Hegseth is in hot water again over sharing attack plans. But this time it may be worse

Embattled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed back Tuesday on the latest revelations that he shared military attack plans on his private phone with his wife, brother and personal lawyer.

“If you remember… I said no one is texting war plans,” Hegseth said on Fox and Friends. “What was shared over Signal then [during the first leak, which surfaced last month] and now was informal, unclassified coordinations for media coordination [and] other things.”

But the details he shared, two hours before airstrikes hit in Yemen, almost certainly were classified, according to retired Marine Lt. Col. Mick Wagoner, who was a military lawyer for 17 years and deployed to four war zones.

“A launch of an attack there is just no-way, no-how, that an American military operation starting off is going to not be classified for Lord’s sake,” he said.

And Hegseth’s defense also tacitly confirms that he shared those details with people, like his wife, he knew were not authorized to have the information.

According to a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly, after CENTCOM commander General Erik Kurilla sent Hegseth details over secure communications about impending military operations on March 15th, Hegseth shared that information, verbatim, with two separate chat groups on Signal. One was made up of top Trump administration officials — and inadvertently included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. But the other chat group included people with no clear reason for receiving the sensitive information.

“The last time he was wrongly using an insecure communications device, and he mistakenly thought he was speaking only to security clearance holders,” said Kevin Carroll, who served 30 years in the Army, then in the CIA and then the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. Security breaches like what happened in the Signal group chat are called “spillage” by the military, but this is more, says Carroll.

“Here he’s knowingly using an insecure communication device and he’s knowingly giving classified information to people who are not security clearance holders so it’s really more than a spill,” Carroll said. “It really gets more to the sort of willfulness that is typically prosecuted by the Department of Justice.”

Element of surprise

Even the man President Trump picked as his top military official, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine, seemed to struggle with Hegseth’s use of the first Signal group at his confirmation hearing.

“We all can agree that we need to always protect the element of surprise,” Caine said when asked repeatedly about leaking attack plans in advance.

When asked directly what he would have done if he found himself on an unclassified platform where tactical information was being discussed, he said, “I would weigh in and stop it if I was a part of it, but in this case I wasn’t.”

Military officers who have sent battlefield assessments that were several years old have lost their jobs for passing the information over an unsecured channel, Carroll, the Army lawyer who served in the first Trump administration, said. He defended a junior Marine Corps officer in court who sent urgent, potentially lifesaving information to fellow officers in Afghanistan from a nonclassified email server and was relieved of duty.

Carroll says, for troops, seeing leadership share attack plans in advance on Signal but so far suffer no consequences is toxic to morale. But that double standard is so common, he adds, that there’s a phrase for it in the military: “different spanks for different ranks.”

Carroll points out examples from both political parties where senior officials’ mishandling of classified information went mostly unpunished: Hillary Clinton, Sandy Berger, President Joe Biden; Richard Armitage, former Vice President Mike Pence, and of course Trump.

But several current and former military prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed there is no precedent for a secretary of defense willfully divulging operational plans against a hostile military force in real time.

The repercussions for Hegseth remain unclear. Democrats and at least one Republican lawmaker have called for his resignation in the wake of the news. NPR has previously reported that the White House has begun the process of looking for a new leader at the Pentagon to replace Pete Hegseth, though Trump has said publicly that he stands by his secretary of defense, and the White House has strenuously denied those reports.

Both Trump and Hegseth have blamed “disgruntled former staff” for revealing the existence of the second Signal chat group. They appear to be referring to four senior advisers who left the Pentagon abruptly last week. Former Defense Department spokesperson John Ullyot resigned and then published an opinion piece calling the past month at the Pentagon a “full-blown meltdown” of infighting.

Three other Pentagon advisers — Colin Carroll, Dan Caldwell, and Darin Selnick — were escorted out of the Pentagon and accused of leaking information to the press. They put out a joint statement on X saying they have not even been told what they’re accused of leaking. Caldwell and Selnik are longtime associates of Hegseth’s who worked with him at Concerned Veterans for America, a right-leaning policy group.

In response to charges that the three men leaked information to the media, Selnick told NPR, “We are discussing next steps.”