A report by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general has concluded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of a private messaging app to discuss upcoming airstrikes by U.S. forces into Yemen earlier this year risked endangering American troops, according to two people familiar with its findings.
The report, which is scheduled to be released publicly on Thursday, scrutinized Mr. Hegseth’s participation in a group chat on the Signal messaging app with several other senior Trump administration officials that became public because a journalist who was inadvertently added wrote about it.
The internal Pentagon inquiry found that Mr. Hegseth’s use of the app had risked potentially compromising Defense Department information that could have endangered personnel and missions if it had been disclosed to a foreign adversary, according to the two people familiar with it, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential document.
The report also said that Mr. Hegseth had refused to sit for an interview with the inspector general on the matter and instead provided a short written statement, the people said.
A classified version of the report was provided to a small number of members of Congress in a secure room on Wednesday.
In March, Michael Waltz, then the national security adviser, mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to a chat called “Houthi PC small group” on the Signal app that included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House adviser Stephen Miller. The defense secretary passed along a detailed timeline of airstrikes on Houthi fighters and infrastructure in Yemen just two hours before the first bombs began falling on March 15.
That air campaign, which the Pentagon called Operation Rough Rider, lasted about six weeks, with the United States attacking more than 800 targets in Yemen with roughly $1.5 billion worth of munitions.
The inspector general’s office announced it would review Mr. Hegseth’s use of Signal on April 3. Later that month, it was revealed he had inappropriately shared sensitive information in a second Signal chat group that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
The inspector general’s office said at the time that it would conduct an “evaluation” of Mr. Hegseth’s conduct, a term used to describe a review of noncriminal violations of Defense Department policies, as opposed to an “investigation,” which are opened in response to a potential criminal act.
That office is led by Steven A. Stebbins, who took over in an acting capacity following President Trump’s firing of his predecessor, Robert P. Storch, as part of a purge of inspectors general in the executive branch just four days after Mr. Trump took office in January.
The inquiry did not include whether his use of the app was more extensive or whether additional sensitive information was shared with unauthorized individuals.
The report also did not address whether any of the information was classified at the time it was shared. It noted, however, that Mr. Hegseth has “original classification authority” as part of his role as secretary of defense and did not assess whether he properly sought to declassify information before discussing it on the unauthorized messaging platform.
Investigators also determined that not all of the messages were properly preserved in compliance with the Federal Records Act and instead relied heavily on publicly available details about the exchanges.
The release of the report will bookend a difficult week for Mr. Hegseth, who has drawn criticism in connection with a series of airstrikes on Sept. 2 launched by the Joint Special Operations Command on a small motorboat in the Caribbean Sea that the Pentagon has said was smuggling narcotics.
The two congressional committees that oversee the Defense Department have begun bipartisan investigations of Mr. Hegseth’s actions regarding a second wave of strikes on survivors of the initial attack, including that he may have directed that the strikes must leave no survivors — actions that could have violated international law.
Robert Jimison covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on defense issues and foreign policy.
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