A senior Republican senator has rejected Pete Hegseth’s claim to have been completely exonerated by a watchdog report into the “Signalgate” scandal.
An Inspector General report found that the defense secretary risked endangering the lives of American troops when he used the messaging app Signal to discuss secret plans to launch airstrikes targeting Houthi fighters in Yemen.
Hegseth—who is also facing war crime accusations over the killing of two survivors after a strike on a suspected Venezuelan drug boat—quickly dismissed the report’s findings on X. “No classified information. Total exoneration. Case closed. Houthis bombed into submission. Thank you for your attention to this IG report,” he wrote.
Speaking to CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said the Pentagon chief is not out of the woods, noting that the report found a foreign adversary could have intercepted the information he shared on Signal.
“Anytime you release mission-set information before the strike, you run that risk, and thank goodness that we did not tarnish one of the most extraordinary precision strikes in recent history,” Tillis said. “It’s a mission-critical piece of information that our adversaries could have used to blow those planes out of the sky. You just don’t do that.”
“No one can rationalize that as an exoneration. We know that mission information was outside of the classified setting that it was trusted to be in,” the senator added.
The Signal chat where Hegseth openly discussed attacking Houthi rebels in Yemen included Trump administration and intelligence officials, such as Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally added to the group chat.
According to CNN, the Inspector General’s report notes that Hegseth has the authority to declassify information. However, it is unclear whether he did so before sharing airstrike plans in a chat that Goldberg was able to read.
Hegseth also refused to sit for an interview with the Inspector General, instead providing a short written statement.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has called on Hegseth to resign or be fired for putting U.S. service members at “unacceptable risk” by using a personal phone app to discuss the attacks.
“It reflects a broader pattern of recklessness and poor judgment from a secretary who has repeatedly shown he is in over his head,” Warner said.
In July, Tillis also said Hegseth, a former Fox News host, was “out of his depth” at the Pentagon after taking it upon himself to halt shipments of military aid to Ukraine, and questioned the wisdom of his confirmation as defense secretary.
When asked by Collins on Wednesday night if he would vote to confirm Hegseth now, Tillis said he did not want to answer a hypothetical question.
“I’ve got a real problem with some of these decisions, not malicious intent, it’s about being tight on execution,” Tillis said. “This president deserves people who are concerned with his legacy.
“At the end of the day, people may forget who Pete Hegseth is; people will not forget who Donald Trump is. And when they make decisions that are below the standards that I think President Trump wants, I’m going to hold him accountable because I care about his legacy.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Pentagon for comment.
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