Pete Hegseth responded to allegations that he and other U.S. national security officials leaked highly sensitive plans about a Yemen military strike to a journalist over a group chat.
Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg broke the story Monday when he reported that members of the Trump administration had mistakenly added him to a Signal group chat that discussed a classified military operation targeting Houthi positions in Yemen.
A White House national security spokesperson has since confirmed the text thread was legitimate.
“Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen were shared with a journalist from The Atlantic and were those details classified?,” a reporter from Fox News asks the Defense Secretary just moments after he had stepped off a plane onto a landing strip at Pearl Harbor military base in Hawaii.
Hegseth was captured chuckling to himself before firing back.
“So I[…] You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist whose made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.
“To include the, I don’t know, the hopes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides hoaxes or suckers and losers hoaxes”, Hegseth accosts.
The secretary continued attacking Goldberg: “This is the guy that peddles in garbage. This is what he does.
“I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops. I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning.
Hegseth went on to defend the actions of the U.S. military, explaining that “our sailors were getting shot at as targets, our shops couldn’t sail through.”
When asked why such highly sensitive material was shared on Signal and how a journalist was privy to seeing that information, Hegseth said: “I’ve heard I was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.,” before storming off.
“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told various media outlets in response to the leak.
President Donald Trump told reporters Monday afternoon that he was not aware of the article. “I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question about the bombshell report.
Hours after Trump was questioned on the security firestorm and the article had shocked millions online, including senior political officials like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Hegseth finally responded.
Goldberg claimed that on March 15 – the day the world became aware that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen – he was erroneously added to the message chain after receiving a connection request by someone who appeared to be White House national security advisor Michael Waltz.
Then, at precisely 11:44 a.m., he received a message from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – just two hours before the bombs started hailing down on the Middle Eastern country.
In the damning set of text messages, that have now come to light, Goldberg was exposed to “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.”
The leak, which has sent reverberations rippling through the White House, came as Trump held his third known cabinet meeting amid legal challenges over immigration, looming new tariffs, and rising tensions over the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
