Senators from both parties were poised to issue formal requests Wednesday for multiple inspector general probes into senior officials’ use this month of the Signal messaging app to discuss a military operation — and whether the incident is an aberration or part of a pattern.
Senate Armed Services Committee leaders said they are preparing a letter to the acting Pentagon inspector general on Wednesday that would request a probe of the incident, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top Trump administration officials discussed plans for bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen ahead of the operation. The messages in the chat were set to disappear in a week, potentially complicating legally required recordkeeping.
Meanwhile, top Senate Democrats were drafting a letter requesting additional investigations. The missive will go to acting Pentagon IG Steven Stebbins and other federal IGs, including those who oversee intelligence agencies, a Senate Democratic aide said.
The Democrats plan to ask for answers about the so-called Houthi PC small group chat on the Signal messaging app, as well as any other use of such apps for sensitive discussions.
In the Houthi chat, reported and published by The Atlantic, none of the participants asked why the Signal app was the platform for the potentially classified conversation, suggesting the possibility that the app had been used for such communications previously.
Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a brief interview that probing the possibility of broader use of unsecured communications systems is “part of the process of getting an impartial investigator to look into” the issue.
In search of ‘ground truth’
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., and the ranking Democrats on six committees wrote to President Donald Trump on Wednesday posing a series of questions about the Signal incident, including asking, in effect, whether or not the Signal chat about the Houthi strike was an isolated incident.
But other Democrats — and at least one Republican, Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss. — are seeking answers from a source other than Trump: the IGs, even though Trump fired more than 17 of them during his first week in office and replaced them with acting officials.
Wicker told reporters the Senate Armed Services Committee is preparing to request an expedited IG report to obtain more details from the administration “to get ground truth” about the incident. And the panel is looking to schedule a classified briefing for committee members with a senior official “relatively soon,” he added.
Wicker did not name a specific briefer, but said lawmakers “will want someone that actually has the facts and can speak on behalf of the administration.”
Reed agreed, saying: “You have to have someone who is able to take an objective position with facts and let us draw a conclusion. Right now, it’s jumbled in terms of who did what and who knew what.”
Muted GOP reaction
The Trump administration has defended the Houthi chat, arguing the material was not technically classified, did not reveal precise locations of targets and was disclosed by an allegedly biased journalist who was included in the chat group in an apparent accident.
A number of Senate GOP defense hawks disputed those assertions Wednesday, and they also knocked officials’ decision to discuss sensitive strike plans on Signal.
But they stopped short of calling on anyone involved to step down.
For example, Armed Services Airland Subcommittee Chair Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., pushed back against the Trump administration’s attempts to dispute The Atlantic’s reporting, saying “the basic facts are pretty clear.”
“Nobody needs to lose their job over this, but we do need to get the bottom of it and just be assured it’s not going to happen anymore,” Cramer told reporters.
Wicker said he wants to see the Trump administration acknowledge any “mistakes” that may have been made. Based on what he’s seen of the conversation, he said, the information “appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified.”
‘Operational plan’
Some Democrats, meanwhile, called for the ousting of not just Hegseth but all of the Cabinet members who were involved in the Signal chat.
“Every one of those people deserve to lose their jobs,” said Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a member of the Armed Services Committee.
In the House, Democratic leadership also pushed for Hegseth’s immediate departure from the Pentagon. And members of the chamber’s largest minority party caucus, the New Democrat Coalition, demanded Hegseth resign or be fired.
Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a member of the Armed Services Committee, said there should be an IG investigation and consequences for those involved.
“I’ve already called for Sec Def to resign, and if he doesn’t resign, he should be fired,” Kelly said. “There isn’t any other information that’s more sensitive than an impending combat mission. They could say, ‘Well, that wasn’t classified,’ I think because it wasn’t a document, right? He [Hegseth] took information off of something, or from what somebody told him.
“When you look at how specific the times were, I think he probably had an operational plan in front of him. And then he shared that information on an unsecured app that put all these folks flying these missions at risk.”
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