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Former Fox News morning show host Pete Hegseth may have the command over the Department of Defense, but he apparently does not have command of the English language.

Earlier this year, we found out that, according to the woman who claimed Hegseth sexually assaulted her (and whom he paid $50,000), the right-wing TV personality and war crimes enthusiast does not know what “no” means.

On Thursday, we learned that the Christian nationalist also does not know what “exonerated” means.

At least that is the inescapable conclusion one has to reach after reading a report from DOD’s inspector general, which found that Hegseth, ahead of an air strike on Yemen earlier this year, “created a risk to operational security” that could have led to harm to the US pilots who carried out the mission.

Congressional lawmakers had requested the investigation after Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic revealed earlier this year that he was added to a chat group on the messaging app Signal in which Hegseth revealed details of the attack.

And because sending out sensitive national security information to reporters on a commercially available app can hardly be described as maintaining operational security, the report also noted that the man who said that American “warfighters are entitled to be led by the best and most capable leaders,” did not comply with DOD rules prohibiting the use of a personal device for official business.

While the strike was successful and Hegseth’s disregard for the rules did not end up costing the lives of the pilots sent on that mission, “Signalgate” was a major embarrassment for the Trump administration and for the former Fox & Friends host in particular.

However, instead of offering some contrition for his carelessness, Hegseth believes that the report’s (damning) finding somehow absolved him of wrongdoing.

“No classified information. Total exoneration. Case closed,” he tweeted on Wednesday when details of the report had leaked.

Is the case closed, though?

Let’s see what the report actually said.

“Based on our review, we concluded that some information the Secretary sent from his personal cell phone on Signal on March 15, 2025, matched the operational information USCENTCOM sent and classified as SECRET//NOFORN,” it stated.

Specifically, Hegseth sent “nonpublic DoD information identifying the quantity and strike times of manned US aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes.”

Finally, the report makes it clear that the only reason Hegseth, who refused to sit down with investigators, was not in much more serious trouble is a technicality, in that he has “the authority to determine the level of classification for all DOD information.”

In other words, if anybody else in the Pentagon had sent the same information, they would have found themselves in hot water.

And, of course, the same Republicans who were giving Hegseth a pass for sending this information to a group chat from a private phone through a commercial messaging app (that was set to delete some of the messages, which made the job of investigators more difficult) lost their minds a few years ago when Hillary Clinton did something similar (without endangering the lives of US troops).

To sum it all up, there is no “exoneration” to be found for Hegseth in this report, just evidence of his lackadaisical handling of information that would have helped a hostile force to target American pilots.