WASHINGTON — A day after The New York Times reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared with his wife and brother U.S. plans to attack Yemen over the commercially available group chat app Signal, Hegseth blamed the media for what he said were “lies” and “hoaxes.”
“This is what the media does,” Hegseth said of the Times story about a March 15 chat on Signal that shared the flight schedules for U.S. fighter jets targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen. “They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try slashing and burning people to ruin their reputations.”
Speaking to reporters at Monday’s Easter Egg Roll at the White House, Hegseth said he has talked with President Donald Trump since the story broke.
“We are going to continue fighting on the same page all the way,” the defense secretary said.
Responding to the new Signal allegation, Trump told Spectrum News, "It’s all just the same old stuff from the media. That’s an old one. Try finding something new."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the president’s support during an interview on NBC News on Monday morning.
“The president absolutely has confidence in Secretary Hegseth,” Leavitt said, echoing her comments from a month earlier, after Hegseth was implicated in another group Signal chat on the same day that mistakenly included The Atlantic magazine's editor-in-chief.
The back-and-forth texts on the app in March included exact warplane launch and bomb drop times before U.S. military personnel began their mission. Signal encrypts communications but is not approved for sending classified information.
Despite the March incident setting off a firestorm of criticism about security protocols within the Defense Department, Leavitt said last month that steps had been taken to “ensure that something like that can obviously never happen again.”
Following The New York Times story, multiple Congress members called for Hegseth to leave.
“I had concerns from the get-go because Pete Hegseth didn’t have a lot of experience,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, told Politico. “I like him on Fox. But does he have the experience to lead one of the largest organizations in the world? That’s a concern."
“Hegseth has to go. Immediately,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., wrote in a post on X late Sunday night that included a link to a Politico opinion piece written by former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot.
Ullyot, who resigned from his position last week, said the past month at the Pentagon has been “total chaos” following “leaks of sensitive operational plans” and mass firings.
"It’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer," he wrote, saying the "latest flashpoint is a near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks" after Hegseth fired three senior staffers on Friday.
“The Secretary of Defense clearly doesn’t understand the concept of operational security or he doesn’t care,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a retired Navy captain, wrote on X late Sunday night in a post that linked to The New York Times' story. “Carelessness puts our service members at risk. If this is true, he has again proven himself unqualified for this job and should resign or be fired.”
