Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer, attend the Rolsh Easter Easter of the White House on April 21.
Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, included via Getty Images
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Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, included via Getty Images
The defense besieged secretary Pete Hegseth pushed the last revelations on Tuesday that he shared military attack plans on his private phone with his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
“If you remember … I said that no one sends war plans,” said HegSeth on Fox and friends. “What was shared on signal then (during the first leak, which surfaced last month) and was now informal and not classified coordination for the coordination of the media (and) other things.”
But the details he shared, two hours before the air strikes touch Yemen, were certainly classified, according to Lieutenant-Colonel retired from Marine, Mick Wagoner, who was a military lawyer for 17 years and deployed in four war areas.
“A launch of an attack, there is no meaning, no hand, that an American military operation beginning will not be classified for Lord’s love,” he said.
And Hegseth’s defense also tacitly confirms that he shared these details with people, like his wife, he knew that it was not allowed to have the information.
According to an American official who is not authorized to speak publicly, after the Centom Commander, General Erik Kurilla, sent HegSeth details to secure communications on imminent military operations on March 15, Hegseth shared this information, motorized, with two distinct signal discussion groups. One was made up of senior officials of the Trump administration – and inadvertently included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. But the other cat group included people without clear reason to receive sensitive information.
“The last time he was wrongly used a communication system without security, and he wrongly thought that he was only talking about security authorization holders,” said Kevin Carroll, who served 30 years in the army, then in the CIA, then in the Department of Internal Security in the first Trump administration. Security violations as well as the cat groups are called “spill” by the military, but it is more, says Carroll.
“Here, he knowingly uses a communication system without security and knowingly gives classified information to people who are not security authorization holders, so it’s really more than a spill,” said Carroll. “This really comes back to the type of will which is generally prosecuted by the Ministry of Justice.”
Surprise
Even the man that President Trump chose as his highest military official, president of the joint chiefs Dan Caine, seemed to have trouble using HegSeth of the first group of signals during his confirmation audience.
“We can all agree that we must always protect the element of surprise,” Caine said when he was questioned several times of attack plans that fake in advance.
When he was asked directly what he would have done if he found himself on an unused platform where tactical information was under discussion, he said: “I would weigh and stop it if I was part, but in this case, I was not.”
Military officers who sent evaluations from the battlefield that had lost their jobs for having transmitted information on an unwelcome channel, said Carroll, the army lawyer who served in the first Trump administration. He defended a junior officer of the Marine Corps in court who sent urgent information and potentially saving the life of other officers in Afghanistan from an unsecified email server and was noted from his functions.
Carroll says, for the troops, to see leadership share attack plans in advance on the signal, but so far, no consequence is toxic to morale. But this double standard is so common, he adds, that there is a sentence for that in the army: “Different spanking for different rows.”
Carroll underlines examples of the two political parties where the mismanagement of senior officials of classified information remained mainly unpunished: Hillary Clinton, Sandy Berger, President Joe Biden; Richard Armitage, the former vice-president Mike Pence, and of course Trump.
But several current and former military prosecutors and defense lawyers have agreed that there is no precedent for a defense secretary voluntarily disclosing operational plans against a hostile military force in real time.
Hegseth’s repercussions remain unclear. Democrats and at least a republican legislator called for his resignation following the news. NPR previously pointed out that the White House had started the research process of a new Pentagon leader to replace Pete Hegseth, although Trump publicly declared that he was standing alongside his defense secretary, and the White House delicately denied these reports.
Trump and Hegseth blamed “the former dissatisfied staff” for revealing the existence of the second group of signal cats. They seem to refer to four senior advisers who left the Pentagon last week last week. The former spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense, John Ulyot, resigned, then published an opinion article calling the “complete collapse” of the intestines last month.
Three other Pentagon advisers – Colin Carroll, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick – were escorted outside the Pentagon and accused of having disclosed information to the press. They published a joint declaration on X saying that they had not even been informed of what they are accused of fleeing. Caldwell and Selnik are longtime associates of HegSeth who have worked with him at Conclé Veterans for America, a group of right -wing policies.
In response to the accusations that the three men have disclosed information to the media, Selnick told NPR: “We are talking about the next steps.”
