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The noise from SignalGate has apparently become too much to ignore. On Thursday, the Defense Department inspector general’s office announced that it will take a look at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal to organize, with other members of the Trump administration, a military operation in Yemen that reportedly killed at least 53 people.
In a memo addressed to Hegesth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, Pentagon IG Steven Stebbins said that his office was initiating a “subject evaluation” that will seek to “determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business.”
The “evaluation” comes at the behest of Republican Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Democrat Jack Reed, the ranking member of the same governing body, who seems concerned that organizing military operations via a chat app may not be the best idea. They probably were not thrilled to learn that, according to a recent Politico report, Trump’s national security team has set up at least 20 group chats on Signal in order to communicate about different foreign policy initiatives, including military operations.
Of course, this probe likely would not be happening if national security adviser Mike Waltz hadn’t accidentally added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat where multiple Trump officials were talking about an attack on Yemen. Goldberg made public the fact that he had been inserted into the group, which led to one of the dumbest news cycles of the second Trump term (no small feat!) in which Hegseth and Waltz tried to downplay the seriousness of conducting war plans in a private chat app by saying things like Goldberg got “sucked into” the conversation.
But now that it has been made public, so too have some of the other dubious practices of the Hegseth-led Department of Defense, which has apparently been doing a lot of communicating in places that it shouldn’t—not just over Signal, but reportedly over Gmail, as well.
That is typically frowned upon for a number of reasons, the first and foremost being that it’s a risk to national security—a message that the Pentagon delivered just days before Trump’s team launched their Yemen group chat. Then there are public transparency regulations that require administrations to do a certain amount of record-keeping when it comes to this kind of stuff, which also end up flouted by using services like Signal.
It’ll be interesting to see what kind of conclusion the IG comes to—assuming he lasts long enough to complete it, given Trump’s penchant for ousting inspector generals.
