Republican strategist Scott Jennings has some advice for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid controversy over the firing of several top-level staffers and a second Signal chat where he reportedly shared military plans with family and his attorney: Avoid the media.
“If I were Secretary Hegseth, I wouldn’t do any more media interviews right now,” he said Tuesday during an appearance on CNN. “The best way to prove you can do the job is to do the job.”
Jennings, a senior political commentator for the network, said the Pentagon chief should instead focus on the department’s accomplishments, including the U.S. military’s successful airstrikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen that began in mid-March and the bump in recruiting numbers since President Trump was elected as commander-in-chief.
“He needs to focus on that and just get a handle on doing the job,” Jennings told the “NewsNight” panel. “The media piece, leave it aside for the moment.”
“And for the White House, my advice would be, whatever guidance you gave the Cabinet and your senior officials about the use of Signal and other encrypted applications, just release it,” the veteran GOP operative added. “Whatever memo went out, whatever the lawyers gave everybody after the first Signal thing, just put it out so that everybody can see what directives have been given since the initial tempest in a teapot brewed over.”
Hegseth has dug in as he faces another round of calls from Democratic lawmakers to resign from his post following The New York Times’s report that he shared Houthi militant strike plans in an unsecure Signal group chat with his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
At the Pentagon, the number of close aides who have been terminated — including those he picked to join him at the Defense Department — has multiplied after an internal investigation was opened on those leaking information to news outlets.
“Disgruntled former employees are peddling things to try to save their a‑‑, and ultimately, that is not going to work,” Hegseth said Tuesday morning while on “Fox & Friends.”
The White House has also backed up the defense secretary publicly, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters on Tuesday that Trump “stands strongly behind Secretary Hegseth and the change that he is bringing to the Pentagon, and the results that he’s achieved thus far speak for themselves.”
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) became the first GOP lawmaker to signal that Hegseth should step down after the existence of the chat was reported by news outlets.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) also expressed worry about the Pentagon chief Monday on CNN, but stopped short of calling for his ouster.
“If in fact, he did discuss what’s called top secret or things that only need to be discussed inside a [Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility] with his wife, if she doesn’t have that kind of security briefing, yes it would concern me,” he said.
Hegseth has maintained that the information shared in the chat was “unclassified” and “informal.” He made a similar argument following scrutiny over a separate Signal chat earlier this year, where a journalist was inadvertently added to a chat among senior Trump officials detailing war plans in Yemen.