Scandal veteran Hegseth’s future is on the line

WASHINGTON DC — After multiple attempts by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee to break him, CIA Director John Ratcliffe eventually gave up his man on Tuesday afternoon.

He placed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth squarely at the heart of the ongoing storm over the use of a group chat on the messaging app “Signal” to discuss war plans against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Ratcliffe, who had steadfastly insisted that all of his own communications in the Signal chatroom were “entirely permissible and lawful”, went on to indicate that he was not sure whether the same could be said for Hegseth’s contributions to the room, observed – along with everything else – by journalist Jeffrey Goldberg after he was erroneously invited to join the conversation.

At the heart of the matter is whether top-secret war plans, including targets, timelines and strategies, were placed into the Signal group in possible contravention of the Espionage Act and a variety of other federal laws.

“With respect to the assertions and the allegations that there were strike packages, or targeting information or things that relate to [the Pentagon]…the Secretary of Defence is the original classification authority for determining whether something is classified or not”, Ratcliffe told an increasingly quizzical Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island. 

“Any information” that Hegseth shared, opined Ratcliffe, “is not classified”, because the Defence Secretary may have declassified it before sharing it.

“But you have no way to verify that?” pressed Reed.

“I don’t”, conceded Ratcliffe, opening up an avenue that future investigators may choose to pursue against Hegseth, the former Fox News weekend breakfast TV anchorman who now heads the Pentagon and its more than two million men and women in uniform.

When Donald Trump tapped Hegseth to lead the Defence Department, it was one of his most unlikely selections and was based partly on the President’s enjoyment of Hegseth’s role on Fox News.

A military veteran who saw minimal combat but was deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, his curriculum vitae offered none of the qualifications usually associated with Pentagon leaders. He never rose above the rank of a junior officer, and had demonstrated no notable expertise in the minutiae of the nation’s defence strategies and critical alliances and partnerships.

Instead, Hegseth engaged in the public backing of US soldiers accused or convicted of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, an effort that led directly to Trump’s November 2019 pardons of troops involved in three war crimes cases.

Accusations of excessive drinking, sexual misconduct, and – during his stewardship of two separate veterans’ charities – financial irresponsibility, left many observers wondering how Hegseth could possibly secure Senate confirmation to lead the most complex, managerially-challenging and militarily vital branch of the United States government. Allegations of professional and personal misconduct trailed after him like a bad smell. When a woman accused him of sexual assault in 2017, Hegseth denied the claims against him but paid her a financial settlement nonetheless.

Republicans, some of them personally lobbied by Trump in a high-octane campaign to undergird Hegseth’s nomination, dragged the President’s man across the finishing line by the narrowest-possible margin. Hegseth’s confirmation on 24 January required Vice President JD Vance to cast the deciding vote in his capacity as President of the US Senate, after three Republicans voted with the Democrats to deadlock the appointment in a 50-50 tie.

Today, Hegseth stands accused of being at the centre of one of the most reckless breaches of national security in modern American history.

His immediate reaction, following Goldberg’s revelations about the Signal group chat, was to go on the offensive. After landing in Hawaii to begin his first tour of the Asia-Pacific region since he took office, the Defence Secretary slammed Goldberg as “deceitful” and a “discredited so-called journalist”. Despite the reporter’s claims to the contrary, Hegseth insisted that “nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that”.

With Trump himself claiming on Tuesday that “there was no classified information” released in the Signal group, Goldberg is indicating that he may release more of the chat room’s contents in a bid to prove that Hegseth was spilling the nation’s secrets via an insecure channel.

The Defence Secretary’s future may hinge on the willingness of Congressional Republicans to assist Trump by brushing the scandal under the carpet.

Certainly on Tuesday, no Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee evinced any determination to take reprisals against those responsible for what Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana called “a mistake”.

Hegseth likes to characterise himself as champion of the nation’s “war fighters”, and may himself live to wage another battle.

But the Signal scandal has demonstrated that a President can pick a Defence Secretary in haste, based on liking the cut of his jib when he anchors a weekend breakfast TV show, but is then at risk of repenting the choice at leisure.