Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the inspector general investigators looking into his alleged use of Signal to share classified strike plans that he determined the details he shared either weren’t classified to begin with or were “safe to declassify,” according to a written statement included in a report released Thursday by the Defense Department’s independent oversight office.
Though Hegseth had the authority to make that decision, the IG found he was still in violation of department policy for transmitting information that could have put service members in danger—in this case, the Navy pilots who were flying the March 15 mission to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen—by taking sensitive details about time, place and manner and sharing them on an unapproved messaging platform via his personal cell phone.
“The Secretary sent nonpublic DOD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes,” the report found. “Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DOD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DOD personnel and mission objectives.”
The report finds several issues with Hegseth’s communications, namely that while declassified, the strike plans were still very much sensitive information, and that he used an unapproved app on his personal cell phone to communicate them, then did not take care to retain what is clearly official correspondence.
“The United States military has successfully managed operations for two and a half centuries without the use of an instant messaging application, and why the secretary felt the need to use that application—while sitting in the SCIF and with access at his fingertips to the two more appropriate communication tools—he chose to use this unapproved tool is mysterious to me, right?” Greg Williams, the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, told Defense One.
The move calls Hegseth’s judgment into question, as the declassification of information doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s fit to be broadcast in a group chat whose members, it would appear, were not all accounted for as intended recipients.
“It’s like buying something inappropriate on your expense account and claiming that because the expense account was approved, or didn’t violate any written rules, that the expense was necessarily prudent,” Williams said.
Hegseth’s spokesman on Tuesday posted on X that the report is a “TOTAL exoneration.”
That’s not what the report says.
“Because the Secretary indicated that he used the Signal application on his personal cell phone to send nonpublic DOD information, we concluded that the Secretary’s actions did not comply with DOD Instruction 8170.01, which prohibits using a personal device for official business and using a nonapproved commercially available messaging application to send nonpublic DOD information,” the report reads.
Additionally, DOD officials are required to keep all official correspondence. The IG had to use the Atlantic’s transcript of the Signal chat because the messages in Hegseth’s phone had auto-deleted.
The IG recommends that U.S. Central Command, which sent the classified email from which Hegseth pulled the details, review its classification procedures to ensure it prints classification warnings after each paragraph of a document, instead of just at the top of it (as was the case with the March 15 plans).
A separate IG report recommends further training on the use of personal devices, as well as a department-wide review of their use to conduct official business.
Hegseth’s written statement to the IG, given in lieu of the requested sit-down interview, provides some of the first insight into the decision-making that went into sharing strike plans on the Signal group chat, which included national-security officials, but also fatefully, the editor of The Atlantic.
In public statements, both Hegseth and his spokespeople have insisted that he shared no classified information, but have never included the explanation that Hegseth had thoughtfully declassified the information before he shared it. There is no official process for a defense secretary to declassify information, so Hegseth deeming it so is as legitimate as anything else.
Hegseth vs. IGs
Inspector general reports are not in the business of handing down punishments, so it will be entirely up to President Trump whether Hegseth faces any repercussions.
As of press time, the secretary had not made any public statements in response to the report’s public release. Spokespeople for the secretary did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Hegseth has already taken steps to constrain his department’s IGs, though he has stopped short of adding to the Trump administration’s unprecedented firings of IG at nearly two dozen other agencies. During his Quantico speech to flag officers in September, he said the independent investigators had somehow been “weaponized.”
“I call it the ‘No more walking on eggshells policy,’ ” Hegseth told the auditorium full of senior leaders. “We are liberating commanders and NCOs. We are liberating you. We are overhauling an inspector general process, the IG that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver’s seat.”
His guidance to the service secretaries included tightening the threshold for opening IG investigations, requiring frequent written updates, and creating a system for tracking “serial complainants”—a problematic step because IG hotlines are anonymous.
“It was not clear to me then, and it is still not clear to me now, whether Hegseth intended for that to apply to the military branch IGs, the DOD IG, or both,” Faith Williams, who directs the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the Project on Government Oversight, told Defense One.
So far, Hegseth has only issued orders to the military departments to overhaul their local IG processes. In the case of his own department IG investigation, it was requested by the heads of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“But I think regardless of who he ultimately intends those changes to impact, what was really clear reading through that memo was this kind of dripping disdain for whistleblowers and for the work that an inspector general office does,” Williams said. “And I think we can all agree that, let’s work together to make improvements to IG processes and procedures and make sure we have the best people serving in those roles. I am interested in that, too. I’m not saying IGs are above reproach, but that memo just really dripped with hostility toward whistleblowers, and it does beg the question, ‘why?’”
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