As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth faces scrutiny from the acting inspector general, Americans continue to process the possible ramifications of Signalgate.
Hegseth’s and other President Donald Trump senior administration staff’s use of the app Signal to communicate about possibly classified military operations against Houthis in Yemen has raised concerns about national security.
As reported by The Associated Press, the conversation included Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others. Inadvertently, The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who has written critically of Trump since his first term in office, was included in the conversation and later publicly shared what he saw.
“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,” Acting Inspector General Steven Stebbins said in a notification letter to Hegseth. The letter said Stebbin’s office “will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements.”
American law requires that members of the president’s administration archive official conversations. The Pentagon referred questions about the investigation to the inspector general’s office. Sen. Roger Wicker of Massachusetts, who is chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat in the committee, requested the investigation.
“You’re bringing that up again. Don’t bring that up again. Your editors probably — that’s such a wasted story,” Trump said to a reporter.
Hegseth provided exact times of warplane launches and bomb droppings in the Signal conversation, which immediately endangered the American men and women who would have carried out the attacks.
Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, have expressed concern about the use of Signal and whether classified information was shared with a journalist. The Trump Administration insists no classified information was shared, yet current and former military officials have told American press that the details Hegseth shared would have been classified.
On April 2, an op-ed by Warner appeared in the Wall Street Journal about the questions that remain from Signalgate.
“Given the dizzying pace of events in Washington, Americans can be forgiven for wondering which issues are worth paying attention to, and which are like one of national security adviser Mike Waltz’s disappearing Signal messages — here today, gone in a second. More than a week after news broke that President Trump’s top advisers were using an unclassified messaging app to discuss details of a planned military strike, there’s still much we don’t know about this security breach,” Warner wrote.
Warner said that any rank-and-file enlisted military or intelligence officer who would jeopardize national security would lose security clearance and their job. An almost identical situation in early 2025 involved a Homeland Security employee who included a journalist on an email chain with less sensitive information. The employee lost her security clearance immediately and was placed on leave.
“It’s disturbing that, despite the potential ramifications of this breach, no one has been held accountable for mishandling classified information—not Mr. Waltz, who initiated the group chat and who, we learned this week, has a habit of discussing sensitive government matters using unsecure channels; not Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who gambled with the airmen’s lives by sharing the details of weapons, targets and timing nearly three hours before military operations were scheduled to begin; and not Tulsi Gabbard, who as Director of National Intelligence is tasked with keeping our nation’s secrets safe from adversaries but appears to have lied about the incident when questioned before the Senate Intelligence Committee,” Warner wrote.
Warner said the White House is eager to move on from Signalgate, but lawmakers do not yet know if officials in the chat used personal or government-issued phones. Gabbard declined to comment during her testimony when asked.
“This lack of transparency and accountability is deeply damaging to the intelligence-sharing relationships upon which our security depends. Israel — one of our best sources of intelligence in the Middle East—is reportedly furious that the breach exposed a source on the ground in Yemen. There is nothing that requires Israel, or any of our allies, to share this kind of intelligence with the U.S. These relationships depend on mutual trust. Other countries may now be reluctant to share information knowing that the Trump administration can’t be relied on to protect sensitive sources and methods.”
American men and women in the military are probably wondering if they can trust the Trump Administration “to have their backs” after Signalgate. Warner held town halls in Hampton Roads, Virginia last weekend, “home to the USS Harry S. Truman, the aircraft carrier that participated in the strikes against the Houthis. I got an earful from friends and family members of the sailors and pilots deployed on the Truman, incensed that Mr. Hegseth and his colleagues cavalierly put their loved ones’ lives at risk. Why, they asked me, is he allowed to keep his job when their spouses, siblings and children would have been court-martialed for doing anything remotely similar?”
“They have a right to be angry and a right to some answers. We owe them nothing less.”
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Rebecca Barnabi
