Hegseth’s Own Words Come Back to Haunt Him After Texting War Plans

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth probably regrets mistakenly sending the Trump administration’s classified plans to attack Yemen to Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, not least because he’ll have to eat his own words.

In 2016, while working for Fox News, Hegseth repeatedly criticized then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for storing classified information on a private email server at her home. In one instance, Hegseth pointedly asked: “How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?”

In the same segment, Hegseth also remarked on the recklessness and danger of Clinton’s actions.

“The people we rely on to do dangerous and difficult things for us rely on one thing from us: That we will not reveal their identity, that we will not be reckless with the dangerous thing they are doing for us. That’s the national security implications of a private server that’s unsecured,” Hegseth said.

Later, in 2023, Hegseth spoke on Fox News about classified documents found at President Biden’s home (which Biden cooperated with investigators to return, unlike Trump).

“If at the very top, there’s no accountability … then two tiers of justice exist,” Hegseth said, comparing Biden to a Navy sailor who was jailed for photographing classified areas of a submarine.

All of this exposes Republican double standards when it comes to classified information. Hegseth’s 2016 attacks on Clinton’s server seem quaint compared to sharing military plans outside of government communications on a Signal chat with a journalist present, as Hegseth did.

Hegseth’s attacks on Biden’s lack of accountability for his handling of classified documents were hypocritical even without Monday’s revelations, as Trump faced no legal consequences for keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and refusing to return them. In keeping with Hegseth’s own statements, should he, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and everyone else in the Signal chat face accountability for discussing secret military plans outside of government servers and channels?

Everyone knows what it’s like to be unwillingly added to a group chat—but it’s not usually a threat to national security. 

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, reported Monday that earlier this month, he’d been dropped into a Signal group chat with several high-ranking members of Donald Trump’s administration, where they plotted a bombing campaign in Yemen. 

The 18 members of the group chat called “Houthi PC small group” appeared to include senior Trump officials and Cabinet members such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. 

Goldberg said that he had been inexplicably added to the group chat on March 11 by a user called Michael Waltz, whom Goldberg determined to be Trump’s national security adviser. 

There, in full view of the head of a publication Trump recently called a “Third Rate Magazine,” senior-most officials hatched what appears to be a moneymaking scheme to bomb a foreign country. The latest round of strikes last week killed more than 50 people so far, and injured 100 more, according to Al Jazeera.  

On March 13, Waltz wrote that he was creating a “principles group,” or principals committee of senior officials, to discuss national security plans. 

Waltz requested points of contact from the group’s many high-ranking members, and the names seemed to be reasonably real. For instance, Vance said his point of contact would be Andy Baker, his national security adviser, and Rubio said the State Department’s would be Mike Needham, Rubio’s counselor and chief of staff. 

The next day, a signal user identified as “JD Vance” aired his hesitations about moving forward with bombing Yemen. The alleged Vance claimed that it would be a “mistake” to defend trade in the Suez Canal because that would mostly benefit Europe, which sees 40 percent of its trade travel through that route. Meanwhile, the U.S. only ships 3 percent of trade through the Suez Canal. 

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.,” Vance wrote. 

A user called “Pete Hegseth” said that Vance should raise his concerns with the president. “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” He pushed for them to proceed with the campaign in case Israel took action first or the plans leaked.

“This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered,” the user called Hegseth wrote. 

Waltz also pushed that they move forward with strikes, reminding members that the president had directed the Defense and State departments to “compile the costs associated and levy them on Europeans.” 

Later that day, the alleged Vance agreed with alleged Hegseth, writing, “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” 

The possible DOD head replied, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

One user, called “S M,” who Goldberg believed could be Stephen Miller, said that the U.S. should seek remuneration for the strikes in Yemen from Europe and Egypt, and figure out a way to “enforce such a requirement.”

“If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” the user “S M”  wrote. 

Goldberg wrote that the next day, March 15, Hegseth sent lengthy messages that could not be repeated. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility,” Goldberg said.

To confirm that the group chat was legitimate, Goldberg said he waited for the first round of detonations to hit Sanaa, and they did, exactly when the user identified as “Pete Hegseth” said they would. A round of congratulatory messages were sent in the chat. Goldberg, having concluded that the conversation was real, exited the group chat, and received no follow-up from Waltz. 

Goldberg’s surreal experience among the decision-makers of the Trump administration comes amid promises to crack down on leakers within the government. 

Just hours before the U.S. began strikes on Yemen, Gabbard warned that the Trump administration would be aggressively pursuing leakers from within the intelligence community. By including Goldberg in the conversation, Waltz has made himself the classic definition of a leaker. But it may be worse than that.

“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain [has] now committed a crime—even if accidentally. We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe,” wrote Delaware Senator Chris Coons in a post on X Monday. 

The Atlantic reported that several national security experts surmised that Waltz’s use of Signal had likely violated the Espionage Act, because he had discussed information related to national defense. Typically, discussing military activity requires officials to enter a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, where cell phones are not allowed. “Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe,” Goldberg wrote. 

Signal is also not an approved venue for sensitive information, and because Waltz had set some of the messages to automatically disappear after a few weeks, it seems that the group chat likely violated federal rules about keeping records of official acts.

National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes confirmed Monday that the group chat was legitimate.

“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. The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our servicemembers or our national security,” he said. 

Elon Musk’s decision to take a chainsaw to the IRS is fast-tracking the agency for a steep decline in revenue.

Abrupt, DOGE-directed staff cuts at the agency have sparked fears that U.S. tax revenue could plummet by 10 percent, or $500 billion, this spring, reported The Washington Post.

Last year, the IRS collected $5.1 trillion, with $825 billion going to the Defense Department. Such a massive loss would hobble government services or increase the national deficit.

“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official, told the Post.

Some of DOGE’s loftiest goals for the tax collection agency include a mass layoff of some 20,000 agency employees, many of whom work directly in processing taxes and investigating tax fraud. But the Trump administration has been less than serious with regard to the impact of the cuts: In February, Donald Trump suggested that the tax specialists could find new work as armed border agents.

So far, DOGE has fired more than 11,000 IRS employees and lost two agency commissioners, both of whom stepped down since Trump was inaugurated. That’s forced the agency to quickly reimagine how it allocates its resources: In order to keep its core functions operating, the agency has dropped investigations into high-valued corporations and taxpayers, several IRS staffers involved in the matter told the Post.

That stands in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s agenda for the IRS, which aimed to beef up the agency with more than 80,000 new hires. That was under the helm of IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, who promised to make mincemeat out of the ultrawealthy and their tax cheats.

The transition hasn’t been too noticeable this tax season so far, Timur Taluy, CEO of tax-prep service FileYourTaxes.com, told the Post. So far, IRS data shows a roughly 8 percent drop in representative availability on the IRS helpline compared to last year—a small indicator of the forthcoming changes. But IRS specialists argue that more changes are on the way.

“We tried to make clear this is a logistics operation. There’s a science to it. If you put 30 people on the line, this is how much you can accomplish today. If you put 15 people on the line, you can accomplish half of that,” a source who was involved in warning the Trump transition team about the planned IRS changes told the Post. “You can change the productivity over time with a smaller input of personnel, but not this filing season. This is where we are today.”

Border czar Tom Homan gave up the game on Donald Trump’s revenge scheme to rob noncitizens of their legal rights under the Alien Enemies Act.

During a Sunday interview on ABC News’s This Week with Jonathan Karl, a sedated-sounding Homan struggled to answer questions about the rushed deportations of more than 100 alleged members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the Trump administration has declared an invading force.

Karl asked how authorities had been able to determine whether the individuals were in the gang; Homan readily admitted that many of the deportees did not have any criminal record.

“A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist databases, right?” he said.

Homan said that authorities had relied on social media, surveillance, sworn statements from gang members, and wire taps to determine supposed gang affiliation.

Karl explained that lawyers for several of the deportees claimed that authorities had wrongly labeled their clients as gang members.

“Do they get a chance to prove that before you take them out of the country and put them into a notorious prison in a country that they’re not even from? I mean, do they have any due process at all?” he asked Homan.

“Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?” Homan said.

“Well the people who did that should be prosecuted—” Karl continued, but Homan cut him off.

The border czar insisted that due process could be suspended because “every Ven-ze-ulan” on the flight was determined to be a member of the gang, and therefore a terrorist.

Shortly after the AEA was invoked last week, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary injunction on deportations under the wartime law after lawyers from the ACLU challenged the designation of five individuals under the act. Still, the Trump administration proceeded with the swift removal of more than 100 Venezuelan nationals, launching a series of hearings last week reviewing the use of the law to suspend due process.

While the Trump administration has since said it would comply with court orders, the president and other members of his administration have begun relentlessly attacking Boasberg, claiming that he was a “lunatic” who was biased against Trump.

On This Week, Homan was asked to explain his own wild attack on the judiciary, when he said, “I don’t care what judges think.”

“I don’t care what that judge thinks as far as this case,” Homan explained Sunday. “We’re going to continue to arrest public safety threats and national security threats. We’re going to continue to deport them from the United States.”

On Monday, Boasberg ruled that the ACLU was “likely to succeed” in arguing that individuals the government had claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang were “entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all,” denying the government’s request to lift his restraining order on AEA deportations.

Despite Homan’s admission that the deportees lacked actual criminal records, Attorney General Pam Bondi falsely claimed Sunday that the Trump administration was within its rights because the deportees had committed “the most violent crimes that you can imagine.”

Donald Trump is appointing his personal lawyer Alina Habba as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

The president announced the move in a Truth Social post Monday morning, saying that Habba “will lead with the same diligence and conviction that has defined her career.”

The move will put Habba in charge of all federal cases in New Jersey on what is supposed to be a temporary basis, bypassing Senate confirmation. The state is the home of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, and is also the jurisdiction for the government’s case against pro-Palestine activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, whom Trump is trying to deport after rescinding his green card.

Habba has a reputation as one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, backing him up when he spreads conspiracy theories and, during his hush-money trial last year, offering defenses for his unusual behavior, from falling asleep in court to his penchant for holding press clippings of himself.

More recently, earlier this month Habba responded to the Trump administration’s firing of thousands of military veterans by saying that “perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment.” Her seemingly unconditional support for the president also extends into her legal acumen, which is highly flawed at best.

Throughout Trump’s New York hush-money trial, Habba misspoke in court, hurting Trump’s case and even seeming to misunderstand the term “due process.” While representing the president in a defamation lawsuit from writer E. Jean Carroll, Habba’s opening statement seemed to immediately undermine Trump’s case, and during the case, she was reprimanded by the judge on multiple occasions.

Making Habba the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey seems like a recipe for disaster, considering she is supposed to uphold and enforce the law in accordance with the Constitution. But Trump’s decision to appoint Habba is almost certainly by design: He wants a loyalist to push prosecutions that he wants, regardless of legal justifications, and protect his interests in the state.

Education Department staffers warn that Trump’s mass firings will do irreparable harm to the student loan system. At least 300 people were fired last week from Federal Student Aid, the office within the department that manages student loans. 

This was shortly followed by President Trump’s Thursday executive order to eliminate the Education Department entirely. 

“They got rid of all of the quality checkers. It’s only a matter of time [before] they cause the whole system to fail,” a high ranking department staffer told The Guardian anonymously. “If this was a bank, and they fired all the quality assurance team, their regulator would have shut them down.… It’s the opposite of safety.”

These anonymous workers believe the purge will create opportunities for fraud and abuse and  lead to more bureaucratic issues, like long wait times for loan service providers. “As an organization, we were already doing a lot more work than our staffing provides. We would need 10 times more people for a bank of our size,” the senior staffer said.

“What Linda McMahon has done is given 5,000 institutions the green light to cause massive amounts of taxpayer fraud and abuse of federal financial aid dollars financed by taxpayers without any check and balances in place,” one fired employee said. “The gatekeepers are gone.”

This is a massive blow to an already hobbled system. Many of those fired were working full time to make sure that American citizens could pay for college without drowning in millions of dollars in debt.

The MAGA movement is not falling in line behind Elon Musk.

Republican strategists and voters with an affinity for Donald Trump are not keen to see the world’s richest man make cuts to agencies and programs that they rely on, sparking concerns that Musk’s entrenchment in Trump’s agenda could cost conservatives in midterm elections.

GOP strategist Alex Conant told The Hill Friday that there’ll be “political costs” to empowering Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency if Republican voters don’t hear about the “benefits” of DOGE—and soon.

“What Republicans should be concerned about is Musk’s effectiveness,” Conant said. “If DOGE actually breaks things that people care about and rely on, there’s gonna be political costs to that.”

Republican strategist Doug Heye predicted that Musk’s involvement in the White House would result in “real job losses” in the coming weeks and months.

“And where that has an impact, especially in specific communities … that makes their life harder for the reliable voter, typically, for Trump,” Heye told The Hill. “That kind of slow burn, I think, could have an impact.”

Even some of Trump’s biggest fans have had their immense loyalty challenged by Trump’s new billionaire adviser.

Trump attended an NCAA men’s Division I wrestling championship in Philadelphia on Saturday, alongside White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Musk. But reactions to the Tesla CEO were less than warm, reported The New York Times.

Katy Travis, a 48-year-old wrestling mom from Montana, told the publication that Musk’s constant presence at Trump’s side “looks ridiculous,” and that his enormous influence over Trump made the president “look weak.”

“It makes him look like he’s kissing ass to get money,” Travis told the Times.

Others were worried about their investments as Musk’s aggressive slashes to federal agencies rattled the stock market.

“I know there’s a lot of concern about what he’s doing, as far as the DOGE stuff and all,” Jarrod Scandle, a 44-year-old retired Pennsylvanian police officer who specified that he’s more of a “Chevy or Ford” guy, told the Times. “I understand everybody’s concern. I’m concerned. I own stock, and you know, it’s red every day, and I’m worried.

Donald Trump has escalated his attacks on judges ruling against his administration, suggesting that they could be charged with sedition and treason.

The president reposted an article from Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website known for trafficking in hoaxes and conspiracy theories, on his Truth Social account Sunday. The article attempts to make a legal argument that federal judges who rule against Trump’s policies and executive orders can be prosecuted for sedition and treason.

The article makes wild claims about federal law concerning treason and seditious conspiracy, claiming that judges collaborating “with foreign or domestic entities to undermine national security-related executive decisions” would justify treason charges, while judges “intentionally obstruct[ing] executive functions and conspir[ing] to weaken presidential authority” could constitute seditious conspiracy.

Going even further, the article’s writer, Yaacov Apelbaum, argued that if judges’ rulings are “severely undermining the federal government’s operations,” that could constitute “aiding enemies or direct rebellion” under Article 3 of the Constitution.

If the president is giving serious weight to these legal theories, that goes far beyond his previous threats to impeach judges he doesn’t like, which has been echoed by Elon Musk and other right-wing figures and drawn a mealy-mouthed condemnation from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

It also suggests that Trump will stop at nothing to continue issuing legally questionable executive orders, which have decimated federal agencies created and regulated by Congress, and rushed through mass deportations and immigration penalties that very likely violate federal law and the Constitution. If Trump finds a way to sideline, impeach, or charge federal judges when they rule against him, he will have decimated the constitutional separation of powers and cemented himself as a dictator.

The judicial system has handed DOGE another loss.

Judge Deborah Boardman on Monday ruled that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has no legal right to the personal information of American citizens held at the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Treasury Department.

“No matter how important or urgent the President’s DOGE agenda may be, federal agencies must execute it in accordance with the law. That likely did not happen in this case,” Boardman wrote. She then filed a preliminary injunction blocking the aforementioned departments from sharing sensitive information with DOGE.

Boardman also referred to the Privacy Act of 1974 after noting that DOGE had already gotten its hands on systems containing Americans’ banking information, Social Security numbers, and marital and citizenship status.

“Congress’s concern back then was that ‘every detail of our personal lives can be assembled instantly for use by a single bureaucrat or institution’ and that ‘a bureaucrat in Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles can use his organization’s computer facilities to assemble a complete dossier of all known information about an individual,’ Boardman wrote. Those concerns are just as salient today.”

This story has been updated.

Activist groups are holding “empty chair” town halls in Republican districts to show how abandoned some red-state voters are feeling four months into Trump’s second term.

A dozen town halls over the last week have featured angry voters yelling at a picture of their no-show Republican lawmaker. Hundreds railed against Andy Harris in Maryland on Saturday, where Representative Jamie Raskin stepped up in his absence.

“What’s interesting is that the people who are showing up are not paid protesters, but the people who are not showing up are paid politicians,” Raskin said while organizers showed a giant “MISSING” milk carton ad with Harris’s face on it. “If your name is on the ballot, your face should not be on the milk carton.”

Senator Thom Tillis was attacked in South Carolina on Friday.

“We need [Senator Tillis] to know that a lot of bills that are going through that he’s voting for us, the people, a lot of us are against,” said town hall attendee Rebekah Burks. “And we want him to know that we are unhappy with that. He works for us. We’re his constituents. He works for us. We have the right to talk to him, and he should answer our questions.”

“Will you stand up for your people and Congress by taking food out of the mouths of hungry constituents in your district?” a constituent said to the empty chair New York Representative Elise Stefanik should have been in. “She promoted higher education and Pell grants, and today she’s calling for the destruction of the Department of Education, which administers those grants,” said another.

In Ohio, a whopping 1,400 people showed up to rebuke Senators Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted on Saturday.

“As an ex–federal employee and a union member, I’m mad as hell,” attendee Arnold Scott said. “How about these billionaires pay their taxes? When they cut employees at the various agencies, actually what they’re doing is cutting the services that the taxpayers are paying for. When they cut the VA, they’re cutting veterans. You stand there and say you support the veterans, but then you cut the veterans. When you cut them, that translates into it taking longer for them to receive the services that they’re entitled to.”

More of the same happened in San Diego, where voters’ main concern was “what Elon Musk and DOGE is doing as far as having an unelected person just dismantling the government.”

These town halls, organized by progressive group Indivisible, come as Trump and Musk’s current and proposed purges to Social Security, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Food and Drug Administration, and much more have started to hit their own constituents where it hurts—with no resistance from their representatives.