The Daily Show host Jon Stewart has suggested that the US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth was “distracted by The White Lotus” when he leaked a top secret military plan to a journalist via a group chat.
Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg broke the story Monday when he reported that members of the Trump administration had mistakenly added him to a Signal group chat that discussed a classified military operation targeting Houthi positions in Yemen.
Mocking the stunning breach of security, Stewart said on the Monday (24 March) edition of his show: “Oopsie poopsie! Back in my day if you were a journalist who wanted leaked war documents, you had to work the sources, meet them in a dark garage, gain the trust, pound the pavement.
“Now, just wait for the national security director to be distracted by The White Lotus while he’s setting up his bomb Yemen group chat.”
“By the way, I might be in this group chat, I don’t know. I don’t check my group chats,” added the 62-year-old comedian.
Stewart continued, “Perhaps my favourite text of the entire group chain was the one from our defense secretary saying, quote, ‘we are currently clean on OPSEC.‘ OPSEC means operational security,” Stewart explained. “He said that in a group chat. A group chat with a journalist.
“The journalist said that he didn’t think that the story was real until Yemen was bombed,” Stewart said, prompting a sad reaction from the audience.
A White House national security spokesperson has since confirmed the text thread was legitimate.
“Can you share how your information about war plans against the Houthis in Yemen were shared with a journalist from The Atlantic and were those details classified?,” a reporter from Fox News asks the defense secretary just moments after he had stepped off a plane onto a landing strip at Pearl Harbour military base in Hawaii.
Hegseth was captured chuckling to himself before firing back.
“So I[…] You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist whose made a profession of peddling hoax in this time and time again.
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“To include the, I don’t know, the hopes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides hopes or suckers and losers hopes”, Hegseth accosts.
The secretary continued attacking Goldberg: “This is the guy that peddles in garbage. This is what he does.
“I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops. I’ve monitored it very closely from the beginning.
Hegseth went on to defend the actions of the U.S. military, explaining that “our sailors were getting shot at as targets, our shops couldn’t sail through.”
