strike before that military strike.
Which brings us to perhaps the most damning point for Hegseth – that this information, regardless of its technical classification status, could have jeopardized the mission and soldiers if it fell into the wrong hands.
The report notes that Hegseth in a July 25 statement to the inspector general claimed the chat included “no details that would endanger our troops or the mission.”
But that strained credulity, given the level of detail he shared. And the IG report makes clear it disagrees.
The crucial part:
“… If this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes,” the report says. “Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”
Also importantly, even as Hegseth might not have shared technically classified information, he was still breaking the rules. The IG says he “did not comply with DoD Instruction 8170.01,” because he used his personal phone and shared nonpublic information on the app.
Ipso facto, Hegseth violated the rules, and that violation risked “harm to U.S. pilots.”
It’s the kind of thing that once upon a time would have been of grave concern to Republicans.
Back when the issue was Hillary Clinton’s private email server, their central argument was that, regardless of whether anything bad actually happened, Clinton had jeopardized national security.
“This raises serious concerns about whether Secretary Clinton compromised national security secrets for what she describes as a matter of ‘convenience,’” then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said in 2016.
And few made this point as strongly as Hegseth himself.
He linked Clinton’s actions directly to the welfare of those who protect us.
“The people we rely on to do dangerous and difficult things for us rely on one thing from us: that we will not … be reckless with the dangerous things they’re doing for us,” Hegseth said in 2016. “That’s the national security implications of a private server that’s unsecured.”
This isn’t even the biggest story involving Hegseth right now. That would be the double-tap strike on an alleged drug vessel in the Caribbean that killed survivors of the first strike – an attack that could have been a war crime.
And Hegseth likely benefits from the passage of time. Signalgate was a very big deal at the time, but the story broke nearly nine months ago now. The White House said President Donald Trump “stands by” his defense secretary after CNN’s exclusive reporting on the classified version of the watchdog report on Wednesday.
But for a guy already seemingly on the hot seat, with even some Republicans questioning his fitness for the job, the IG report is pretty ominous.
