WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared details of a March attack on Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis in a message group that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday.
The revelations of a second Signal chat raise more questions about Hegseth’s use of an unclassified messaging system to share highly sensitive security details and come at a particularly delicate moment for him, with senior officials ousted from the Pentagon last week as part of an internal leak investigation.
In the second chat, Hegseth shared details of the attack similar to those revealed last month by The Atlantic magazine after its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was included in a separate chat on the Signal app by mistake, in an embarrassing incident involving all of President Donald Trump’s most senior national security officials.
The person familiar with the matter, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said the second chat included about a dozen people and was created during his confirmation process to discuss administrative issues rather than detailed military planning.
The chat included details of the schedule of the air strikes, the person said.
Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, has attended sensitive meetings with foreign military counterparts, according to images the Pentagon has publicly posted.
During a meeting Hegseth had with his British counterpart at the Pentagon in March, his wife could be seen sitting behind him.
Hegseth’s brother is a Department of Homeland Security liaison to the Pentagon.
The Trump administration has aggressively pursued leaks, an effort that has been enthusiastically embraced by Hegseth at the Pentagon.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, without evidence, said that the media was “enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article.”
“The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda. … We’ve already achieved so much for the American warfighter, and will never back down,” Parnell said in a statement on X.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said that “recently fired ‘leakers’ are continuing to misrepresent the truth to soothe their shattered egos and undermine the President’s agenda.
TUMULTUOUS MOMENT FOR HEGSETH
Democratic lawmakers said Hegseth could no longer stay in his job.
“We keep learning how Pete Hegseth put lives at risk,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a post to X. “But Trump is still too weak to fire him. Pete Hegseth must be fired.”
Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War veteran who suffered grave injuries in combat in 2004, said that Hegseth “must resign in disgrace.”
A U.S. official at the Pentagon questioned how Hegseth could keep his job after the latest news.
The latest revelation comes days after Dan Caldwell, one of Hegseth’s leading advisers, was escorted from the Pentagon after being identified during an investigation into leaks at the Department of Defense.
Although Caldwell is not as well known as other senior Pentagon officials, he has played a critical role for Hegseth and was named as the Pentagon’s point person by the Secretary in the first Signal chat.
“We are incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service at the Department of Defense ended,” Caldwell posted on X on Saturday. “Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.”
Following Caldwell’s departure, less-senior officials Darin Selnick, who recently became Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff, and Colin Carroll, who was chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, were put on administrative leave and fired on Friday.
(Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart. Additional reporting by Valerie Volcovici and Nandita Bose; Editing by Chris Reese, Diane Craft and Gerry Doyle)
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