On Thursday, the acting inspector General of the Department of Defense released his report on Signalgate in which top national security leaders discussed secret military information on a commercial messaging app with, not to put too fine a point on it here, me.

The Inspector general found that Defense Secretary Hegseth's behavior endangered the safety of American pilots and that he should not have been using a commercial messaging app or his own phone to share secret information about upcoming airstrikes.

In response, Hegseth and his spokesman Sean Parnell denied that the report said what it said.

This is what Parnell wrote.

The Inspector General review is a total exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we knew all along.

No classified information was shared.

This matter is resolved and the case is closed.

Hecket himself tweeted, total exoneration, case closed.

Here is what the Inspector general actually wrote.

The secretary's transmission of non-public operational information over signal to an unclear journalist, that would be me, and others 2 to 4 hours before planned strikes, using his personal cell phone exposed sensitive DOD information.

The secretary's actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed US mission objectives and potential harm to US pilots.

Hecketh Parnell and other administration officials are claiming that these findings represent a total exoneration.

Let me be blunt here These people think we are idiots.

I try not to express my personal views from this chair, but since Signalgate happened on my phone, let me say that the most disturbing aspect of this whole episode is that if any other official at the Department of Defense and certainly any uniformed military officer shared information 1100 as sensitive as Heeth and others shared on an insecure messaging app without even knowing that the editor in chief of The Atlantic was on the chat.

They would be fired or court-martialed for their incompetence.

And that's what I have to say about that.

To find out what others have to say about this and about the growing controversy regarding HSA's use of the military to fight alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean.

Let me bring in three experts.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times.

Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and Nancy Yousef is a national security correspondent at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for, for joining us.

So it's been a terrible week for Pete Hagseth.

That's objective reality suggests that we know that Secretary of Defense is a hard job, but Peter, a lot of these wounds seem self-inflicted.

Self-inflicted, and we're debating whether the Secretary of Defense is following the rules of law in terms of blowing up boats in the Caribbean and following the rules of security on his own phone in terms of military operations.

These are two things you don't want to hear about Secretary of Defense, particularly Secretary of Defense dealing with matters of life and death, you know, dozens of people have been killed in these operations in the Caribbean.

The s tri ke s that were at issue on the call that you happened on the single chat that you happen to be added to involved dozens of people presumably who were killed in the Houthi bases that they were striking at and many a military operations who could have been endangered had the enemy known what you knew and what, uh, you know, shouldn't have been known to anybody outside of the chain of command.

And to say it wasn't classified, is is sort of not the point.

The fact that he decided I'd declassified it.

Well, why would you declassify information like that.

That makes no sense, right?

This information is not post facto.

OK, it's time now to release that.

This is information real time that could affect an operation, you know, the interesting thing about that is that he has original declassification authority as the Secretary of Defense, but he didn't declassify it.

He just used it theos, it's like, it's like the ESP defense.

It's like, you know, that he might have imagined in his head that it was declassified.

Like, I don't think that's how it works when you actually are de cla s s ify ing something.

So even the fiction of this defense, which is it was declassified by virtue of the fact that I shared it is not I use the ESP defense all the time at home, but not like I thought about but not when I'm attacking the Houthis.

Yeah, but Nancy, let's let's let's talk about this in, in, in uh detail, the, the IG report, the Inspector general report.

How do you interpret the findings?

that the IG concluded that while he had the authority, he didn't he, they didn't want to answer directly the question that whether he was classified proper or not.

What they didn't set is spelled out all the ways you're supposed to declassify something and noted that he didn't carry those out.

And so their conclusion was essentially that he put US service members in potential harm's way by sharing information this way.

And what they outlined without sort of saying it directly, even in the unclassified version, is that he picked up words verbatim from the US Central Command commander in the run up to this, the first major military campaign under the Trump administration and typed them verbatim into a. It was almost like a copy paste.

That's right, from a secure communication and let's be clear what he was typing in times, strike targets, platforms that were going to be used.

And to me, the most interesting thing in uh in all this is, well, the secretary claims that not only was it not um classified, but that he was providing nonessential information like the details of an operation.

He was continuing to communicate with US Central Command, according to the report on secure comm.

So he's typing it in the signal and calling it unclassified while talking to the commander in a secure system at the very same time.

Try a counterfactual here, Jeff.

Have you published that information at the time you received it on your phone, they would have come after you.

right?

Right.

And they also would have canceled the strike.

They would have said this is dangerous.

This is putting our troops in danger, we should a counterfactual to be clear that I would never obviously engage it, but this is the way you can tell if it's sensitive or not.

If I had put that on Twitter immediately, would the United States Air Force have continued or the navy continued with the strikes.

No, because then the Houthis would know that the planes are coming and they have air defense.

The president is sorry, but the president is accusing members of Congress of sedition, right, for simply stating the rules of war, but that's not a problem if we put out operational.

The whole thing is insulting to us.

I mean, I do think this goes back to the idea like here we are months later debating, you know, did the sun rise this morning.

I mean, you know, these facts are essentially on their face remarkable.

We all understand, and it's it's important that we have an inspector general is important that investigation is done, but the bottom line is the official leadership of the Department of Defense is at war with reality here in, in the response and you know the question I have that's completely unanswered is what if anything is going to, where is accountability for Pete Hegseth in terms of how he's running the Department of Defense.

What is Congress going to do about this?

Where is the oversight and accountability of this.

What I've seen is some statements from Republican members of Congress, including those with senior positions on Capitol Hill, basically saying like, oh, everything's fine here, move along, move along, which again is a remarkable It is an abdication of responsibility.

It's not exactly oversight, Nancy, let me ask you a question as a defense Department correspondent, currently in physical exile from the Pentagon, right, because, as we've discussed on the show in the past, you guys have basically been removed from you guys, meaning the entire press corps removed from the building because you refused to accede to their demands for review and other such issues, but you're a defense correspondent.

I'm a little bit surprised given all that's happened to you and the press corps and everything else and the fact that on the Venezuela strikes, they're not giving us any information about who they're striking or why.

I'm a little surprised that the Inspector General was the acting inspector general was felt free enough to actually criticize the Secretary of Defense.

That's a good sign for democratic oversight, no?

Yes, and I think the fact that he was acting was a was a was a factor in all this because he appeared to sort of approach the job with a willingness to lose it if he wrote something that went against what the department wanted to hear.

What we kept hearing from the Inspector general was a commitment to really answering the questions and not approaching this any other way but trying to get to the bottom of this.

I think the other thing that was a factor in in all this is.

in the military, you, you can say total exoneration, you can say case closed, you know, uniformed officers deal with this every day, so they were going to understand this issue better than most and weren't going to be able to, weren't gonna be as susceptible to sort of a spin on this because these are issues they deal with every day, and I think therefore the expectation is that the Inspector General treated with the seriousness with which we asked uniformed personnel to treat these issues every single inspector general's own credibility was on the line.

That's exactly inside the Department of Defense.

That's right, right, because there's this is something they deal with day in and day out.

Worth reminding people that the Secretary of Defense himself refused to speak to the inspector General.

No sense that he had any accountability to anybody, to your point about even answering questions, right?

No, no, no, they, the Inspector General used the signal chat that I published in The Atlantic as the evidence because it was disappeared from his phone, and they did not preserve the Secretary of Defense, nor did Mike Waltz, the then the national security advisor Mar co Rubio, the secretary, then nobody preserved the actual record, which wasn't official, obviously de facto official government communication.

That was one of the oddities of this whole thing.

I want to go to the um go to the, the, the bigger issue, the Venezuela issue, um, but I do want to note one thing, and I think Susan, you've got, got this, the aggressive defense doesn't seem to be working here.

I mean, they could yell exoneration.

but all you have to do is read the words, and you know that it wasn't exoneration.

What's the, what's behind the this this constant aggressive defense.

Yeah, I mean, look, that's a hallmark obviously of this administration and you have a lot of people at senior levels who were essentially imitating the boss, and that's how Donald Trump treats adversity.

He punches back harder.

He never admits wrongdoing.

He always fights back and so, you know, they're they're taking a page from the playbook, I think, of the Trump administration.

The question is also who they're speaking to with this defense, you know, it seems to me that Pete Hegseth has taken a sort of a Twitter view of being the leader of the Pentagon, and that is something that we've really never seen from a leader of the Pentagon.

He seems to be more focused on winning the social media spin wars than he is on actual wars, and I think this is pretty consistent with that, right?