House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to be “fired immediately” in a letter to Donald Trump over Hegseth and other senior administration officials’ use of Signal messages to relay possible classified information.
Jeffries isn’t alone in the caucus wanting Hegseth out. A group of Democratic House military veterans on Tuesday called for his resignation.
“Secretary Hegseth, with how he is handling this, clearly has no honor, has no sense of duty and has absolutely zero accountability for his own actions,” said Rep. Seth Moulton, who also called for Joe Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, to resign last year.
Fourteen House Democrats also called on the House Armed Services Committee to hold a hearing on the incident made public in an article by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported on being accidentally added to a group chat where high-level administration officials discussed a bombing campaign in Yemen.
“There’s no chance in hell that this was not classified information. Just not possible, certainly at the time that it was released,” Rep. Eugene Vindman, who previously worked as a National Security Council deputy legal adviser, said of the breach.
The White House has remained adamant that no classified information was shared in the messages. There may be some appetite in Congress for oversight, however: Majority Leader John Thune indicated that the Senate Armed Services Committee is interested in having hearings; Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told NOTUS that his staff is actively looking into a possible investigation under the Espionage Act.
Democrats are certainly behind it.
“Of all the times to be bipartisan, this is it,” Rep. Jimmy Panetta said. “This is the type of oversight that needs to be done by Democrats and Republicans, especially when it comes to the men and women in our armed services.”
The Signal app is not approved by the U.S. government in an official capacity; though in a hearing Tuesday morning, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the “CIA has approved” the app for use by the White House generally and that it was recommended by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for “high-level officials who could be targeted by foreign adversaries.”
What it hasn’t been approved for is to transmit classified material.
“We need answers, not just who is responsible for these reckless actions, but what the Trump administration is going to [do to] make sure that this doesn’t happen again,” Rep. Derek Tran said. “Resignations and investigations.”
Nearly all the Democrats in the group of House veterans called on Hegseth to resign.
Rep. Gil Cisneros, a former under secretary of defense, said that he never included apps like Signal in his work at the Pentagon. Cisneros said that even Hegseth’s apparent use of a cell phone in a classified environment to read some of the chat details that Goldberg left out of his article represented an obvious risk that would be “unacceptable” in the Pentagon broadly.
“All of us here that served in uniform, we know that was classified,” Rep. Ted Lieu said. “We cannot talk about the time, date, place, targets, sequence of strikes, and not have that be classified, because, again, you’re putting American troops’ lives at risk.”
Lawmakers like Reps. Jason Crow and Jimmy Panetta also raised concerns about possible impacts on troops more directly.
“Our deepest and most sacred obligation is to protect the men and women in uniform,” Crow said. “This isn’t a singular mistake. This is part of a larger pattern of disregard, of impunity, of not taking its job seriously in our most sensitive national security life-and-death decisions.”
“We learned very early, every one of us in our careers, that loose lips sink ships,” Rep. Mike Thompson said.
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.