House Democrat: Hegseth shared classified info to make up for 'personal inadequacies'

Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) suggested Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared top secret information in a Signal group chat with national security officials to alleviate “personal inadequacies.”

“What in the hell are you guys doing? And why are you doing that on a commercial chat platform? Makes absolutely no sense. And it's, in fact, extraordinarily dangerous,” Garamendi said during a Tuesday appearance on NewsNation.

“And then you bring in the Secretary of Defense and perhaps for his own personal inadequacies for the job, he decides that he's got to show that he's got the really big, important stuff that he can then share with the other teenagers that are chatting about this,” the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee’s subpanel on military readiness added.

The California lawmaker’s comments referred to reports from The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who said he was mistakenly added to a chat with President Trump’s Cabinet members where war plans regarding strikes on the Houthis in Yemen were revealed.

Multiple Democrats have urged both Hegseth and national security adviser Mike Waltz to resign over the discrepancy. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) sent a Tuesday letter to the White House encouraging President Trump to fire the Secretary of Defense.

“It's like the top national security secretaries and others that are at the top of the national security program kind of got together like a bunch of teenagers talking things over about the school dance and the football game,” Garamendi told Laura Ingle during the NewsNation interview.

However, Hegseth denies claims that war plans were inadvertently shared.

“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth told reporters on Monday. 

Garamendi has long questioned Hegseth’s ability to lead the Department of Defense and initiated a probe into the leader’s decision to deploy medical units at Guantanamo Bay where the Trump administration has tried to hold illegal immigrants.

“Unfortunately, it is clear that this administration cares more about imposing their radical political agenda and lining the pockets of their billionaire buddies, than it does about protecting the American taxpayer and our national security,” the lawmaker told The Hill in February.