Pentagon’s watchdog to review Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal app to convey plans for Houthi strike

The Signal messaging app Hegseth used to share plans for a strike against the Houthis can’t handle classified material and isn’t part of the Defence Department’s secure communications network.

US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth is being investigated over the Signals fiasco. Picture: AFP.

The Pentagon’s acting inspector general has announced he will review Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to convey plans for a military strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.

The review will also look at other defence officials' use of the publicly available encrypted app, which is not able to handle classified material and is not part of the Defence Department’s secure communications network.

Mr Hegseth’s use of the app came to light when a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, was added to a Signal text chain by national security adviser Mike Waltz. The chain included Mr Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others, brought together to discuss military operations against the Iran-backed Houthis. “The objective of this evaluation is to determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defence and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business. Additionally, we will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements,” the acting inspector general, Steven Stebbins, said in a notification letter to Mr Hegseth.

The letter also said his office “will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements.”

Mr Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration are required by law to archive their official conversations, and it is not clear if copies of the discussions were forwarded to an official email so they could be permanently captured for federal records keeping.

The Pentagon referred all questions to the inspector general’s office, citing the ongoing investigation.

President Donald Trump grew frustrated when asked about the review. “You’re bringing that up again,” Mr Trump scoffed at a reporter. “Don’t bring that up again. Your editors probably — that’s such a wasted story.”

In the chain, Mr Hegseth provided the exact timings of warplane launches and when bombs would drop — before the men and women carrying out those attacks on behalf of the United States were airborne.

The review was launched at the request of Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the committee’s top Democrat.

In congressional hearings, Democratic lawmakers have expressed concern about the use of Signal and pressed military officers on whether they would find it appropriate to use the commercial app to discuss military operations.

Both current and former military officials have said the level of detail Mr Hegseth shared on Signal most likely would have been classified. The Trump administration has insisted no classified information was shared.

Waltz is fighting back against calls for his ouster and, so far, Mr Trump has said he stands by his national security adviser.

On Thursday, Mr Trump fired several members of Waltz’s staff after far-right activist Laura Loomer urged the president to purge staffers she deemed insufficiently loyal to his “Make America Great Again” agenda, several people familiar with the matter said.

In his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, Mr Trump’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, would not say whether the officials should have used a more secure communications system to discuss the attack plans. “What I will say is we should always preserve the element of surprise,” Caine told senators.