WASHINGTON: The Pentagon\u2019s acting inspector general announced Thursday that he would review Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s use of the Signal messaging app to convey plans for a military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.
\nThe review will also look at other defense officials\u2019 use of the publicly available encrypted app, which is not able to handle classified material and is not part of the Defense Department\u2019s secure communications network.
\nHegseth\u2019s use of the app came to light when a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, was inadvertently added to a Signal text chain by national security adviser Mike Waltz. The chain included Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others, brought together to discuss March 15 military operations against the Iran-backed Houthis.
\n\u201cThe 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,\u201d the acting inspector general, Steven Stebbins, said in a notification letter to Hegseth.
\nThe letter also said his office \u201cwill review compliance with classification and records retention requirements.\u201d
\nHegseth and other members of the Trump administration are required by law to archive their official conversations, and it is not clear if copies of the discussions were forwarded to an official email so they could be permanently captured for federal records keeping.
\nThe Pentagon referred all questions to the inspector general\u2019s office, citing the ongoing investigation.
\nPresident Donald Trump grew frustrated when asked about the review.
\n\u201cYou\u2019re bringing that up again,\u201d Trump scoffed at a reporter. \u201cDon\u2019t bring that up again. Your editors probably \u2014 that\u2019s such a wasted story.\u201d
\nIn the chain, Hegseth provided the exact timings of warplane launches and when bombs would drop \u2014 before the men and women carrying out those attacks on behalf of the United States were airborne.
\nThe review was launched at the request of Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the committee\u2019s top Democrat.
\nIn congressional hearings, Democratic lawmakers have expressed concern about the use of Signal and pressed military officers on whether they would find it appropriate to use the commercial app to discuss military operations.
\nBoth current and former military officials have said the level of detail Hegseth shared on Signal most likely would have been classified. The Trump administration has insisted no classified information was shared.
\nWaltz is fighting back against calls for his ouster and, so far, Trump has said he stands by his national security adviser.
\nOn Thursday, Trump fired several members of Waltz\u2019s staff after far-right activist Laura Loomer urged the president to purge staffers she deemed insufficiently loyal to his \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d agenda, several people familiar with the matter said.
\nIn his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, Trump\u2019s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, would not say whether the officials should have used a more secure communications system to discuss the attack plans.
\n\u201cWhat I will say is we should always preserve the element of surprise,\u201d Caine told senators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon\u2019s acting inspector general announced Thursday that he would review Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s use of the Signal messaging app to convey plans for a military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen. The review will also look at other defense officials\u2019 use of the publicly available encrypted app, which is not able to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":79151,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79153,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79140\/revisions\/79153"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}