The Democratic Party’s official X account and much of the party leadership are calling on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to resign.

This came just minutes after DNC Chair Ken Martin issued a statement that read, “Pete Hegseth was unfit to lead the Defense Department even before he risked our national security through his own sloppy handling of sensitive military information. Just like his boss, Donald Trump, Hegseth — and everyone else involved — put on a stunning display of recklessness and disregard for our national security. Hegseth should resign, and if he doesn’t resign, he should be fired. It’s crystal clear that our men and women in uniform deserve better— and that our national security cannot be left in Hegseth’s incompetent and unqualified hands.”

After these messages went out, a flurry of other Democrat elected officials chimed in with concurrent sentiments.

“I’m demanding answers,” United States Senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s former running mate, posted to X, along with a copy of a letter addressed to Trump detailing his outrage.

“We are gravely concerned by appalling reports that senior officials of your Administration, including the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, and other Cabinet members, coordinated military strikes in Yemen over the commercial and unclassified messaging application Signal. We are even more concerned by the fact that a reporter was included on the same Signal chat, entitled ‘Houthi PC small group,’ demonstrating a complete lack of understanding by all involved of the gravity of the discussion and a profound carelessness for the lives of the servicemembers conducting operations against the Houthis,” Kaine wrote.

The Atlantic published the story Kaine referred to on March 24 under the headline “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”

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The reporting showed Hegseth announcing a strike against Yemen’s Houthi rebel group just before the bombing commenced. Some reported parties to the texts, such as National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, responded to the news of the bombing in the chat with a string of emojis that has since become a viral meme.

 

The story also showed apparent riffs in the administration.

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices,” Vice President JD Vance wrote, per The Atlantic. “I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

Transmitting sensitive information through privately owned mediums is not new in American politics.

“Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,” Waltz posted to X, along with an attached 2016 article from Politico, in 2023.

 

After the Atlantic story broke, the House Foreign Affairs Dems quote-tweeted this post with the same sequence of emojis that Waltz had reportedly used in the Houthi PC small group.

Amid a national debate about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as America’s top diplomat, the Inspector General reportedly found around a dozen emails with  “information classified at the Secret or Confidential levels” on private email addresses associated with Clinton’s predecessors including Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. However, the duo denied all wrongdoing, per ABC.

The sharing of classified information has occasionally put black marks on officials’ careers. CIA Director David Petraeus pled guilty to a criminal charge of mishandling classified information and was widely reported to have shared classified information with reporters.

However, not every leak is discovered or prosecuted, and the release of sensitive information appears to have occurred in many presidential administrations.