WASHINGTON – The Defense Department’s Inspector General concluded in a report filed Tuesday that information Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared in a Signal group chat about a pending military operation in Yemen was considered classified, according to two people who read the report.
The report outlines the findings of a more than eight-month investigation into Hegseth’s use of Signal, an encrypted but unclassified messaging app, to share details of planned U.S. attacks in March before they began.
It found that the information could have endangered U.S. troops if it had been intercepted by a foreign adversary, said the two people who read the report. The evaluation by the Department of Defense Inspector General also concluded that Hegseth violated military regulations by using his personal phone for official business, according to those people.
Hegseth has maintained that he did not share classified information in the group chat. The inspector general did not address whether Hegseth took appropriate steps to declassify the information shared in the chat.
There was no immediate comment from either the Pentagon or the White House.
The IG report was delivered to the Senate and the House intelligence and armed services committees and lawmakers were reviewing the report Wednesday, congressional aides said. A redacted version has not been made public.
The group chat, which included other top members of President Donald Trump’s national security team, became public after an editor from The Atlantic magazine was inadvertently added.
NBC News has reported that minutes before U.S. warplanes took off to begin their strikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in March, Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, who headed U.S. Central Command at the time, used a secure U.S. government system to send detailed information about the operation to Hegseth.
The material Kurilla sent included details about when the American fighters would take off and when they would reach their targets, information that, if it had fallen into the wrong hands, could have put the pilots of those planes in serious danger, NBC News reported.
Much of that same information appeared in the Signal chat that Hegseth shared with other senior Trump administration officials and, in a separate chat, with members of his family and his personal lawyer, three US officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges told NBC News.
The release of the report comes at a delicate time for Hegseth, who is currently under scrutiny over the decision to launch a second military strike against a suspected drug smuggling ship in the Caribbean Sea that the Pentagon said was carrying 11 people. The first attack left at least two survivors.
“I personally saw no survivors,” Hegseth told reporters during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday. “The thing was on fire. It exploded into fire and smoke. You can’t see it.”
He added: “This is called fog of war.”
This is a development history. Please check back for updates.
