Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said he believes there should be an investigation into the Trump administration’s use of a Signal chat for official business but stopped short of calling for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign, calling it “overkill.”
“It’s entirely appropriate for the inspector general to be able to look at it and be able to ask two questions,” Lankford said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“One is, obviously, how did a reporter get into this thread in the conversation, and the second part of the conversation is, when individuals in the administration are not sitting at their desk in a classified setting on a classified computer, how do they communicate to each other?” he said, questioning if encrypted apps were the right way to communicate.
Top Trump administration officials have received sharp scrutiny after it was revealed The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal group chat where they were discussing the upcoming attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Hegseth initially denied that any war plans were communicated via the app, but The Atlantic released a second round of screenshots from the chat that showed him detailing the time, location and weapons used in the strike.
Democrats quickly called for investigations and for Hegseth to resign, though the administration has backed the Secretary and others in the group chat amid the blowback.
Lankford said he doesn’t see the instance as “much of an issue” because the officials in the group chat believed it was a closed circle.
“This is normal communication on it. What’s not normal is having a reporter in the middle of it,” he said.
Host Dana Bash pressed the Oklahoma senator if he had doubts about Hegseth’s leadership.
“No … I don’t see this as an issue of leadership,” he said. “I’ve heard some people calling for his resignation, I think that’s way overkill.”
