Trump Calls Concern Over Hegseth’s 2nd Signal Chat Episode ‘Waste of Time’

by · NY Times

Trump Calls Concern Over Hegseth’s 2nd Signal Chat Episode ‘Waste of Time’

The president said he had confidence in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after The New York Times reported that he had shared details about a military strike in another group chat.

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President Trump has so far been unwilling to fire any of his top officials, a marked change from his first administration.
Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

By Jonathan SwanAishvarya Kavi and Michael Gold

Reporting from Washington

President Trump threw his support behind Pete Hegseth on Monday and said any concern over his defense secretary’s decision to share military attack plans in a Signal group chat was a “waste of time.”

Speaking to reporters on the White House’s South Lawn after the Easter Egg Roll, Mr. Trump said he had full confidence in Mr. Hegseth.

“He’s doing a great job — ask the Houthis how he’s doing,” the president said, referring to the rebel group in Yemen that the United States targeted in military strikes last month.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that Mr. Hegseth had shared details about those strikes on March 15 — before they happened — in a message thread that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

The details were essentially the same attack plans that Mr. Hegseth had shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

The decision to close ranks around Mr. Hegseth comes as Mr. Trump has so far been unwilling to fire any of his top officials, no matter what headlines they generate — a marked change from his first term. People who had discussed the matter with the president said he was determined to dig in and wanted to see Mr. Hegseth fight back. Mr. Trump has been adamant, in private, about not giving the “fake news” media the satisfaction of seeing him fire one of his top officials in a scandal.

Mr. Hegseth seemed to strike the note of defiance that Mr. Trump was looking for in a clash with journalists on Monday morning. He lashed out at reporters and television crews as he attended the annual Easter Egg Roll with members of his family.

He dismissed the Times article as one of many “hit pieces” that aired accusations from “disgruntled former employees.” He said he had spoken to Mr. Trump and they were “on the same page all the way.”

The defense secretary pointed at the reporters and called them “hoaxsters,” then gestured to his young children, who were gathered behind him.

“These kids right here, this is why we’re fighting the fake news media,” Mr. Hegseth said, before joining his wife and walking away.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth spoke on the phone on Sunday night, a few hours after the Times article was published, a person briefed on the call said. The president told Mr. Hegseth that disgruntled “leakers” were to blame for the report and made clear that he had the defense secretary’s back.

Mr. Trump then instructed his team to publicly defend Mr. Hegseth.

On Monday morning, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, went on “Fox & Friends,” the same show that Mr. Hegseth had hosted during his career as a television personality.

Ms. Leavitt insisted that Mr. Hegseth had not shared classified information in the chat. The Times reported that he had disclosed sensitive details about the Pentagon’s attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen in a chat last month, before the strikes. The chat group had been created to strategize about Mr. Hegseth’s nomination.

“This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change that you are trying to implement,” Ms. Leavitt told the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade. She blamed The Times’s report on “leakers.”

Pressure piled on Mr. Hegseth after news of the second Signal group broke.

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska on Monday became the first Republican member of Congress to say that Mr. Hegseth’s conduct was intolerable and that it warranted his dismissal.

Mr. Bacon, a former Air Force general who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said in an interview with Politico that it would be “totally unacceptable” for Mr. Hegseth to have had a Signal chat with his family about the missions in Yemen.

“Russia and China are all over his phone, and for him to be putting secret stuff on his phone is not right,” he added. “He’s acting like he’s above the law — and that shows an amateur person.”

Asked to clarify his comments, Mr. Bacon said in a statement that he would “never tell the White House what to do” but that he “wouldn’t tolerate” Mr. Hegseth’s behavior if he were in charge. “If the reporting is true, this is unacceptable,” he said.

Mr. Hegseth’s former spokesman took the extraordinary step of publicly questioning his fitness to lead the Pentagon.

On Sunday night, Politico published an opinion essay by the spokesman, John Ullyot, who had recently departed the Pentagon. In the essay, Mr. Ullyot said the department was “in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”

Prominent Democrats also called for an investigation into Mr. Hegseth’s handling of sensitive national security information after The Times’s report of the second Signal chat.

Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, requested on Monday that the National Archives and Records Administration investigate the Trump administration’s use of Signal and other messaging applications, raising concern that top officials are recklessly using them to discuss sensitive national security matters in potential violation of federal laws that require them to preserve records.

Mr. Schiff, who as a member of the House led Democrats’ case for Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, asked the archives administration to take steps to preserve any messages that Trump administration officials had sent on the encrypted messaging app.

“Given the reckless and careless manner by which the administration utilized the messaging application in this context, there is a strong reason to believe that senior political appointees have engaged widely in such practices when discussing other sensitive national security matters,” Mr. Schiff wrote in a letter obtained by The Times.

He also urged a broader review of how all senior Trump administration officials use messaging applications and platforms like Gmail, and whether agencies had policies in place to preserve communications there. And he asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is acting as the national archivist after Mr. Trump’s abrupt firing of the previous one, to recuse himself from any inquiries and to instead turn an investigation over to the Justice Department or independent inspectors general.

But Mr. Trump appears unmoved. In his comments to reporters after the Easter Egg Roll, the president dismissed the notion that Mr. Hegseth had done anything wrong.

“He’s doing a great job,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s just fake news. They just bring up stories. I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people and that’s what he’s doing. So, you don’t always have friends when you do that.”

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