Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth should do the “honorable” thing and resign his position for the sake of the troops he’s tasked with leading, according to one Bay State congressman.

U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine Corps veteran representing Massachusetts’ Sixth Congressional District, has joined a growing chorus of voices calling out Hegseth after the unauthorized disclosure of military attack information information on the unsecured messaging service, Signal. The controversy surrounding the disclosure has come to called “SignalGate.”

Moulton, speaking with WBZ in an interview that aired Sunday, said that he’s heard directly from some colleagues within the military and defense community, and they tell him they are “disgusted” by what they’re seeing at the highest levels of the Department of Defense.

“And the ones who are still on active duty, I think, are honestly wondering — how are they expected to lead their troops? How are they expected to make sure that their Marines or soldiers or airmen or sailors actually follow the rules to keep our nation safe when the top guy in the Department of Defense refuses to do so and has zero accountability for his own behavior?” Moulton said.

Moulton’s comments come in reaction to a story released by the Atlantic last week and verified by the White House and other departments, in which the political magazine’s editor-in-chief reported he was added to a Signal group chat along with more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials and then subsequently shown attack plans for an upcoming military strike in Yemen.

Signal is an end-to-end encrypted auto-deleting commercial messaging service which wouldn’t normally be used to send classified messages or to share information that falls under federal records retention laws, but Hegseth has denied that he shared anything which should have been classified. According to the former Fox News host, the messages included “No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.”

“Those are some really sh-tty war plans,” Hegseth said in a post on X, dismissing the controversy surrounding the matter.

The group chat — which allegedly included Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, among others — and the resulting fallout has been dubbed “SignalGate” by beltway insiders.

The revelations led to calls for Trump to fire his Secretary of Defense or National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who apparently added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat in the first place.

Trump said he had not plans to fire Hegseth, or Waltz.

“I don’t fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker.

But Moulton, there can only be one “honorable” response from Hegseth, who is responsible for setting an example for the troops.

“The right thing to do is to resign, because you’ve lost all moral authority to tell people under your command to follow orders — basic orders — that you are unwilling to follow yourself,” he said.

Acknowledging a failure occurred would have been a step in the right direction and perhaps represented a second potential path forward for the embattled Defense Secretary, Moulton said, giving him a chance to ensure a similar mistake never occurs again.

“He’s chosen a third option, which is just to lie. Lie to the American people, lie to the troops he leads, just be completely dishonest about what happened,” Moulton said.

U.S. Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” aired Sunday that the appropriate response at this point is for the DoD’s Inspector General to conduct an investigation. According to Lankford, SignalGate has led to a pair of unresolved questions.

“One is obviously, how did a reporter get into this thread in the conversation?” the senator said. “And the second part of the conversation is, when individuals from the administration are not sitting at their desk in a classified setting on a classified computer, how do they communicate to each other?”

Goldberg, during an appearance on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press” on Sunday, said that there is no mystery surrounding how he was included to the text chain and that Waltz simply added him.

“This isn’t the matrix. Phone numbers don’t just get sucked into other phones,” the Goldberg said. “You know, very frequently in journalism, the most obvious explanation is the explanation. My phone number was in his phone because my phone number is in his phone. He’s telling everyone that he’s never met me or spoken to me. That’s simply not true. I understand why he’s doing it. But you know, this has become a somewhat farcical situation. There’s no, there’s no subterfuge here. My number was in his phone. He mistakenly added me to the group chat. There we go.”

________

©2025 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at bostonherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.