Concerns about Hegseth’s judgment come roaring back after group chat scandal

By Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Jamie Gangel and Katie Bo Lillis, CNN

(CNN) — Ever since news broke on Monday that top Trump officials discussed US military attack plans in a group chat that inadvertently included a journalist, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has projected unflinching confidence.

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Hegseth told reporters Tuesday.

By Wednesday, however, other defense officials were increasingly skeptical of that, especially after The Atlantic magazine revealed the details that Hegseth shared in the Signal chat about the pending strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen, including the timing and types of aircraft.

“It is safe to say that anybody in uniform would be court-martialed for this,” a defense official told CNN. “My most junior analysts know not to do this.”

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz has been criticized for inviting Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg into the chat. And CIA director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom were on the Signal chat, were grilled over two days of Congressional testimony.

But former national security and intelligence officials say it’s Hegseth who looks particularly bad given the level of detail he shared.

“The egregious actor here is Hegseth,” said one former senior intelligence official. “He’s in the bullseye now because he puts all this out on a Signal chat.”

Interviews with multiple current and former national security officials this week, including career military and civilian officials, reflect growing concerns about Hegseth’s leadership at the Pentagon.

The group chat scandal is the latest in a series of what some officials say are examples of questionable judgment by the former Fox News host, as he has struggled to implement consistent and durable policies across the Defense Department in his first two months as secretary.

So far, several high-profile initiatives spearheaded by Hegseth inside DoD since he was confirmed in January— including several related to the southern border mission and a purge of “DEI” content—have either been scaled back or rescinded as he has rushed to implement changes demanded by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

The current and former officials said the rocky start underscores both Hegseth’s inexperience and his freewheeling approach to leadership. Many of his orders are verbal and based on gut instinct rather than a deliberative, multi-layered process, people familiar with his methods said.

“He’s a TV personality,” one of the sources said. “[A general officer] makes a recommendation, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ [Former Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin would never be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, go do it.’ He’d be like, ‘We’ll take it under consideration.’”

Several DoD officials told CNN that Hegseth seems more preoccupied with appearances than with substance—wanting to appear more “lethal” than his predecessor and pulling resources from elsewhere in DoD to achieve that image.

“Your job is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality,” Hegseth told reporters late last year. “Everything else is gone, everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening.”

On Monday, troops armed with M4 assault rifles were seen guarding Hegseth’s plane at Joint Base Andrews. The security posture stood in stark contrast to the agents and service members who typically greeted Austin at the Maryland base, who were usually armed only with concealed handguns.

While unusual, a spokesperson for Air Combat Command said the posture “aligns with standing orders for personnel, especially when operating in official capacities such as deployments or movements during missions.”

At the southern border, thousands of troops surged there by Hegseth in recent months have primarily been building barricades, putting up concertina wire, and generally “just standing around,” another defense official told CNN.

Hegseth also earlier this month ordered the deployment of two heavily armed warships to patrol the waters near the border, where they will primarily be supporting Coast Guard operations to interdict drugs. One of the warships’ most recent deployments was to the Red Sea, where it was tasked with intercepting Houthi missiles and drones.

The deployments to the border are “clearly more about optics,” the defense official said. The official added that diverting troops and assets to patrol a mostly peaceful border was actually drawing them away from training exercises that could improve overall combat readiness.

As for the Signal chat, Hegseth has insisted that nothing classified was shared over text, but four people familiar with the matter told CNN that the information Hegseth disclosed on the Houthi group chat was classified, despite the administration’s claims to the contrary. One of the people said they saw documents sent within DoD about the operation, which were marked classified and included the same information Hegseth disclosed in the Signal chat about specific weapons platforms and timing.

“It was classified when it was shared below the principal level,” this person said.

Hegseth could have declassified the information himself, but he has not said that he did. It’s also unclear why information about an imminent or ongoing operation would be declassified before it was successfully completed.

The White House, for now, is standing by Hegseth in the wake of the Signal chat scandal.

President Trump said his national security adviser Mike Waltz had taken responsibility for creating the Signal group, but the president seemed unaware of the role Hegseth played in including detailed information about airstrikes in the chat.

“It was Mike, I guess, I don’t know,” Trump said when questioned about which of his team was behind the chat. Earlier, the White House said a team of officials from the National Security Council and White House counsel’s office were looking into the matter, assisted by billionaire Elon Musk.

Yet while Trump said Waltz had assumed responsibility for the error, he shrugged off any culpability on the part of his defense secretary, who sent a timeline of the planned attack before it was underway.

“How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do with it,” Trump said, sounding surprised a reporter would raise the issue. Earlier, the White House said Trump had looked at Hegseth’s messages that were included in the text chain published by The Atlantic.

“It’s all a witch-hunt,” Trump said.

The White House on Thursday morning declined to offer an update on its internal investigation into the Signal group chat of top Trump national security officials, calling the episode a “mistake.”

‘This does absolutely nothing to make us stronger’

Hegseth, who served as an infantry officer in the Army National Guard and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, was confirmed by a razor-thin margin in January as Democrats and some Republicans pressed him on allegations of sexual misconduct, infidelity and excessive drinking in his past.

In his first appearance on the world stage as Defense Secretary, Hegseth told NATO in February that Ukrainian membership in the alliance was off the table — a statement that Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, quickly called “a rookie mistake” that took away some of the US’ negotiating leverage in pending ceasefire talks.

Hegseth later said he would not be involved in the negotiations over ending the war between Ukraine and Russia.

Wicker is now formally asking the administration for an inspector general report on the Signal chat, plus a classified briefing from a senior official.

Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday called on Hegseth and other top Trump officials to own their mistakes related to Signal group chat revelations so that they are not repeated. “The important thing here is these guys, they made a mistake, they know it. They should own it and fix it so that never happens again,” Thune said.

Asked by CNN if he has confidence in Hegseth, Thune again did not directly answer and pointed to the success of the underlying mission. “The execution of the strike looks like pretty flawless,” he said before again urging the officials to come clean.

But the strikes have not appeared to deter the Houthis. On Thursday, the Israeli military has said that sirens sounded in several parts of the country Thursday after two missiles were fired from Yemen. The Houthis took responsibility for the attack.

A purge of “diversity” content on Defense Department websites, mandated by Hegseth in a February memo, is being reviewed following outcry over DoD’s hasty removal of historically significant articles and images. A top DoD spokesperson was reassigned over the debacle, and Hegseth’s spokesperson, Sean Parnell, acknowledged last week that mistakes were made. He said DoD is now republishing some of the tens of thousands of pieces of content that were removed.

“Of all the things they could be doing, the places they’re putting their focuses on first are really things that just don’t matter … This was literally a waste of our time,” a defense official told CNN of the content purge. “This does absolutely nothing to make us stronger, more lethal, better prepared.”

Directives hit legal setbacks

Meanwhile, military deportation flights have slowed to a trickle, because the Department of Homeland Security has not actually needed the large and expensive C-17s to help transport migrants, multiple officials said. Only one military flight per week is taking off on average, holding a handful of migrants.

And the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba—which Hegseth in January touted as a “perfect place” to hold as many as 30,000 migrants—is nearly empty. A significant portion of the 900 troops surged there last month to handle an influx of deportees could soon be sent home, officials said.

Several of Hegseth’s directives—issued at Trump’s behest—have also hit legal setbacks. A federal judge last week indefinitely blocked DoD’s ban on transgender service members, dealing a major defeat to a controversial policy the president resurrected from his first term.

Another federal judge ordered earlier this month that DoD and other federal agencies reinstate probationary employees who were fired at the direction of the Office of Personnel Management. Defense officials warned superiors at the time that such mass firings could be illegal, CNN reported last month.

One of the few directives Hegseth has put in writing, a recent strategic guidance memo overhauling the Pentagon’s priorities, appeared to some defense officials like it was more about messaging than substance, amounting to a written pledge by Hegseth to fulfill several of Trump’s favorite military-related promises.

The memo, reviewed by CNN, did not have a separate section detailing the threat posted by Russia, for example, but it did include vague directives to ramp up border operations and even develop credible military options related to the Panama Canal.

Hegseth ultimately rose to the rank of Major before leaving the National Guard in 2021, and has the least experience of any Senate-confirmed defense secretary in recent history.

His immediate predecessor Austin, a four-star general, served for 41 years and commanded US Central Command; former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper served as the Secretary of the Army before being confirmed as SecDef; and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, also a 40-year veteran and four-star general, commanded US Central Command as well before being confirmed as Trump’s first secretary of defense.

The Signal chat fiasco has further highlighted Hegseth’s greenness when it comes to the established protocols for dealing with a highly classified military operation involving airstrikes on a foreign country, a defense official said.

“This is all indicative of his utter inexperience,” the official said.

CNN’s Haley Britzky contributed to this report.

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