US defense secretary shares military plans with his wife and brother on Signal
The March scandal surrounding U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has continued. Citing anonymous sources, The New York Times and CNN report that Hegseth shared detailed plans about a military operation against the Houthis in Yemen on a second Signal group chat, this one on his personal phone and including his wife, lawyer and brother.
According to The New York Times, Pete Hegseth shared details of the upcoming strikes in Yemen in a private Signal chat on March 15.
Four people spoke to reporters about the chat. Some of them said the information included the flight schedule of F/A-18 Hornets to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen. According to The New York Times, the chat included Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Roche, as well as his brother Phil and lawyer Tim Parlatore.
Although Hegseth and Parlatore work for the Pentagon, they have nothing to do with U.S. operations against the Houthis in Yemen.
Jennifer Roche, in turn, has no connection to the activities of the U.S. Department of Defense. Earlier, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hegseth took his wife to meetings with representatives of foreign military departments, where classified information was discussed. In particular, she was present at the talks with the head of the UK Ministry of Defence in early March, when the parties discussed the U.S. decision to stop sharing intelligence information with Ukraine.
The Signal group was called “Defense/Team,” CNN’s sources say. There, Hegseth and his inner circle, more than a dozen people, discussed everything related to this procedure.
The group is also known to have included two of Hegseth’s senior advisers, Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick. On April 15, after being accused of leaking unauthorized information, they were fired. Officials later claimed they had been “slandered.”
The New York Times reached out to the Trump administration for comment on the situation. A U․S․ official told reporters that there was no national security breach.
The first scandal surrounding the Signal chat erupted in March after Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, was accidentally included in a chat where senior U․S․ administration officials discussed the details of the operation against the Houthis in Yemen, which began on March 15.
