Hegseth slammed for throwing colleagues 'under the bus' to dodge blame amid scandal
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was accused Tuesday of throwing his former, hand-picked Pentagon colleagues "under the bus" in an attempt to shift blame over "Signalgate 2.0."
The New York Times reported Sunday that Hegseth used an unsecured Signal app to share highly sensitive information about a Houthi airstrike with is wife, brother, and lawyer. This was the second time Hegseth was pegged for using the phone app to transmit attack plans.
Hegseth appeared on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning, where he continued to blame the ousted officials for leaking information about his chats.
"What was shared over Signal then and now — however you characterize — was informal, unclassified coordinations," a very animated Hegseth said in a clip played on CNN. "In this point, those folks who were leaking, who have been pushed out of the building, are now attempting to leak and sabotage the president's agenda and what we're doing."
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CNN's Natasha Bertrand said the interview showed "Hegseth clearly trying to throw these former aides very much under the bus as he seeks to kind of explain away why he was on this Signal chat with this information being shared about very sensitive military operations."
Also on CNN, former Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh commented on the Hegseth interview, saying, "I think the reality is that these former disgruntled aides didn't type the tik-tok of an operation and put it into not one, but two separate Signal threads. It's not the media that typed up details of these operational details and put it into these Signal threads. So, you're seeing Pete Hegseth continue to blame and point fingers."
Singh called it "deeply troubling" that Hegsseth bragged in the interview "that he looks at...war plans all the time."
"You can't have selective memory loss there. You literally took what you're seeing every single day and bragging about on Fox...and you type that very classified information and put it into an unclassified text thread. And, ultimately, there's been no accountability for him at all."