The Pentagon’s acting inspector general announced on Thursday that his agency will investigate Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the Signal messaging app to coordinate plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The chat came to light when The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a piece claiming he was accidentally invited to Signal group of top White House officials discussing the planned assault.
The Acting Inspector General Steven A. Stebbins sent a letter to Hegseth informing him of the probe.
“The objective of this evaluation is to determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business,” the letter read. “Additionally, we will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements.”
BREAKING: the Department of Defense’s independent watchdog will investigate Secretary Hegseth’s use of Signal to share classified information. This comes on the heels of Oversight Democrats pushing for accountability & transparency.
— Oversight Committee Democrats (@OversightDems) April 3, 2025
Here’s RM @GerryConnolly’s full statement: pic.twitter.com/KVe90qMEPS
Stebbins noted that his team will conduct the evaluation in Washington D.C. and Tampa, Florida.
The letter comes after Sen. Roger Wicker, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, requested the investigation in late March.
Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the committee, and Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat, signed onto a letter to the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense for an inquiry into the potential “use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”
The senators’ assertion that classified information was potentially shared was notable, especially as Trump’s Republican administration has contended there was no classified information on the Signal chain that had included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine.
The only thing I gleaned from “SignalGate” was that Vance & Hegseth are the same people in private that they are in public. pic.twitter.com/94Tn6zSQHc
— 🇺🇸↪️aptain Ⓜ️organ🇺🇸 (@CaptainMorganTN) March 31, 2025
Democrats pounced on the Signalgate revelation, using it to attack the Trump administration and call for the resignations of Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, whose staffer inadvertently invited Goldberg to the chat.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) said the chat “put pilots at risk because of sloppiness and carelessness” and stated, “If this was an officer in the military – at any level – or enlisted person, they would have been fired already.”
Still, President Donald Trump has stood by both men, stating that he has no plans to fire anyone over the affair. The issue fell largely out of the spotlight – especially when the news cycle turned to anticipation of Trump’s impending tariffs.
I’m calling it now: Nothing major will come of this. We already know the facts of the case from Goldberg and the Trump administration. Democrats are likely salivating over the prospect of pushing Signalgate back into the news cycle once again.
But the reality is that there is no “there” there. It was a stupid mistake made by a staffer. Nobody was harmed in this making of this SNAFU. So yes, it’s an embarrassing error, but not much more than that.
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