Planned To Attack Yemen Leaks, US Lawmaker Asks Defense Minister Hegseth To Be Removed From His Position

US Defense Minister Pete Hegseth. (Wikimedia Commons/DoD/US Navy/Petty Officer 1st Class Alexandr)

JAKARTA - United States lawmakers criticized the news that United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared important information on defense and the military regarding plans to attack Yemen in March.

Democratic lawmakers said Defense Minister Hegseth could no longer defend his post.

"We continue to learn how Pete Hegseth puts lives at risk," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a tweet on X.

"But Trump is still too weak to fire him. Pete Hegseth must be fired," he continued.

Meanwhile, senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraqi War veteran who suffered severe injuries in fighting in 2004, said Hegseth "must resign out of shame."

A US official at the Pentagon questioned how Hegseth was able to keep his job after the latest news.

Hegseth shared details of the March attack on Yemen's Houthis allied to Iran in a messaging group that included his wife, brother, and personal lawyers, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday.

The disclosure of chats in the Signal app for the second time raises more questions about the use of an undisclosed messaging system by Defense Minister Hegseth to share very sensitive security details, comes at a very sensitive time for him, with senior officials fired from the Pentagon last week as part of an internal leak investigation.

In a recent chat, Defense Minister Hegseth shared details of attacks similar to those revealed last month by The Atlantic magazine after his editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally included in a separate chat on the Signal app, in an embarrassing incident involving all President Donald Trump's most senior national security officials.

Sources familiar with the matter speak on condition of anonymity saying the chat this time involved about a dozen people and was created during the confirmation process to discuss administrative issues, instead of detailed military planning.

The chat includes details of the airstrike schedule, the source said.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, without evidence, said the media "enthusiastically took complaints from former employees who were dissatisfied as the only source for their articles."

"Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone who is committed to President Trump's agenda. We have achieved so much for American war fighters, and will never back down," Parnell said in a tweet on X.

Meanwhile, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the recently fired "corers" continued to distort the truth to calm down their destroyed egos and undermine the President's agenda.

The latest disclosure comes days after Dan cap, one of Hegseth's top advisers, was escorted from the Pentagon after being identified during a leak investigation at the Department of Defense.

Despite not being as famous as any other senior Pentagon official, he has played an important role for Hegseth and was appointed as an important person for the Pentagon by the Secretary in the first Signal chat.

"We are very disappointed with the way our services at the Department of Defense ended," cuddling at X on Saturday.

"Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our characters with baseless attacks when we left the office."

Following the departure, less senior official Darin Selnick, who recently served as deputy chief of staff of Hegseth, and Colin Carroll, who is deputy chief of staff of Deputy Minister of Defense Steve Feinberg, was given administrative leave and sacked on Friday.