Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, speaks to journalists during the Easter Easter Roll of the White House on the southern lawn of the White House on April 21, the next day The New York Times said he had shared information last month in a second private signal group on strikes in Yemen.
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The White House started looking for a new Pentagon leader to replace Pete Hegseth, according to an American official who was not authorized to speak publicly. This comes because Hegseth is again mired in the controversy on the sharing of military operational details in a group cat.
The defense secretary is under fire after revelations that he shared classified information in a group group with his wife, his brother and his lawyer, according to the official.
The source said that HegSeth used the signal messaging application on its personal smartphone, detailing classified minute information on minute on air strikes on Houthis targets in Yemen. It happened almost at the same time in March that Hegseth shared similar details with senior White House officials In a different signal cat group This accidentally included a journalist. This leak, hours before the air strikes, could have endangered the American pilots if this information on the time of strikes was intercepted by the American opponents. The Houthis have already shot down twice American predatory drones.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, denied that there was an effort to replace HegSeth, Publication on X This President Trump “stands” strongly “behind him. Addressing the White House journalists, Trump supported Hegseth and said that the concerns about signal cats are” loss of time “.
“He does a great job – ask Houthis how he’s going,” Trump said.
Hegseth had denied the reprehensible acts at a White House Easter event earlier on Monday.
“This is what the media do, they take anonymous sources of former dissatisfied employees, then they try to cut and burn people, ruin their reputation. It will not work with me,” he said.
Hegseth probably referred to four senior advisers who left the Pentagon last week last week. The former spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense, John Ulyot, resigned and then published a opinion Calling for the pentagon last month a “full -fledged collapse” of intestine struggles that hurt President Trump.
Three other Pentagon advisers – Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll and Darin Selnick – were escorted outside the Pentagon and accused of having disclosed information to the press. The trio then put a joint declaration On X calling for their “unreasonable” dismissal and saying that they had not even been informed of what they were accused of fleeing.
“We all serve our country honorably in uniform – for two of us, it included deployments in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, on the basis of our collective service, we understand the importance of information security and work every day to protect them,” they wrote.
Caldwell and Selnik are longtime associates of Hegseth who have worked with him among the veterans concerned for America, a right -wing policy group.
New Hampshire senator Jeanne Shaheen, a democrat of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that HegSeth should accept responsibility.
“But we must not forget that the ultimate responsibility here is the responsibility of President Trump for having selected a former weekend television host, without any experience of directing a large complex organization, to direct the greatest department of our government and make life and death decisions for our soldiers and countries,” she said.
NPR Disclosure: Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR, chairs the board of directors of the Signal Foundation.
