A Republican-led Senate committee Thursday ordered the first independent investigation into top national security officials’ sharing of plans for an impending military attack via an unsecure group chat on the Signal messaging app.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), chair of the Armed Forces Committee, and a top Democrat asked the Pentagon inspector general to review the actions of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other Trump officials who discussed details about the March 15 attack on pro-Iran Houthi militants in Yemen.
The bipartisan pair of lawmakers called for a probe into the “use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”
The lawmakers told Steven Stebbins, the acting inspector general at the Department of Defense, to assess whether the information shared in the chat was or should have been classified, identify if anyone violated policies or broke laws by using an unsecure app and to make recommendations to better handle similar situations in the future.
Democrats and some Republicans have called the disclosure one of the worst national security lapses in years, and demanded further investigation by Congress and law enforcement.
Trump has derided fallout from the incident as a “witch hunt” and said the app could be “defective.” He said Hegseth did nothing wrong and noted that Waltz has “taken full responsibility.”
The White House National Security Council has also said it would investigate the matter but has not offered any updates.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said there was no need for any criminal investigation and asserted that none of the shared information was classified, an assessment that many critics question.
Hegseth shared the sensitive operational details on Signal in real time to a high-level group including Vice President J.D. Vance, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
Waltz inadvertently added journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat, who later published details of the discussion.
Critics say the security lapse could have put American service members in danger and risked the success of the mission to punish the Houthis for disrupting commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
They note exposure of the details could also endanger American intelligence assets, like whoever disclosed the location of targets and the extent of damage inflicted by the attack.
Wicker lamented that the leak undermined what he called “a hugely successful mission.”
Goldberg’s Atlantic magazine initially published only sparse details of the military operation. It later revealed verbatim copies of the messages shared on Signal after officials dodged questions about the lapse, downplayed the sensitivity of the discussions and even blamed the veteran journalist for the incident.
