Pressure is building on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Washington Post first reported and the News Hour confirmed that Hegseth had the unclassified messaging app Signal installed on a computer in his Pentagon office. All of this is unfolding as chaos is mounting at the Pentagon with the firings of top Hegseth aides.
You are absolutely right.
They try to spin it as “trying to get around no personal electronics allowed in the SCIF”, but what if it’s a low-side DoD machine?
The biggest issue I see is if signal isn’t vetted to run on DoD computers, and quite frankly that’s a slap on the wrist at most.
For reference, you can do as much damage as you could from signal by logging into Gmail.
My biggest thing is just the way that everything is treated as a smoking gun. This is what got us Trump on the first place. It’s good to question controversial actions by elected and appointed people, or really anybody…but skepticism requires context, otherwise it’s just a conspiracy theory, and we’ve seen where that leads.