Does Pentagon Chief Hegseth Have a Russian Email Account?

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is under scrutiny after reports surfaced that he might have opened an account with the Russian email service mail.ru.

This comes as a new twist as the Signal chat scandal involving senior Trump administration officials continues to unfold.

Following reports that top advisers to US President Donald Trump used a commercial communication app to discuss a military strike on Yemen and included a journalist in the chat by mistake, reporters from the German magazine Der Spiegel questioned how easily accessible the personal data of key US officials might be.

Through an editorial investigation, they discovered that mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and even passwords belonging to high-ranking US officials had been found online.

Among those exposed were Hegseth, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, putting the security practices of Trump’s top security officials into question.

Journalists used public databases – including those pertaining to data breaches – to uncover the information. The leaked contacts were linked to various online platforms, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Dropbox, WhatsApp and Signal.

For Hegseth’s data, Der Spiegel reporters simply contacted a commercial provider of contact information primarily used by companies for sales, marketing and recruitment purposes.

Other Topics of Interest

US Drone Warfare Shifts Focus to Rapid Scaling and Adaptive Tech Inspired by Ukraine

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth emphasized that global drone superiority relies on the ability to scale and adapt quickly week by week, a lesson the Pentagon is actively adopting from Ukraine.

The reporters submitted a link to his LinkedIn profile and received Hegseth’s Gmail address, phone number, and other details in return. The same technique was used to obtain Waltz’s information, which was found alongside passwords in open databases connected to Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp.

Gabbard, meanwhile, appeared to take more precautions, but journalists still located her email addresses on WikiLeaks and Reddit.

Hegseth’s alleged Russian email address

After the investigation, Finnish disinformation researcher Pekka Kallioniemi published a screenshot from an alleged database compiling past data breaches that purportedly showed an email address owned by Hegseth under the mail.ru domain.

He questioned on social media why the Pentagon chief would have a Russian email account, though he did not confirm whether it was genuine or fabricated.

The X post sparked questions online. Some users suggested the email address might have been created by outsiders to discredit Hegseth, while others speculated that it’s a joke.

Several hours later, Kallioniemi said the information “was fetched from some of the public leak databases going around [the] internet.”

“This particular leak is from 2016, so the account was created before that. The password used was consistent with other similar accounts allegedly linked to Hegseth,” Kallioniemi wrote.

As further proof supporting Kallioniemi’s claims, an X user named antii said that the password for [email protected] matches the one used by [email protected], an account linked to Hegseth’s alma mater. The user also shared a screenshot from the LeakPeek database as evidence.

Kyiv Post determined that the domain @alumni.princeton.edu is legitimate as it is used by alumni of Princeton University, according to the university’s site. However, Kyiv Post cannot determine if the account belonged to Hegseth himself. 

According to Breach Directory, a service that compiles past data breaches, the password for [email protected] – which supposedly has the same password as [email protected] – was leaked twice in two data breach incidents, once in 2016 and once in 2019.

Official responses, counter arguments

The White House has downplayed the leak. A National Security Council official stated that Waltz’s accounts were changed before he joined Congress in 2019. However, Der Spiegel reported that his contact details and messaging accounts remained active when the investigation was published.

X user antii later claimed that Hegseth’s email was tied to a Russian phone number and a Proton Mail account.

However, Timofey Vi, a Russian expert from the Global Fact-Checking Network, challenged the claims on social media, saying the account “had never existed before.”

To prove his point, he registered a similar email himself and showed a screenshot of his Russian phone number during the process.

Mail.ru’s official policy prohibits duplicate email addresses, making it unlikely that a previously existing account could be recreated.

Despite this, some social media users remained convinced that the number originally belonged to Hegseth.