'Were they being clever?' Expert suspects embattled Trump official involved in cover-up

Former Pentagon special counsel and federal prosecutor Ryan Goodman said Monday that the national security issues plaguing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have gone from bad to worse — and he suspects a cover-up may have been afoot at the Pentagon.

Speaking to CNN’s Erin Burnett on her show, “OutFront,” Goodman aired his suspicions following new bombshell revelations that the embattled defense secretary shared confidential attack plans on a Singal chat for a second time – on this occasion, with his wife, brother, personal attorney and about a dozen other people in tow, according to media reports.

Goodman said after the first Signal breach in which the defense secretary inadvertently sent top-secret war plans to a journalist, American Oversight filed suit against Hegseth and other Trump administration officials under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking to enjoin the Trump administration from continuing to destroy evidence of their own conduct.

As a result, a D.C. Circuit Court ruling ordered the administration to preserve all federal records, Goodman added.

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“And when I look back at what the DOD and the DOJ said in response to that, all federal records in the first Signal chat, they had a very narrow reading of the judge's order to preserve those records,” Goodman said. “They said, ‘Okay, we'll preserve the records of that Signal chat on that Houthi incident with those individuals. And then when they wrote in again, they said, ‘we have searched Secretary Hegseth’s device’ – we now know there's another device.”

“So that’s the issue for me,” the former prosecutor added. “Were they really being that clever because they actually knew that there was something much more incriminating on a second device?”

Goodman reiterated that the damaging aspect of the second Signal scandal – which Burnett called “shocking” and “jaw-dropping” – is that Hegseth is “communicating the battle plans to people who should never receive it.”

“So the first one was about like, was this gross negligence in the way in which they were doing it? This isn't about gross negligence, Goodman said bluntly. “It's purposeful dissemination of national defense information to people who have no basis for receiving it. That’s what the law is actually aimed at.”

Watch the video below via CNN or at the link here.