Pentagon Inspector General Releases Report on Hegseth’s Signal Use

On Dec. 4, the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General released a report entitled “Evaluation of the Secretary of Defense's Reported Use of a Commercially Available Messaging Application for Official Business.”

The stated purpose of the evaluation was “to determine the extent to which” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other Defense Department personnel “complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of the Signal commercial messaging application…for official business,” as well as to review compliance with classification and record retention requirements.

The inspector general concluded that, on March 15, Secretary Hegseth “sent sensitive, nonpublic, operational information” over a Signal chat on his personal cell phone. That information, which he had received in a secure email from Central Command, identified “the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes.” The report also warned that “[u]sing a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives.”

The report acknowledges that the defense secretary, as “an original classification authority,” can “decide whether information should be classified and whether classified materials no longer require protection,” and notes Hegseth’s contention that he took “non-specific general details” that he determined “were either not classified or that he could safely declassify and use to create an ‘unclassified summary’ to provide to the Signal chat participants.” However, because Hegseth indicated that he used Signal on his personal device, the report “concluded that the Secretary’s actions did not comply with DoD Instruction 8170.01, which prohibits using a personal device for official business and using a nonapproved commercially available messaging application to send nonpublic DoD information.” 

According to the report, Hegseth declined an interview request from the inspector general’s office during the investigation and sent in a written statement on July 25 instead.

Read the report here or below: