US President Donald Trump has urged American officials to stop using the Signal messenger, which has been linked to scandals involving leaks of classified government information.
“Maybe not using Signal, okay?” Trump said in an interview with The Atlantic magazine, answering a question about what he told administration officials after the scandals.
The president said that he had spoken with US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “I think he’ll pull himself together,” Trump said of him. “I had a conversation with him, a positive conversation.”
Earlier, the Associated Press reported that Hegseth’s office at the Pentagon was equipped with an unsecured Internet access point, bypassing the security protocols established by the Defense Department. The minister accessed the Internet through an unsecured channel to use Signal. Earlier, The Washington Post, citing sources, reported that Hegseth installed a messenger not intended for the transmission of classified information on his computer at the Pentagon to compensate for the lack of cellular communication.
On April 20, The New York Times, citing sources, reported that on March 15, Hegseth posted a schedule of flights of F/A-18 Hornet fighters that were striking positions of the Yemeni Houthis in a chat with his wife Jennifer, who is not a Pentagon employee, his brother Phil, and his personal lawyer Tim Parlatore (both work at the Pentagon). As the publication pointed out, unlike the chat of US administration officials in Signal, which became the subject of a scandal, the second chat was created by the head of the Pentagon personally and included about a dozen people from his inner circle. US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Sean Parnell denied this information.
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