The Head of the Pentagon Has Been Using His Personal Phone for Sports Betting and Sharing Military Secrets

We should all probably be more conscious of our digital footprint — not least of all the defense secretary of the United States Pete Hegseth, the man at the center of all the "Signalgate" drama who continues to stretch the definition of what it means to have "100 percent OPSEC." As the New York Times reports, the same phone Hegseth used when he accidentally shared top secret war plans with an Atlantic journalist last month in a Signal group chat is also his personal phone. And embarrassingly, its number could easily be found online on a variety of public apps […]

Apr 26, 2025 - 12:24

The Head of the Pentagon Has Been Using His Personal Phone for Sports Betting and Sharing Military Secrets

US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth has been using the same phone he uses to send out war plans to also go on sports betting websites.

Remember when defense secretary of the United States Pete Hegseth, the man at the center of all the "Signalgate" drama, accidentally texted a journalist about the need to maintain "100 percent OPSEC" about secret war plans?

As the New York Times reports, the same phone Hegseth used when he accidentally shared those covert military maneuvers is also his personal one. And embarrassingly, its number could easily be found online on a variety of public apps as recently as March, including WhatsApp, Facebook, Airbnb, and — we kid you not — a sports betting website.

"There's zero percent chance that someone hasn't tried to install Pegasus or some other spyware on his phone," Mike Casey, the former director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told the NYT. "He is one of the top five, probably, most targeted people in the world for espionage."

According to security experts, it's not surprising that Hegseth's personal number is on the web, since he was a private citizen before being sworn in. Instead, the former Fox News host's staggeringly stupid mistake was using the same phone number to do all his official top secret military stuff, like announcing the details of an airstrike in Yemen against Houthi forces in a group chat that also had his wife and brother (we should clarify: that was a separate incident from when he accidentally leaked stuff to a journalist).

As the NYT notes, even low-level government employees are forbidden from using personal devices for work-related tasks — and here's the guy in charge of the entire nation's defense efforts, leaving it all out in the open.

In August last year, according to the reporting, Hegseth used his phone number to join Sleeper.com, a fantasy football and sports betting site, using this clandestine username: "PeteHegseth." He also used his number with an email account that left a bunch of Google Maps reviews, praising a dentist office for its "amazing" staff and a plumber for "fast, honest, and quality work."

At least he's the type to leave a nice review. But Hegseth's flaunting of common-sense privacy practices makes him a sitting duck for hackers.

"If you use your phone for just ordinary daily activities, you are leaving a highly, highly visible digital pathway that even a moderately sophisticated person, let alone a nefarious actor, can follow," Glenn S. Gerstell, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency, told the NYT.

"Phone numbers are like the street address that tell you what house to break into," James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert, told the paper. "Once you get the street address, you get to the house, and there might be locks on the doors, and you ask yourself, 'Do I have the tools to bypass or break the locks?'"

Hegseth's qualifications for the Pentagon job have been seriously called into question ever since he was nominated by Trump. He's allegedly a falling-down drunk, and his former colleagues at Fox News complained that he would show up to work hammered. Hegseth has also been accused of sexual assault.

In March, Hegseth became the center of a national scandal after he shared classified war plans for a bombing campaign in Yemen in a Signal chat with other national security officials that accidentally contained The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. Ironically, during his stint at Fox News, Hegseth said former secretary of state Hillary Clinton should've been jailed for making a comparable mistake when she used her private email server for official communications.

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