MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow trolled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday for declaring in a highly sensitive group chat among top Trump administration officials that their discussion was completely secure, even though one person in that chat was a journalist who later reported on the incident.
In the message chain over Signal earlier month, where Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and others were discussing a forthcoming strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hegseth wrote, “We are currently clean on OPSEC.” OPSEC stands for operational security.
Yet The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg saw that message too, because Waltz had mistakenly invited him to the chat. Goldberg would subsequently write about the chat in a piece for the publication.
Maddow chuckled over the mistake.
“They were not clean on OPSEC,” she said. “They were not clean on operational security. Not even close. We know he sent that text because a journalist was in the group chat that he was texting!”
The MSNBC anchor then mocked Hegseth’s parlance.
“‘Currently clean on OPSEC,‘” she repeated. “Must have felt cool to say it though, right?”
Hegseth, despite the White House’s National Security Council confirming the authenticity of the messages, actually denied it Monday.
“Nobody was texting war plans,” he claimed, after lashing out at Goldberg for his past reporting on Trump.
