Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is under fire again for sharing sensitive military details on the unclassified messaging app Signal, but in an additional channel separate from the one that got him and White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz into trouble last month, the New York Times reported Sunday.
This second Signal chat included Hegseth’s wife, brother and personal lawyer, and it contained “flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen—essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic,” Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt and Maggie Haberman reported Sunday for the Times.
As before, a White House spokesperson insists “no classified information was shared.” But that assertion regarding Waltz and Hegseth’s March incident “was viewed with tremendous skepticism by national security experts,” the Times reports. And unlike the episode with Waltz and members of the White House’s principals committee, “some of the participants in the group chat created by Mr. Hegseth were not officials with any apparent need to be given real-time information on details of the operation,” which “is sure to raise further questions about his adherence to security protocols,” Jaffe, Schmitt and Haberman write.
Hegseth’s spokesman blamed “disgruntled former employees…who were fired this week.” Those individuals, Sean Parnell said in a statement on social media, “appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary” while “the Office of the Secretary of Defense is continuing to become stronger and more efficient in executing President Trump’s agenda.”
- Update: Five top Pentagon officials either resigned or were suspended from their jobs last week. Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, became the fifth when he announced Friday he’d be leaving his role “in the coming days,” according to Politico’s Jack Detsch and Daniel Lippman. Three others—senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and Colin Carroll—were fired Friday amid a leak investigation not limited to the initial Signal fiasco. Those three released an unusual joint statement Saturday proclaiming their innocence. (The remaining individual in this ensemble, John Ullyot, published his own post-resignation statement in Politico on Sunday. More on that below.)
Reminder: The Defense Department’s acting inspector general announced an investigation into the previously-known Waltz/Hegseth messaging thread. But “It’s not clear whether Mr. Stebbins’s review has uncovered the Signal chat that included Mr. Hegseth’s wife and other advisers,” the Times reports.
Capitol Hill reax: “If true, this incident is another troubling example of Secretary Hegseth’s reckless disregard for the laws and protocols that every other military servicemember is required to follow,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, and ranking member of the Armed Services Committee said in a statement Sunday. (The DODIG’s investigation was launched after Reed and Committee Chairman Roger Wicker requested it.)
“I urge the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General to include this latest incident in its ongoing investigation of Mr. Hegseth’s mishandling of classified information,” Reed said Sunday. “Since he was nominated, I have warned that Mr. Hegseth lacks the experience, competence, and character to run the Department of Defense. In light of the ongoing chaos, dysfunction, and mass firings under Mr. Hegseth’s leadership, it seems that those objections were well-founded,” Reed said. (Wicker, for his part, does not yet seem to have released a statement on this latest disclosure from the Times.)
“Every day [Hegseth] stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois. “He must resign in disgrace,” said Duckworth, who is a combat veteran. “How many times does Pete Hegseth need to leak classified intelligence before Donald Trump and Republicans understand that he isn’t only a f*cking liar, he is a threat to our national security?”
“The last month has been a full-blown meltdown,” said former DOD spokesman John Ullyot, writing Sunday in Politico. Ullyot quit last week after a reported power struggle with spox Parnell and amid the Pentagon’s internal leak investigation.
“From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president,” and “it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer,” Ullyot said. He also alleged “More firings may be coming, according to rumors in the building.”
Related reading:
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1975, the capital of South Vietnam in Saigon finally fell after a sustained assault of North Vietnamese forces.
Around the world
Gradual drawdown in Syria underway. Defense Secretary Hegseth has ordered a “consolidation of U.S. forces…to select locations in Syria,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Friday.
For the last several years the U.S. has kept around 1,000 troops across several locations. But gradual progress fighting ISIS militants in the region has allegedly paved the way for a smaller U.S. presence. “This deliberate and conditions-based process will bring the U.S. footprint in Syria down to less than a thousand U.S. forces in the coming months,” said Parnell.
U.S. forces “will remain poised to continue strikes against the remnants of ISIS in Syria,” but “The threat of terrorism is not confined to the Middle East, and we will be vigilant across every continent to ensure that ISIS has nowhere to hide,” said Parnell.
One big stumbling block: More than 46,000 “displaced and detained ISIS-linked individuals in camps and detention facilities in northeast Syria,” and the U.S. is urging countries around the world—60 different nations are represented in this detained population, according to Human Rights Watch—to take their citizens back, Parnell said.
Ukraine latest: Kyiv said Russia violated its own Easter ceasefire that Moscow’s Vladimir Putin unilaterally declared on Friday. “As of Easter morning, we can say that the Russian army is trying to create a general impression of a ceasefire, but in some places, it does not abandon individual attempts to advance and inflict losses on Ukraine,” Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy wrote Sunday on social media.
“Either Putin does not have full control over his army, or the situation proves that in Russia, they have no intention of making a genuine move toward ending the war, and are only interested in favorable PR coverage,” he added later. AP has more.
For what it’s worth, “There are several signs of a slowdown in Russia’s economy,” former Russian central banker Alexandra Prokopenko wrote Friday. On the other hand, she explained, “At least on a political level, a gentle slowdown will not be a big problem.”
However, “In [Russia’s] manufacturing sector there’s an ever greater gap between industries tied to the military-industrial complex and those that are not,” she writes. This is at least partly because “Increased costs for parts and raw materials, the cooling of domestic demand and a labor shortage are holding back any increase in output.”
“It’s currently looking like a soft slowdown, with no crash landing and a smooth moderation in the pace of growth. But we’re not talking about a transition to a prosperous peacetime economy. Russia’s economic model is not being rebuilt, it’s simply running out of steam.” Meanwhile, some “External factors can also play an unpredictable role, particularly a global economic slowdown due to a US-China trade war,” she warned. Read more, here.
Podcast: Russian military researcher Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace joined Brian Whitmore’s hourlong “Power Vertical” podcast on Friday to discuss the past six months of Russia’s stagnated Ukraine invasion.
And in the DC think tank world, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is launching a new Air and Missile Defense Program, led by Brad Bowman and Mark Montgomery. FDD research fellow Lydia LaFavor will join Bowman and Montgomery, as well as Gordon Lubold of NBC News, for a panel discussion at noon ET Tuesday. Details, here.
Additional reading:
Commentary
Op-ed: Why I resigned in protest from National Defense University. Tim Roemer, a six-time Democratic representative from Indiana known for working across the aisle, has stepped down as a member of the Board of Visitors at NDU, the institution of joint professional military education at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. In an op-ed published by Defense One, Roemer writes that he is departing in protest of various Trump-administration “strategic and tactical blunders that threaten America’s security,” including an “ideological approach to education” and a “narrow focus on ‘lethality’” that “suggest that the administration does not understand the importance of educating our next generation of leaders.” Read on, here.
And: It’s China’s turn to face transnational terrorism threats. During the GWOT years, Beijing’s cooperation on counter-terrorism was often seen as part of its attempt to justify Uyghur repression. But now the country faces undeniable threats from transnational groups, write Mollie Saltskog and Colin P. Clarke of The Soufan Group, here.
