Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth strongly pushed back on a report from a left-wing journalist on Monday who alleged that he was included in a Signal chat group where he claims that sensitive military attack plans were shared.
Hegseth made the remarks after landing in Hawaii for meetings about the United States military’s preparedness to confront threats in the Indo-Pacific region after The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a report suggesting that Trump administration officials shared classified materials on the encrypted messaging app about the United States’ attack plans on Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
“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 the ‘Suckers And Losers’ hoax,” Hegseth said. “So this is the guy that pedals 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,” he continued. “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 re-establish 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.”
When asked about how a journalist was “privy” to the information included in the Signal chat, Hegseth fired back, addressing Goldberg’s characterization of what was discussed.
“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth said.
