Democratic Party calls for United States defence secretary Pete Hegseth to either resign or be fired by US president Donald Trump intensified on Wednesday in the wake of the internal security breach fiasco involving senior Republican cabinet officials.
Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote a letter to Mr Trump on Tuesday asserting that the information Mr Hegseth shared on Signal, an encrypted messenger app, “shocks the conscience, risked American lives and most likely violated the law”. He concluded that Mr Hegseth should be “fired immediately”.
“Ultimately the buck stops with the president of the United States of America,” Mr Jeffries explained on Wednesday, “which is why I made clear to President Trump yesterday in my correspondence that the secretary of defence should be fired immediately if he is not man enough to own up to his mistakes and resign in disgrace.”
The White House responded to Wednesday’s publication by the Atlantic magazine of the remainder of the Signal text chain involving Mr Hegseth and the other senior-most defence and security directors in the administration by arguing that they proved that nothing classified had been shared.
The editor-in-chief of the magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been inadvertently included in the Signal chat group for a four-day period which culminated in Mr Hegseth’s sharing of a planned bombardment on Houthi terrorist targets in Yemen.
“No locations. No sources and methods, NO WAR PLANS,” national security adviser Mike Waltz, who had unwittingly invited Mr Goldberg into the group, asserted in a social media post.
“Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent.”
Mr Hegseth also sought to dismiss the idea that the information he shared fell under the term “war plans” by stating on X: “Those are some really shitty war plans.”
In a brief statement with reporters prior to departing on an official visit to Hawaii on Wednesday morning, Mr Hegseth said of the criticisms: “They know it’s not war plans. There are no units. No locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources. No methods. You know who sees war plans? I see ‘em. Every single day.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, reacting to the Atlantic headline which referred to “attack plans”, asserted on X that it was a concession that the leaked messages were “NOT ‘war plans’”.
“The Atlantic has conceded: these were NOT ‘war plans.’ This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin,” Ms Leavitt wrote.
“We have said all along no war plans were discussed,” she maintained at the Wednesday lunchtime briefing in which she reiterated that Mr Trump has expressed full faith in his senior defence officials.
“I would characterise this messaging thread as a policy discussion.”
On Capitol Hill, the gravity of the Signal chat leak dominated proceedings at the House Intelligence Committee’s open hearing on Wednesday morning, where director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe were in attendance. Both were also part of the Signal group chat.
In a tempestuous morning that ran along partisan lines, both senior Trump officials faced demanding questions, with Ms Gabbard acknowledging that while the inclusion of a journalist on a confidential group was “a mistake”, the message thread was “a standard update to the national security cabinet”. She also confirmed that the Signal message app comes pre-installed on government devices.
Elsewhere in the Capitol, House Republicans did acknowledge the seriousness of the error.
“It was a mistake,” said Georgia representative Rich McCormick.
“Nobody has denied that. Of course it’s embarrassing. Of course we did something wrong. I don’t think it will happen again, I sure hope not. It does jeopardise people’s lives: luckily it didn’t in this case.”
“Nobody is willing to come to us and say: this was wrong,” congressman Jason Crow said at the morning hearing.
“That this was a breach of security, and we won’t do it again. It is outrageous and it is a leadership failure and that is why secretary Hegseth, who undoubtedly transmitted classified sensitive operational information via this chain, must resign immediately.”
