Pentagon IG opening up #SignalGate investigation

I really thought we had put #SignalGate behind us, but there is a massive new development in the incident.

The Pentagon Inspector General has just ordered an investigation into the leak, and something tells me more head will roll because of it.

The Leak

We beat this story to death last week, but I will do a quick rehash for those of you who may have missed it.

It would appear that the Director of National Security, Mike Waltz, created a Signal chat group for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to update key staffers on the progress of a strike against the Houthis in Yemen.

Unfortunately, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was also added to the group.

The chat thread included strike times, packages, and equipment, so there is now the question of classified information being on the thread.

Hegseth Says No Classified Information

When this story first broke, I reached out to my military contacts to see if they would classify the information as war plans and classified information.

They all said pretty much the same thing... technically, these were not war plans because there was not enough information, but they also stated that was more or less semantics considering how much information was in the text stream. As I reported last week, the consensus was that any intelligence officer worth their salt would have been able to figure out what was going on rather quickly.

They also noted they would very much consider much of that information classified, and there is no way it should have been put out there on a messaging app.

Hegseth, however, defended himself, stating, "Nobody's texting war plans. I noticed this morning out came something that doesn't look like war plans. And as a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plans because they know it's not war plans."

IG Will Investigate

With the outrage by Democrats and serious questions about security, it was not a surprise to see Pentagon Inspector General Steven Stebbins announce that an investigation is underway.

Stebbins stated, “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.”

This investigation is the result of a bipartisan request by Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and ranking member Jack Reed (D-RI).

This could be a problem for both Hegseth and Waltz, and I would not be surprised to see one or both of them lose their job over this. Hegseth should have known better to be so specific about everything, and Waltz, in my opinion, should have already been fired over this. We will keep an eye out of the results of the investigation by the IG and see if Trump acts on it.