The Pentagon’s inspector general, Steven Stebbins, said late last week that he will open an investigation into “Signalgate,” the portmanteau for the scandal created last month when a team of high-ranking Trump officials used the commercial messaging app Signal to discuss real-time war plans, in what amounted to a massive breach of security.

The investigation will focus on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s use of the app, rather than secure government channels, to discuss detailed information about a military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen and whether doing so was in line with Department of Defense policy.

“Additionally, we will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements,” the announcement reads.

It’s the first indication of any kind of potential administration repercussions for the dozen or so Cabinet officials and surrogates who were involved in the chat. In fact, the messaging so far has been largely the opposite: The White House has attempted to paper over the severity of the bombshell revelation, even though President Donald Trump and his administration have long claimed to have no tolerance for anything that could jeopardize national security.

The scandal was revealed when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, published a March 24 article in which he said he had been added to a chat on the messaging app Signal that involved 18 high-ranking administration officials, including Hegseth and national security adviser Michael Waltz. The group chat included details about an attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen that has since been carried out, including times, types of aircraft, and targets. The Atlantic reported that the National Security Council authenticated the text chain.

Some of the messages were set to automatically delete one to four weeks after they were sent, a function that must be manually turned on by the creator of the chat, even though the Federal Records Act requires officials to preserve their communications.

It was an objectively stunning leak. But the White House raced to downplay the report.

Trump has said Waltz, who added Goldberg to the Signal group, “learned a lesson.” Waltz himself echoed the idea that there had been “lessons learned” when he appeared on Fox News, and admitted: “We made a mistake.” He also said, “We’re not going to use Signal anymore.” (Politico reported last week that there are at least 20 Signal chats that officials use to discuss sensitive foreign policy work.)

Officials have painted the whole incident as a somewhat unremarkable error, with several brushing off what it meant that information about a military operation had been shared in the venue and delving into the semantics of whether it was classified.

Trump and his allies in the Republican Party are known for loudly clamoring for probes — and punishment — when it comes to the handling, or alleged mishandling, of sensitive information by their perceived enemies. In 2016, a cornerstone of Trump’s presidential campaign was going after opponent Hillary Clinton for her use of a personal email server while she was secretary of state. (The FBI investigated her, and she was never charged with any wrongdoing.)

More recently, just 10 days before Goldberg published his report, Gabbard devoted an entire thread on X (formerly Twitter) to the need to stop leaks that can compromise national security. She specifically lamented leaks that come from “within” the intelligence community.

Even if the information in the chat was not technically classified, some experts told HuffPost that does not change how risky the conversation was: Sensitive details about a strike that had yet to occur were shared on a messaging platform that could have been infiltrated by political adversaries or hackers.

It remains to be seen what, if any, punishment those involved in “Signalgate” may face. But legal experts and former members of the military said the U.S. has a long history of unequal punishments when it comes to security breaches and information leaks — and high-ranking officials are actually the ones who are most likely to avoid reprimand.

‘Need-To-Know’

It’s unclear how much appetite there actually is for consequences, or even answers, within the administration.

Previously, FBI Director Kash Patel declined comment to Congress when asked if he would open a probe into the incident, and Attorney General Pam Bondi expressed scant interest in pursuing an investigation. During a press conference at the Justice Department, she instead offered commentary about Clinton, former President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. (Both Clinton and Joe Biden came under investigation for their handling of classified documents, but were never charged.)

But the administration is not the only channel by which the public can get answers.

The public watchdog group American Oversight is suing the administration, alleging violations of the Federal Records Act. The group says the Signal chat amounted to a secret back channel, and the judge overseeing the lawsuit has ordered the Defense Department to preserve all records as the case plays out in Washington, D.C. A status hearing in federal court is slated for this week. American Oversight also filed Freedom of Information Act requests for information on Signal usage at 25 federal agencies.

The lawsuit over the text leak focuses on retention and transparency. But Liz Hempowicz, deputy executive director of American Oversight, said the whole ordeal also appears to be a “textbook case of what the Espionage Act was written to prevent.”

The Espionage Act makes unauthorized retention or distribution of sensitive information illegal and is punishable by fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years. Critically, the prosecution of those charges does not depend on whether the information that is disclosed is classified.

“If a junior enlisted service member had leaked strike plans to unauthorized recipients, they’d already be in custody,” Hempowicz said. “But when it’s a Cabinet official, the White House shrugs — and history suggests that will be the end of it.”

Alaina Kupec, a retired U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer with experience planning strategic missions in Yemen and Iran, said her time in the military taught her that the type of information Hegseth disclosed is generally only shared on a strict “need-to-know basis” in order to protect the mission. Not everyone on the Signal chat, especially aides (not to mention Goldberg, who apparently no one realized was in the group), would need to know the precise timing of strikes, she said.

Hegseth and Waltz have defended the use of Signal for their group discussion, citing a need to move quickly. Typically, classified or sensitive information is disclosed in what is known as a SCIF, or a sensitive compartmented information facility. SCIFs are rooms that are kept secure and private, often with some sort of guard or official who has assessed the space for outside surveillance. Communications are classified and then are passed through SCIF devices. Calls, including group calls, can be held on secured lines, and a secure email system is also available.

“Before planes take off, that circle should be closed as tightly as possible, whether it’s time-sensitive or not,” Kupec said. “There is a government system created for them to communicate on. … Even if Signal is encrypted, there’s no system that isn’t plagued by eavesdropping concerns.”

She said the claim that officials were in a rush sounded like an excuse.

“As I read the chat, at the end of the day, this was the secretary of defense showing off to his friends that he knew information and he wanted to look cool. That’s all that was, pure and simple. That was his first time dealing with something very sensitive and he was giddy and excited and sharing it with his friends,” Kupec said. “Like a child on a school ground having this secret he wanted to share with his friends. You just don’t share that level of information with that broad of an audience in an insecure way.”

Kupec said not everyone could act so carelessly without significant consequences.

“Had that been me, as a junior officer who did that, my career would have been over and I would have been prosecuted. Without question,” she said.

‘Different Spanks For Different Ranks’

Modern history has shown that there is indeed a disparity in how people at different levels are treated when they go against protocol or leak sensitive information.

Retired Major General John Altenburg, the former designated senior ethics official for the Army and a former prosecutor with decades of experience in national security and oversight matters, said there are often “different spanks for different ranks” in the military.

In the case of Signalgate, he said he was “no apologist” for anyone involved in the chat. But a leaker’s intent can make a big difference in how they are prosecuted or punished, Altenburg told HuffPost.

He noted that both Waltz and Hegseth have said that looping in Goldberg was an accident and an error, and therefore he doesn’t believe the Espionage Act — which does not differentiate between accidental and intentional leaks — should apply.

“Once the strikes occurred, it was OBE, or overcome by events,” he said. In other words, once the strikes happened, any concern that Hegseth may have jeopardized national security or inadvertently exposed U.S. interests was a moot point.

But in other cases involving the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, even when disclosures were made well after the relevant missions were undertaken or military strategies were deployed, the federal government has extended stiff penalties. And while not every case of leaking can be compared one-to-one, it is notable, Hempowicz said, how often “high-ranking officials face minimal consequences, if any.”

Take, for example, the case of Daniel Hale, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst who leaked top-secret documents to a journalist about America’s drone strike program in Afghanistan after he left the military in 2013.

It had been his job to track and coordinate drone killings of enemy combatants, but what he saw was the rampant, often indiscriminate killing of civilians caught in drone crosshairs. Hale’s attorneys said he leaked top-secret information out of altruism, not to boost his ego or glory.

The U.S. government didn’t see it that way. It charged Hale under the Espionage Act for disclosing information without authorization. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years in federal prison.

Now consider James Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during President Barack Obama’s first term. Cartwright was accused of leaking top-secret information to reporters at Newsweek and The New York Times about a joint cyberwar attack mission being led by the U.S. and Israel against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Details about the operation ended up in a journalist’s book. The government said Cartwright lied to investigators when asked whether he had discussed classified details of the operation with another reporter. Emails showed that he had, prosecutors said, but after a lengthy investigation, he was never charged for disclosing information without authorization.

But he wasn’t charged under the Espionage Act. Instead, he was charged with making a false statement. He pleaded guilty to lying and insisted his “only goal in talking to the reporters was to protect American interests and lives.”

Cartwright remarked in 2016 after pleading guilty: “I love my country and continue to this day to do everything I can to defend it.”

Prosecutors sought two years imprisonment for Cartwright. His defense attorneys asked for a year of probation plus community service. In 2017, Obama pardoned him before he could be formally sentenced.

Meanwhile, former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning spent seven years in prison after she was convicted of sharing state and diplomatic cables with WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. Manning would have been in prison for 35 years, as prosecutors recommended, but her sentence was commuted in 2017. Assange was hit with over a dozen charges under the Espionage Act and pleaded guilty last year to receiving and publishing secrets. As part of his plea deal, he was allowed to return home to Australia without serving time in the U.S.

Contractors and analysts like Reality Winner and Henry Frese have been sent to prison for leaking sensitive information to the press. Winner, who leaked a top-secret report about Russian meddling in the 2016 election, was sentenced to five years in prison but was released after two years on good behavior. Frese, once a civilian counterrorism consultant for the Pentagon, was sentenced to a little under three years in prison after he was convicted of sharing sensitive secrets about foreign weapons programs with reporters, one of whom was a girlfriend he was trying to impress, according to his lawyers.

Alternatively, in the case of one high-ranking official, former CIA Director David Petraeus, Petraeus avoided Espionage Act charges altogether after he was investigated for disclosing classified information to his biographer, with whom he was also having an affair. Petraeus gave his biographer access to binders packed with sensitive and classified information including old military strategies and notes on discussions with the president.

The reason Petraeus never faced Espionage Act charges remains unclear. Sources told The Washington Post in 2016 that tensions were high at the Justice Department over this decision. Many prosecutors worried a light touch against Petraeus would make it far harder to prosecute leakers down the line. It did not.

In the end, Petraeus pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information, avoided any steeper charges and was sentenced to two years’ probation. He also paid a fine of $100,000.

Around that same time, John Kiriakou, a former CIA counterterrorism officer who exposed the Bush administration’s torture program and revealed the name of a covert agent to a reporter, noted the double standard.

He had been charged under the Espionage Act and sentenced to just under three years.

“Both Petraeus and I disclosed undercover identities — or confirmed one in my case — that were never published. I spent two years in prison; he gets two years’ probation,” Kiriakou told Vice in 2015.

This is the paradox that has always plagued the military, Kupec said.

“There’s always a double standard for those that are in higher authority. They have the political connections and capacity to excuse themselves and wash away their sins. The White House considers this case closed on their part but this is why we have a separation of powers. [The White House] should not be the final arbiters of what’s legal or not,” she said.