Pete Hegseth Stunningly Denies War Plans Were Leaked to ‘Highly Discredited’ Journalist Who Dropped Bombshell Report
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was defiant on Monday, just hours after the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic revealed having accidentally received sensitive information about a looming bombing campaign.
Jeffrey Goldberg published a stunning report revealing that he had been accidentally included in a Signal app group chat featuring top national security and defense officials, who discussed forthcoming air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Hegseth was asked about the report later in the day, and he responded by attacking Goldberg and insisting the journalist hadn’t been looped in on “war plans.”
“Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen was shared with a journalist in The Atlantic?” a reporter asked Hegseth during a gaggle at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. “And were those details classified?”
As the reporter asked her question, Hegseth emitted a small chuckle:
HEGSETH: So, you’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the, I don’t know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia! Or the fine people on both sides hoax. Or suckers and losers hoax. So, this is a guy that peddles in garbage. This is what he does.
I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops. I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning, and you see, we’ve been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration [sic]. Our troops, our sailors were getting shot at as targets. Our ships couldn’t sail through. And when they did shoot back, it was purely defensively or at shacks in Yemen. President Trump said, “No more. We will reestablish deterrence. We will open freedom of navigation, and we will ultimately decimate the Houthis,” which is exactly what we’re doing as we speak from the beginning overwhelmingly.
REPORTER: Why were those details shared on Signal and how did you learn that a journalist was privy to the targets, the
HEGSETH: I’ve heard it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that. Thank you.
In his report, Goldberg – who was reportedly added to the chat by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz – declined to offer explicit details of what he learned in the group chat, but said Hegseth posted “operational details” in the conversation.
“I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg wrote of the discussion on whether to bomb the Houthis in Yemen. “What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
A spokesperson for the National Security Council told Goldberg, “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
Watch above via CNN.
