Vice President JD Vance appeared to make light of the uproar over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sharing Yemen strike information on Signal by returning to the chat after the messages were leaked.
The Defense Department inspector general released its unclassified report on Hegseth’s use of the messaging app to share sensitive information on Thursday.
The 84-page report looked into Hegseth’s use of Signal after The Atlantic revealed its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to the chat with top Trump administration officials.
While the magazine subsequently published a transcript of the messages, the IG report also included a partial transcript of the chat obtained on March 27, which showed what happened in the Signal group after The Atlantic wrote about the leak.
It showed one person, Vance, returned to the group chat amid the fallout.
The chat included in the report showed Goldberg left the group on March 16, the day after the strikes. The first report from The Atlantic was released on March 24.
“This chat’s kind of dead. Anything going on?” the vice president wrote on March 25.
The Daily Beast asked the vice president’s office for comment on why he returned to the chat.
His comment came as questions were being raised over whether top officials in the administration had shared classified information on a messaging app that was not authorized for sharing sensitive information.
The partial transcript of the chat does not show anyone responding to the vice president.
After his post, the next alert was that “MAR” had changed their profile name to “MR,” and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent set his disappearing message time to eight hours. CIA Director John Ratcliffe also changed his profile name to just “John.”
As noted in the report, the Defense Department provided the partial transcript of the Signal chat on March 27, but the record did not include a “significant portion” of the defense secretary’s conversation.
“When we asked whether the information provided represented the information the DoD preserved from the Secretary’s cell phone, an OSD official stated that the DoD had provided all messages that were available at the time the screenshots were taken,” the report read.
The IG report concluded that some previous messages had auto-deleted before being preserved.
The report determined Hegseth sent information on the quantity and times of planned military action over an “unapproved, unsecure network” ahead of the strikes.
“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,” it read.
It also found Hegseth’s actions did not comply with rules that prohibit the use of a personal device for official business and using a non-approved messaging application to send nonpublic Defense Department information.
However, the inspector general concluded that the defense secretary holds the authority to determine the classification level of info he communicates.
Hegseth has fiercely denied that he sent classified material over the messaging app.
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