WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday was given a final copy of the completed Defense Department Inspector General report that examined his sharing sensitive military information on a Signal group chat back in March, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
The much-anticipated report is expected to become public as early as this week, these people said.
The report outlines the findings of a more than eight-month investigation into Hegseth’s use of Signal, an encrypted but unclassified messaging app, to share details of planned U.S. military strikes in Yemen before they had begun.
Hegseth has maintained that he shared no classified information on the group chat.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The two people familiar with the inspector general investigation would not say what its conclusions are. The report was requested by the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., on March 27.
The group chat, which included other top members of President Donald Trump’s national security team, became public after an editor for The Atlantic magazine was inadvertently added.
NBC News has reported that minutes before U.S. fighter jets took off to begin their strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in March, Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, who led U.S. Central Command at the time, used a secure U.S. government system to send detailed information about the operation to Hegseth.
The material Kurilla sent included details about when U.S. fighters would take off and when they would hit their targets — information that, if it fell into the wrong hands, could have put the pilots of those jets into grave danger, NBC News has reported.
Much of that same information appeared on the Signal chat that Hegseth shared with other top Trump administration officials, and, on a separate chat, with members of his family and his personal attorney, three U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the exchanges told NBC News.
The expected release of the report comes at a sensitive moment for Hegseth, who is currently under scrutiny in connection to a separate incident over a military decision to launch a second strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea that the Pentagon said was carrying 11 individuals, after a first strike left at least two survivors.
Wicker and Reed have publicly raised concerns about the second strike. The White House has said the strikes were in line with international law.
On the Signal chat case, Wicker and Reed had requested from the inspector general more details about what information was communicated on the chat and “any remedial actions” that were taken as a result.
The committee leaders also asked for “an assessment of whether any individuals transferred classified information, including operational details, from classified systems to unclassified systems, and if so, how.”
