The fallout from The Atlantic’s stunning report that revealed top secret war plans were shared with a reporter in a Signal group chat is just beginning but the calls for Pete Hegseth to resign are already starting to flow in.
That includes conservative New York Times columnist David French, who told readers in an opinion piece on Monday that as a result of the ordeal, the Pentagon chief has “blown his credibility as a military leader.”
“I don’t know how Pete Hegseth can look service members in the eye,” French wrote. “If he had any honor at all, he would resign.”
The Times columnist said in his op-ed that the new reporting from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was “one of the most extraordinary stories I’ve ever read.”
Goldberg’s jaw-dropping report includes his detailed account of being inadvertently included in the messaging app where classified war plans about an imminent strike on Yemen were discussed among Hegseth and other high-level Trump administration officials.
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French, a former Army lawyer who also once wrote for The Atlantic, called the revelation “a stunning breach of security" as he continued to harshly criticize the former Fox News host for the blunder just weeks into his tenure as President Donald Trump’s defense secretary.
“I’ve helped investigate numerous allegations of classified information spillages, and I’ve never even heard of anything this egregious — a secretary of defense intentionally using a civilian messaging app to share sensitive war plans without even apparently noticing a journalist was in the chat,” French told readers.
He concluded that there was no “officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that." The columnist added that “instant consequences” would normally follow such a lapse, “followed by a comprehensive investigation and, potentially, criminal charges.”
“It’s way too soon to say whether Hegseth’s incompetence is also criminal, but I raise the possibility to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of the reported mistake,” French wrote as he summed up his case in support of Hegseth's resignation. “A security breach that significant requires a thorough investigation.”