President Donald Trump on Sunday defended Pete Hegseth a day after NBC News reported that the Defense secretary used his personal phone to send sensitive information about strikes in Yemen to an encrypted group chat that included his wife and brother.
“He’s doing a great job. Ask the Houthis how he’s doing. Everybody’s happy with him. We have the highest recruitment number I think we’ve had in 28 years,” Trump said Monday.
“It’s just fake news. Sounds like disgruntled employees. He was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people and that’s what he’s doing. You don’t always have friends when you do that,” he added.
The revelations that Hegseth used the unclassified messaging system Signal to share highly sensitive security details for the second time come at an uncertain moment for him and the Pentagon, where senior officials were ousted last week as part of an internal leak investigation.
The second chat included about a dozen people and was created during Hegseth’s confirmation process to discuss administrative issues rather than detailed military planning. Among them was Hegseth’s brother, who is a Department of Homeland Security liaison to the Pentagon.
Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, has attended sensitive meetings with foreign military counterparts, according to images the Pentagon has publicly posted.
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters that Hegseth had been counseled against sharing information on unsecure systems like Signal before he did so last month.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
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