Democrats Can't Believe Hegseth Wasn't The One Canned: 'What The Hell?'

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is simply "passing the blame" to Mike Waltz, Democrats argued.

Democrats had a resounding reaction to Thursday’s news that national security adviser Mike Waltz was out of a job after he accidentally added a journalist to a group chat discussing highly sensitive national security matters: What about Pete Hegseth?

“What the hell? And Hegseth gets to stay?” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) posted on social media about the defense secretary, a former Fox News personality.

Waltz may have been the one to add Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal group chat at the center of the scandal, but Hegseth was arguably a bigger part of what made the chat such a national security issue. The defense secretary texted the group detailed information about planned strikes in Yemen, including information that adversaries could have “used to harm American military and intelligence personnel,” Goldberg noted in March.

And weeks later, reports emerged that Hegseth was sharing similar details in a personal group chat with his wife, brother and other members of his inner circle.

“Who really needs to go is Hegseth ... because of his absolute careless treatment of this kind of information,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told HuffPost. “I would dare him to go to [Naval Station] Norfolk and explain that this didn’t put sailors ... lives in danger.”