GOP lawmakers turn up the pressure on Hegseth

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under close scrutiny as Republican lawmakers criticize his handling of sensitive military information in a group chat with other administration officials that inadvertently included a journalist.

Republican lawmakers have stopped short of calling on Hegseth to resign, but they’re warning that his decision to share sensitive details about a pending military strike against Houthi rebels in Yemen over Signal, a commercial app, is a clear “strike” against him.

“I think they should make sure it never happens again. I wish they’d tell us, ‘It will never happen again.’ It’s the first strike in the early stages of an administration,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “Don’t let it ever happen again."

“I don’t know how many strikes you get. In baseball you get three. Maybe this is worst two,” he added. “If mistakes like this continue to happen, we’ll deal with them as it happens. My hope and my expectation is that it won’t.”

Another Republican senator said that President Trump is “not happy” but noted that so far the president is sticking by Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz, who reportedly assembled the group chat, which included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic.

Trump on Tuesday downplayed the controversy, calling it “the only glitch in two months.”

GOP senators are questioning Hegseth’s judgment in the whole affair.

They’re scratching their heads over his decision to divulge sensitive details about when attack fighter jets would launch and when strike drones would reach their targets on a commercial app, which was then accessed by at least two recipients’ private phones.

And they’re wondering about Hegseth’s response to reporters’ questions, specifically his adamant denial that “nobody’s texting war plans” after a National Security Council spokesperson had confirmed that the chat group’s reported texts appeared to be “authentic.”

“The worst part of it is Hegseth saying himself, ‘This didn’t really happen.’ Why don’t you just admit it?” remarked one Republican senator.

“It’s going to have to be investigated,” the source added.

Hegseth’s defiant insistence on a tarmac in Hawaii on Monday that he didn’t text any war plans provoked eye rolls from prominent commentators such as Fox News’s Brit Hume, who reposted a video of Hegseth’s comments on the social platform X and wrote: “Oh for God’s sake.”

Hume on Wednesday criticized the administration for “making a mess” of responding to the scandal by getting “bogged down in a dispute over whether the details of Yemen bombing raids were a war plan and whether those details were, or should have been, classified,” thereby prolonging the story.  

Republican senators said privately they couldn’t imagine Hegseth’s predecessors, such as former secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Jim Mattis, making similar mistakes.

And while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday sought to draw a distinction between “war plans” and “attack plans” in criticizing The Atlantic’s reporting, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told reporters that the information, however it might be described, should have been classified.  

“The information as published recently appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified,” Wicker said at the Capitol.

Wicker and Sen. Jack Reed (R.I.), the top-ranking Democrat on the Armed Services panel, said Wednesday they would send a letter to the Defense Department asking the administration to “expedite” an inspector general report on the security lapse and ask for a classified briefing on the matter.

Wicker said he and Reed are working on another letter to ask that the senior officials preserve all records of their Signal conversations.

“We’re working on a different letter about preservation of documents and we’re going to have a classified briefing,” Wicker said Wednesday afternoon. “We have agreed to a process and we’re pursuing it.

"We are commissioning fact-finding oversight processes," he added. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said Hegseth and other senior Trump officials need to acknowledge they made a serious mistake.

“I think the important thing here is, these guys, they made a mistake. They know it, they should own it and fix it so it never happens again,” Thune told reporters Wednesday.

The big question is what the scandal means for Hegseth’s continued leadership at the Pentagon, after his nomination squeaked through the Senate in late January.

Vice President Vance had to break a tie vote to get Hegseth confirmed after three Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.) — voted no.

McConnell, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, argued in a statement at the time that Hegseth was not ready for the “massive and solemn responsibility” of managing 3 million military civilian personnel and an annual budget of $1 trillion.

“Mere desire to be a ‘change agent’ is not enough to fill these shoes,” McConnell warned. “Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass the test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been.”

Collins, the chair of the Appropriations Committee and a senior member of the Intelligence panel, called the discussion of sensitive details on a commercial app “egregious.”

But she said it’s up to Trump whether Hegseth — and Waltz, for that matter — should continue serving in their current roles.

“That’s not my call, that’s the president’s call. I do think this was an egregious compromise of national security,” she said.

Several prominent Democrats, including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), have called on Hegseth to be removed from his position.

“He should be fired,” Schumer told reporters Wednesday.

Jeffries wrote in a letter to Trump that Hegseth’s “continued presence in the top position of leadership at the Pentagon threatens the nation’s security and puts our brave men and women in uniform throughout the world in danger.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who wrestled over how to vote on Hegseth’s nomination earlier this year, told reporters Wednesday that he doesn’t regret his decision to vote to confirm him.

But he said if the information discussed on the chat was classified, “it’s a serious issue.”

“The best way to end a crisis is to look right at it and get the facts out,” he advised. “I think it would be good just to shut it down. It’ll just end the intrigue and we can get back to fulfilling the promises we made last year that got us elected.”

Tillis asked why operational details needed to be shared outside the strike force just before the attack was scheduled to take place.

“The question that I had was, ‘Why share any of that information with anyone that close to the execution of kinetic strike unless they were material to the execution of the operation?’ So, it just seems like it was an unnecessary communication,” he said.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who cast a critical vote for Hegseth’s nomination as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Trump should decide how to handle what’s next for his national security team, and any potential consequences.

Asked if Hegseth or Waltz should resign, Ernst said: “No, this is up to the president.”

“Let it rest for a minute, we know that the [National Security Council] is probing into this. Once they’re done, I know they will fully inform the president of what has happened,” she said.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, called the national security lapse “a screwup” but pushed back on the notion that Hegseth or Waltz should step down.

“It was a screwup. They’ll fix it and move on,” he said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a prominent Senate voice on national security matters, said in a statement that he would continue to support “all members of President Trump’s national security team.”

“However, recent revelations about the content of the texts — while not discussing war plans per se — do in fact detail very sensitive information about a planned an ongoing military operation,” he said.

Graham later told reporters that Trump should “stick” with his team but cautioned they need to “learn” from their mistakes.

“Don’t say this was perfect, because it wasn’t,” he said.