Hegseth’s New Texting Scandal Adds to a Mounting Security Disaster for Trump

It has been less than a month—if you can honestly believe that—since The Atlantic reported that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth accidentally texted sensitive military strike plans to one of its editors in a Signal group chat.

As it turns out, there was more where that came from.

According to The New York Times, Hegseth shared the same details about the March 15 strike in Yemen with another Signal chat entirely. This one reportedly included roughly a dozen people, including Hegseth’s brother and personal lawyer, who are both Pentagon employees, as well as Hegseth’s wife, who is…well, not.

Unlike the group chat in the first Signalgate scandal, which was created by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, the Times reports that Hegseth created the second chat. And, also unlike the original Signalgate—which included top White House and cabinet officials like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—it is unclear why many of the people on Hegseth’s separate chat would need to be briefed on the strike plans. Hegseth’s wife, for one, is a former Fox News producer.

In a statement posted to X, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote, “There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story.”

Parnell tried to dismiss the Times’ reporting as the work of disgruntled former staffers who were laid off from the Department of Defense last week. But that isn’t quite the salve Parnell seems to think it is.

Signalgate 2.0 comes in the midst of a growing chorus of reports of pandemonium within the Pentagon, including from some of Hegseth’s closest advisors. Mere hours after the Times’ story published, the Department of Defense’s former chief spokesperson and a top cheerleader of Hegseth’s, John Ullyot, published a stunning op-ed in Politico, which described a “month of total chaos” inside the Pentagon.

“In short, the building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership,” Ullyot wrote.

Ullyot, who resigned from the Department of Defense last week, pointed to the recent purge of top Pentagon officials, who were reportedly fired as part of an investigation into department leaks. “Yet none of this is true,” Ullyot wrote, explaining that none of the officials had been given polygraph tests, as the Department indicated they might. “Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door,” Ullyot wrote.

The three officials who were fired Friday also defended their innocence in a post on X over the weekend. “At this time, we still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with,” their statement read. The timing of these firings is particularly curious at a moment when Hegseth’s own Signal account appears to be the leakiest of all.

In his op-ed, Ullyot described the “Month from Hell” inside the office, during which the Pentagon public affairs team flubbed Hegseth’s response to the first Signalgate, encouraging Hegseth to engage in a tedious battle of semantics, insisting “nobody was texting war plans.” Then came reporting that Hegseth had brought his wife to meetings with foreign military officials and tried to set up a briefing for Elon Musk on the United States’ plans in the event of a war with China.

While Ullyot said he’s grateful for Hegseth’s friendship, he wrote that President Trump “deserves better,” and that if he were to fire Hegseth, like so many cabinet members before him, “many in the secretary’s own inner circle will applaud quietly.”