Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denies texting war plans
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth denies texting war plans to a journalist from The Atlantic.
WASHINGTON − In a 2016 appearance on Fox News, the future defense secretary Pete Hegseth repeatedly criticized presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for using a private server for her work as the Obama administration’s secretary of state.
“If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,” Hegseth said.
As a Fox News on-air analyst, Hegseth made a lot of comments that year as Clinton’s use of a private server became a Republican campaign issue, stirred up a public controversy and sparked an FBI investigation: “Any security professional, military, government or otherwise, would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information,” Hegseth said.
“The fact that she wouldn’t be held accountable for this, I think, blows the mind of anyone who’s held our nation’s secrets dear,” Hegseth added back in 2016, “and who’s had a top-secret clearance like I have and others who know that even one hiccup causes a problem.”
Now, Defense Secretary Hegseth and other top Trump administration officials are embroiled in a controversy that brings to mind the drama around Clinton nine years ago.
In a breach that some national security experts called unprecedented and extraordinarily grave, Hegseth and other members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet were found to be discussing operational war plans about how and when to attack the Iranian-sponsored Houthi militias in Yemen earlier this month. And they appear to have accidentally invited a prominent journalist, The Atlantic magazine’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to their Signal chat – which he wrote about in a bombshell article published Monday and confirmed by the White House.
But Hegseth wasn’t alone.
Virtually every other person on the “Houthi PC small group” chat on Signal, including the heads of the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, have publicly gone on record to say breaches of security protocol should be dealt with harshly and immediately.
Classified war plans inadvertently sent to journalist
The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that he was accidentally added to a group chat with top officials that detailed classified war plans.
‘Nobody is above the law’
Here’s Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio, then the junior Republican senator from Florida, who happened to be running for president when the Clinton controversy broke in 2016: “Nobody is above the law, not even Hillary Clinton,” Rubio told Fox News at the time. “Even though she thinks she is.”
These past calls for accountability placed several Trump national security officials in a bind after their Yemen bombing chat went public.
Paul Rosenzweig, a former top lawyer at Justice and Homeland Security departments, said Trump administration officials appeared to be downplaying the seriousness of the Signal disclosures.
“Operational details of a military operation are classified no matter what,” said Rosenzweig, who was a special advocate for the Justice Department’s Data Protection Review Court, which was established to enhance safeguards for U.S. efforts to collect “signals intelligence” via cellphone and emails. “But more importantly, anybody who called for Hillary Clinton’s removal for having emails on her personal server and participated in this Signal thread is incomparably hypocritical and should never be taken seriously when discussing classification matters again.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe, a former Republican House lawmaker, told Fox News in response to another more recent controversy, “Mishandling classified information is still a violation of the Espionage Act.” That’s a criminal charge so serious that it can bring the death penalty.
And in June 2023, Trump National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who Goldberg said invited him to the Signal chat on Houthi attack plans, also weighed in on the issue of alleged mishandling of classified information by both Clinton and Biden.
“When you have the Clinton emails, on top of the fact that the sitting President of the United States admitted he had documents in his garage,” Waltz told CNN. “… But they didn’t prosecute, they didn’t go after these folks.”
And here’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who said in a March 14 post on X in response to concerns about Trump administration policies and plans being leaked to journalists: “Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.”
Gabbard made that comment on the same day she was in the Signal chat discussing the plans to bomb the Houthi rebels, an action that occurred the very next day.
In his extensive 2016 Fox News comments about Clinton, Hegseth referenced a problem with mishandling classified information that could become relevant soon in the wake of the Signal chat:
“How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?” Hegseth asked.
‘Learned a lesson’
On Monday, the White House said it was reviewing how Goldberg, a prominent national security journalist, was accidentally added to the group text. “At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” the National Security Council said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Trump himself appeared to downplay the breach, telling NBC News his national security adviser “has learned a lesson” and that he was standing by Waltz.
Ratcliffe and Gabbard are expected to field tough questions about the breach at an annual global threats hearing before the Senate Intelligence committee today.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, clashed with Gabbard and Ratcliffe Tuesday morning as they appeared before the committee to discuss worldwide threats.
Warner asked Gabbard outright about her earlier X post about how any unauthorized release of classified information is “a violation of the law and will be treated as such.”
“So,” Warner said, “if this information is classified, what are you going to do?”
“Senator, two points here,” Gabbard responded. “First of all, there’s a difference between inadvertent release versus … malicious leaks of classified information. The second point is, there was no classified information” discussed in the Signal chat.
Goldberg claimed there was, citing specifics that he withheld from publication about specific details and timing of the planned attacks weapons used and even the identities of specific Houthi targets.
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Warner then challenged Gabbard and Ratcliffe to “release them publicly” if the chat messages contained no classified information.
Hegseth, who did not testify at the Senate Intelligence committee hearing, dodged questions about the Signal chat when asked by reporters on Monday – even though it was he who put targeting information into the unsecured chat, according to Goldberg’s article.
“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also attacked Goldberg, a veteran national security journalist and editor, as “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”