Hegseth’s Signalgate headache returns. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may have perjured himself when he told lawmakers that text messages shared with a journalist in mid-March contained no classified information about a military operation in Yemen, the Washington Post and CNN reported Wednesday, citing a report from the Defense Department’s inspector general.
“No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information,” Trump’s Pentagon chief insisted after his unsecured messages became public.
However, the Pentagon’s IG says it has evidence Hegseth copied and pasted the Yemen attack plans from an email marked “SECRET” and posted it to a chat thread on Signal, which is an unsecured platform that in this case happened to have had journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic in it.
The email originated from Central Command’s top officer Gen. Erik Kurilla, who used the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, to transmit the information. The email’s secret markings “denoted that the information was classified at a level at which unauthorized disclosure could be expected to cause serious damage to national security,” the Post’s Dan Lamothe and John Hudson explain.
But the IG’s investigation continues. “The inspector general has also been asking witnesses whether anyone else could have physically entered the information into the Signal chat at Hegseth’s request, using his phone,” CNN reports.
Worth noting: “Government regulations allow for the defense secretary to declassify and downgrade classified information produced by the Pentagon,” the Post reports, “but the Trump administration has yet to claim that such a process was carried out before the sensitive information was shared over Signal.”
Pentagon reax: “The Department stands behind its previous statements: no classified information was shared via Signal,” spokesman Sean Parnell told the Post in an emailed statement. “This Signal narrative is so old and worn out, it’s starting to resemble Joe Biden’s mental state,” Parnell told CNN in a statement, and insisted that “our operational security and discipline are top notch.”
Speaking of watchdogs, the Government Accountability Office “has 46 open investigations into other allegations that Mr. Trump illegally withheld funds” delegated by Congress for a variety of matters, including U.S. support for Ukraine, the New York Times reported Tuesday. “In a sign of the seriousness surrounding Mr. Trump’s recent spending moves, the G.A.O. said in May it would retain outside counsel that could assist in litigation.”
Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter dedicated to developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1998, a 41-year-old man with a history of schizophrenia and threats to the president burst into the U.S. Capitol and fatally shot two police officers before he was subdued and taken into custody.
Around the Defense Department
USAF won’t resume full F-35 buys until Lockheed wrings problems from upgrade. “In the end, because we have limited financial resources, we need to make sure that the F-35s we buy have the capability to meet the pacing threat. So, some of the delays with respect to Block 4 and TR-3 weighed into decisions by the department,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin told Defense One’s Audrey Decker in an interview.
Background: Block 4 is an upgraded package of combat capabilities; TR-3 is the “backbone” that supports them. Delays with the project led the Pentagon to stop taking deliveries of F-35s for a year, resuming last July with a “truncated” version of the upgrade.
Currently: The Air Force is asking for just 24 new F-35s in its 2026 budget proposal, which is half of the initial plan, and down from last year’s 44. (The HASC has concurred in its markup of the 2026 budget, though the SASC has bumped the number up to 34.) Read on, here.
The Pentagon’s Golden Dome program officer is putting together a team. Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, his service’s former vice chief, took over the wildly ambitious air- and missile-defense program on Monday “We’ve been very, very selective on getting not only the right talent, but the right personalities that understand how to go fast,” Guetlein said Tuesday at the Innovate Space Global Economic Summit in Arlington, Virginia. “Not everybody understands what it takes to move at that speed.”
“Guetlein said he has a long way to go in building his team but has a list of 30 names, identified from across industry and academia that he hopes will join the effort,” C4ISRNet reports. “As a direct report to Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, he has a slew of authorities designed to speed up decision-making and capability delivery, including the ability to bypass standard competitive hiring procedures that can slow down the process.” Read on, here.
By the way: The Trump administration wants to drop environmental protections for rocket launches, ProPublica reported Tuesday citing a draft executive order.
More on that near-miss between an airliner and a B-52: “Air Force says B-52 crew wasn’t told of passenger jet before near-miss,” Military Times reports. And here is video of that near-miss, posted to social media over the weekend.
Additional reading:
Trump 2.0
Developing: The U.S. is building a 5,000-bed detention facility for migrants on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, Military-dot-com reported Wednesday.
The new facility will cost the Army about $232 million—out of a total estimated cost of $1.26 billion—and “is slated for completion by Sept. 30, 2027. The size and scope of the project make it one of the most significant investments in immigration detention infrastructure in recent years,” Steve Beynon, Thomas Novelly and Konstantin Toropin write.
Critical reax: “Is building tent facilities to house migrants really the best use of DoD funding, or any funding?” said Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, based in Washington. “If we’re gonna build anything on military bases, shouldn’t it be to help service members?” she asked.
ICYMI: Indiana’s Camp Atterbury and New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst will be used to detain immigrants, The Hill reported Friday, citing a July 15 letter (PDF) from SecDef Hegseth to lawmakers.
South Carolina and Mississippi could join the migrant-detention club, their governors told Newsnation last week.
Another 2,000 National Guard troops could be called up to help ICE agents, CNN reported Wednesday. “[S]ources said the troops will be placed on Title 32 status, which puts them under the command of their governors and not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.”
Taskings could include “finger printing and mouth swabbing of detainees,” according to a U.S. official. Those taskings reflect an earlier alert from the Department of Homeland Security, which was initially reported two months ago.
See also: “VIDEO: Troops Question Los Angeles Deployment,” via independent investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein, reporting Wednesday.
The White House says it wants to achieve “global dominance” in artificial intelligence, according to a plan released Wednesday by administration officials. The framework aims to accelerate military adoption, fast-track permits for data centers, support open-source models, and more, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports.
The plan also grants the Defense Department priority access to commercial cloud computing in times of crisis, with a goal to “codify priority access to computing resources in the event of a national emergency so that DoD is prepared to fully leverage these technologies during a significant conflict,” according to the document.
It also calls for the creation of AI innovation and research hubs at senior military colleges to “foster AI-specific curriculum, including in AI use, development, and infrastructure management.”
Critical reax: “The action plan, at its highest level, reads just like a wish list from Silicon Valley,” Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, told Defense One. That’s at least partly because the plan calls for eliminating regulations that may “unnecessarily hinder AI development or deployment.” It also urges the Office of Management and Budget to consider whether a state’s “regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness” of federal funding.
Why that matters: States from Maine to Montana have passed or are considering legislation to restrict uses of AI, including facial recognition for law enforcement. States have also adopted rules limiting AI in hiring decisions or insurance claims—domains where algorithmic errors could lead to discrimination, Tucker reports. Read more, here.
New: Chinese nation-state hackers are now exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Sharepoint file-sharing product, the company announced in an updated security alert issued Tuesday.
“Microsoft has observed two named Chinese nation-state actors, Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon exploiting these vulnerabilities targeting internet-facing SharePoint servers,” the company explained in an alert initially posted on Saturday. “In addition, we have observed another China-based threat actor, tracked as Storm-2603, exploiting these vulnerabilities to deploy ransomware,” the alert reads.
By the way: The Department of Homeland Security was affected by the intrusions, our sister site Nextgov reported Wednesday. The National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Education were also accessed, Bloomberg News reported, while the Washington Post reported that the Department of Health and Human Services had been hit.
What’s going on: The bug is referred to as a “zero-day,” which gets its name because developers had not discovered it before and had zero days to fix it. Hackers can leverage the vulnerability by sending specially crafted data to a SharePoint server, which improperly processes that input and allows them to execute malign code remotely without needing a password.
Recommendation: Security patches have been made available for all affected versions of SharePoint, Microsoft said. Read more, here.
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