Pete Hegseth used a sensitive Signal chat to discuss upcoming strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen—this one including his wife, brother, and even his personal lawyer.
The stunning revelation was published Sunday in The New York Times, the newspaper reporting that he had shared “detailed” information on the March 15 airstrikes before they happened.
This is the second Signal-related scandal involving Hegseth in recent weeks. Last month, The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg claimed that he had been mistakenly added to another Signal group chat with top Trump administration national security officials, in which they discussed sensitive planning details for the military operation.
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Some of the Times sources claimed that Hegseth shared flight schedules for the planes involved—F/A-18 Hornets—in both group chats.
Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, is a former Fox News producer. Despite not being a Defense Department employee, she has reportedly been attending sensitive diplomatic meetings alongside her husband.
Meanwhile, Hegseth’s brother Phil joined the Department of Homeland Security as a senior adviser and liaison to the Defense Department, the Pentagon confirmed in late March.
Timothy Parlatore, Hegseth’s personal lawyer for the past eight years, was also assigned a job at the Pentagon in March as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, as a reservist.
The new Signal chat, reportedly named “Defense| Team Huddle,” included around a dozen of Hegseth’s other personal and professional aides, among them his chief of staff Joe Kasper, who signed a memo in March authorizing a probe into “recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information involving sensitive communications.”
The Times added that two of Hegseth’s senior advisers, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick—who have since been fired as part of the investigation into leaks at the Pentagon—were also members of the chat.
Caldwell and Selnick, along with a third colleague named Colin Carroll, who was also fired as a part of the leak investigation, railed against the Pentagon’s “baseless attacks” in a statement Saturday.
“We are incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service at the Department of Defense ended,” they wrote in a statement on X over the weekend. “Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.”
In a bombshell piece for Politico Sunday, Hegseth’s former press secretary John Ullyot also described the past month at the Pentagon as one of “total chaos” that has shed a glaring light on the defense secretary’s judgement.
“It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president—who deserves better from his senior leadership,” Ullyot, who resigned from his role this month, wrote. “Even strong backers of the secretary like me must admit: The last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon—and it’s becoming a real problem for the administration.”
Adding to the narrative is the fact that Hegseth used his private phone number to make and access the Signal chat with his wife and brother, the Times reported.
Several of the Gray Lady’s sources said he had initially created the group to discuss routine administrative information.
They noted that he did not typically use “Defense| Team Huddle” to discuss sensitive military operations, but that he had shared information on the Yemen strikes in the group around the same time he had sent out similar details to Goldberg via the other Signal group chat.
He had previously been warned by Defense Department data security experts against using his personal phone number and Signal.
“The truth is that there is an informal group chat that started before confirmation of his closest advisers,” a U.S. official told The Times. “Nothing classified was ever discussed on that chat.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell said: “Another day, another old story—back from the dead. The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda. This time, the New York Times—and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage—are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article.
“They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the secretary and the president’s agenda,” Parnell continued. “There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story. What is true is that the Office of the Secretary of Defense is continuing to become stronger and more efficient in executing President Trump’s agenda.”
In a March 24 essay, The Atlantic’s editor revealed that he was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat with high-level Trump administration officials by National Security Adviser Michael Waltz.
In the chat, several top government officials, including Hegseth, discussed sensitive military operations in Yemen while Goldberg sat idly by.
Although Hegseth insisted that no “war plans” were discussed on the Signal group chat that featured Goldberg, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general announced early April that he would review Hegseth’s use of the commercial messaging app.
“The 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,” the acting inspector general, Steven Stebbins, said in an April 3 letter to Hegseth.
