The interim inspector general of the Pentagon announced Thursday that he would examine the defense secretary Pete Hegseth Use of Signal Messaging application to transmit plans for a military strike against Houthi activists in Yemen.
The examination will also examine the use by other managers of the defense of the encrypted application accessible to the public, which is unable to manage classified documents and is not part of the secure communication network of the Ministry of Defense.
Hegseth’s use of the application was revealed when a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, was inadvertently added to a signal text chain by national security advisor Mike Waltz. The channel included Hegseth, vice-president JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others, gathered to discuss the military operations of March 15 against the Houthis supported by Iran.
“The objective of this evaluation is to determine to what extent the Secretary of Defense and the other DD staff are satisfied with DOD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging request for official cases,” the acting inspector general Stebbins said in a notification letter to Hegseth.
The letter also indicated that his office “will examine compliance with the classification and retention of file requirements”.
Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration are held by the law of archiving their official conversations, and it is not clear if copies of the discussions have been transmitted to an official email so that they can be permanently captured for the holding of federal files.
The Pentagon referred all questions to the Inspector General’s office, citing the current investigation.
Get daily national news
Get the best news of the day, the titles of political, economic and current affairs, delivered in your reception box once a day.
In the chain, Hegseth provided the exact calendars of Warplane launches and when the bombs drop – before men and women put these attacks on behalf of the United States.
The examination was launched at the request of Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Chairman of the Senate Committee for Armed Services, and the Senator of Rhode Island Jack Reed, the best democrat of the Committee.
During the Congress hearings, democratic legislators expressed their concern about the use of the signal and the military officers in a hurry to know if they would consider the commercial application appropriate to discuss military operations.
Current and former military officials said that the level of detail that Hegseth shared on signal would probably have been classified. The Trump administration insisted that no classified information was shared.
Waltz retaliated against calls for his eviction and, so far, President Donald Trump has said that he is subjecting himself to his national security advisor.
Trump dismissed several Waltz staff after the far -right activist, Laura Looper, on Thursday, urged the president to serve the president to serve the staff that she considered insufficiently faithful to his program “Make America Great Again”, said several people familiar to the case.
During his confirmation audience of the Senate on Tuesday, Trump’s candidate for the president of the joint staff chiefs, Lieutenant-General Dan Caine, would not say if the civil servants should have used a more secure communication system to discuss attack plans.
“What I would say is that we should always preserve the element of surprise,” Caine told Senators.
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press