The Pentagon's acting inspector general said he will review Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's use of the Signal messaging app to communicate and plan a military strike on Yemen. The review will also cover other officials' use of encrypted apps, the Associated Press reported.
Pete Hegseth, US Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and others were in the same chat on the encrypted messenger Signal, where they discussed the airstrike on the Houthis in Yemen. This chat became known quite by accident - a journalist from The Atlantic was added to it.
Even though Signal has end-to-end encryption and is considered one of the most secure messengers, it is prohibited from being used to discuss classified material. The messengers are also not part of the US Department of Defense's secure communications network, and instead are a target for Russian hackers.
"The objective of this evaluation is to determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business," said a letter from Acting Inspector General Stephen Stebbins to Hegseth.
Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration are required by law to archive all their official conversations, but it is unclear whether copies of the Signal conversations were sent to official email accounts where they could be permanently preserved for federal records. In the shared chat, Hegseth shared the exact times of warplane launches and bomb drops. Current and former military officials say such information would likely be classified, while the Trump administration insists that no classified information was shared.
Following reports that Gege, J.D. Vance, and many other US officials were using Signal for work communications, information also emerged that Trump's national security officials were using personal Gmail accounts for official government business.