Tina Nguyen is a senior reporter for The Verge, covering the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government, and the tech industry’s embrace of the MAGA movement.
The Pentagon Inspector General is expanding an inquiry into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s questionable Signal group chats. According to the Wall Street Journal, the investigation is now also looking into a second chat, as well as exactly how classified information was transferred from a secure government computer onto Hegseth’s account on his personal devices.
Beyond the “Houthi PC Small Group” that inadvertently added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine to discussions about an upcoming military strike in Yemen, the existence of a second chat was reported by the New York Times in April. According to the Times, Hegseth sent the same information about the Yemeni strike to a chat called “Defense | Group Huddle,” which included his wife, brother, personal lawyer, and several personal friends.
The Wall Street Journal reports, based on anonymous sources, that the inquiry is investigating who moved classified information off a secure government computer onto a personal device “moments” after it was sent. By design, it’s “impossible to quickly copy and paste information from a classified system to an unclassified one,” writes the Journal.
Hegseth, a former Fox News anchor, has repeatedly downplayed the significance of the first chat but has remained relatively quiet about the second chat. President Donald Trump has publicly backed Hegseth, but on Thursday, Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor who mistakenly added the editor to the group chat, was “purged” from the White House and reassigned as Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
