In the telling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he was only executing his duties when he shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen in an unclassified group chat on the Signal messaging app. “My job,” he told reporters during a swing through Hawaii, “is to provide updates in real time.”
The implication: Nothing to see here.
The reaction inside the Pentagon to Hegseth’s communications—disclosed this week by The Atlantic after the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to the chat—told a different story, as security specialists raced to reiterate rules about the proper channels for classified information.
“Incidents like this make my job significantly harder,” a Department of Defense operations security, or OPSEC, official told us this week, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. “When senior leadership disregards OPSEC and security protocols without consequences, it undermines the work we do to enforce these standards.”
The OPSEC official added, “Now we have to spend hours retraining and reiterating rules to personnel who see these double standards and question why they should be held accountable when leadership is not.”
In the days since The Atlantic published the contents of the group chat, a gulf has opened between the public posture adopted by senior members of the administration and the private reaction of rank-and-file national-security officials aghast at the severity of the breach and troubled by the lack of repercussions. The disparity is likely to deepen if Donald Trump continues to resist holding anyone accountable.
The president’s instructions to his team late this week remained to attack Goldberg and The Atlantic, and not “produce a scalp” by firing any members of his Cabinet, in the words of one outside adviser consulted by the White House who described the discussions to us. Senior Democrats have called on both Hegseth and the president’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who created the Signal group and added Goldberg, to resign or be fired.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to rule out the possibility of terminations but told reporters this week that Trump “continues to have confidence in his national-security team.” Trump, speaking in the Oval Office yesterday, said of his defense secretary, “Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this.” And the White House today confirmed plans for Waltz to join Vice President J. D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, on a visit to Greenland, in an apparent show of confidence in the national security adviser.
In Congress, the reactions mostly reflected partisan differences, with some exceptions.
Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined the panel’s top Democrat, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, in asking the Defense Department’s acting inspector general to investigate the incident. The acting inspector general, Steven A. Stebbins, was appointed principal deputy inspector general in 2023, under President Joe Biden, and took over leadership of the office on an acting basis following Trump’s dismissal of the inspector general, Robert Storch, in January—part of a broad expulsion of inspectors general.
It’s not clear whether or how quickly an investigation will take place. A spokesperson for the inspector general’s office confirmed receipt of the request and told us it was being reviewed.
It’s also not clear whether there will be other investigations. In response to questioning this week before the Senate and House intelligence panels, FBI Director Kash Patel declined to say whether he would open an investigation. At an unrelated news conference earlier today, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, dismissed the prospect of an investigation. Bondi echoed Trump-administration talking points in describing the contents of the Signal chat as “sensitive information, not classified,” and sought to shift the focus to the success of the mission in Yemen. She then blamed Hillary Clinton and Biden for mishandling classified information. Both politicians faced probes into their conduct by the Justice Department, the agency traditionally responsible for enforcing the Espionage Act and other federal laws governing national defense information.
Wicker, speaking to reporters this week, said he believed that the information shared in the chat should have been classified, contradicting senior Trump-administration officials who insisted they had heeded classification rules. But Wicker stopped short of calling for resignations. So, too, did Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who described the conduct as an “egregious security breach” that should serve as a “wake-up call.” Republican Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska also delivered a blunt assessment, calling the Signal chat a “gross error.”
Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, told us that his Republican colleagues are more concerned about the breach than they let on publicly.
“I think they are much more concerned privately, because they saw the text messages just as I did,” he said in an interview. “They saw the unredacted messages, and they are astonishing.”
Krishnamoorthi also said that the breach has broken through to the public in a way that demands consequences. “They want to know that there’s a uniform application of the law,” the lawmaker told us. According to a YouGov poll released this week, 60 percent of Republicans view the conduct by Trump officials in the Signal chat as somewhat or very serious. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats said the same.
Some conservative influencers broke ranks to warn of public perceptions about the incident. In a lengthy video posted to his more than 3.6 million followers on X, Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, called on Trump to fire someone. “Somebody has to go down,” he said. Tomi Lahren, another popular conservative-media personality, took issue with the administration’s efforts to draw a distinction between “war plans” and “attack plans,” and to imply that the latter is less sensitive. “Trying to wordsmith the hell outta this signal debacle is making it worse,” she wrote on X. “It was bad. And I’m honestly getting sick of the whataboutisms from my own side. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”
Trump, for his part, has been angered by negative news coverage that he believes paints his White House as sloppy and that has distracted from his plans to implement further tariffs on American trading partners, two aides told us. Inside the White House, the episode brought back memories of the scandal surrounding Mike Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser in the early days of his first term, as the president’s aides vowed to ensure a different outcome this time around. Flynn was forced to resign in February 2017 after he was revealed to have lied to then–Vice President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.
Trump, who loathes admitting errors or issuing apologies, has expressed private regret about Flynn’s dismissal and has told advisers over the years that he thinks he gave up too easily. Some in the president’s orbit don’t want another national security adviser thrown overboard so quickly.
Still, some Trump allies believe that Waltz is more vulnerable than the secretary of defense. The bare-knuckle fight to get Hegseth narrowly confirmed reminded the president’s supporters of the push to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which became a significant victory for the MAGA movement. Hegseth is also receiving the most heat from Democrats, which may make the GOP more likely to try to rally around him. Waltz, meanwhile, is viewed with more suspicion by some of the president’s loyalists, who are directing blame at him not for initiating the Signal chat but for seeming to have the contact details of a journalist stored in his phone. (He has denied this while not explaining how he came to add Goldberg to the chat.)
Trump advisers expressed anger toward Wicker and other Republicans on the Hill who have broken ranks. As a contrast, they held up Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and longtime national-security hawk, who declared that no one should lose their job over the Signal debacle.
Graham’s reward came last night in the form of a presidential endorsement on Truth Social in his reelection race, which is more than a year away: “Lindsey has been a wonderful friend to me, and has always been there when I needed him.”