WASHINGTON — The White House expressed support Monday for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth following media reports that he shared sensitive military details in another Signal messaging chat, this time with his wife and brother.

Neither the White House nor Hegseth denied that he had shared such information in a second chat, instead focusing their responses on what they called the disgruntled workers whom they blamed for leaking to the media and insisting that no classified information had been disclosed.

“It’s just fake news. They just bring up stories,” President Donald Trump told reporters. “I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing. So you don’t always have friends when you do that.”

The administration’s posture was meant to hold the line against Democratic demands for Hegseth’s firing at a time when the Pentagon is engulfed in turmoil, including the departures of several senior aides and an internal investigation over information leaks.

The White House also tried to deflect attention from the national security implications of the latest Signal revelation by framing it as the outgrowth of an institutional power struggle between Hegseth and the career workforce. But some of the recently departed officials the administration appeared to dismiss as disgruntled were part of Hegseth’s initial inner circle from when he took the job.

The latest news added to questions about the judgment of the embattled Pentagon chief, coming on top of last month’s disclosure of his participation in a Signal chat with top Trump administration leaders in which details about the airstrike against Yemen’s Houthi rebels were shared.

The New York Times reported Sunday that the information shared in a Signal messaging chat with Hegseth’s wife, brother and others was similar to what was communicated in the already disclosed chain with Trump administration officials.

A person familiar with the contents and those who received the messages, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said it included 13 people and was dubbed “Defense Team Huddle.”

White House officials first learned of the second Signal chat from news reports Sunday, according to an official familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

Hegseth, talking to reporters Monday while attending the White House Easter Egg Roll, didn’t address the substance of the allegations or the national security implications they raised but assailed the media.

“They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations,” Hegseth said. “Not going to work with me. Because we’re changing the Defense Department, putting the Pentagon back in the hands of warfighters. And anonymous smears from disgruntled former employees on old news doesn’t matter.”

The Trump administration has struggled in its public explanations about senior officials’ use of Signal, a commercially available app not authorized to be used to communicate sensitive or classified national defense information.

The first chat, set up by national security adviser Mike Waltz, included a number of Cabinet members and came to light because Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was added to the group.

The New York Times reported that the group in the second chat included Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, who is a former Fox News producer, and his brother Phil Hegseth, who was hired at the Pentagon as a Department of Homeland Security liaison and senior adviser.

Over the past week, five officials in Hegseth’s inner circle have departed.

Dan Caldwell, a Hegseth aide; Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg; and Darin Selnick, Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff; were escorted out of the Pentagon as it hunts down leaks of inside information.

While those three initially had been placed on leave pending the investigation, a joint statement shared by Caldwell on X on Saturday said they “still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with.”

Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot announced he was resigning last week, unrelated to the leaks. The Pentagon said, however, that Ullyot was asked to resign.

A fifth close Hegseth aide, chief of staff Joe Kasper, also was leaving, according to two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters. They didn’t say why.