Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth does a television interview outside the White House on March 21. Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee, including Rep. Jared Golden, D-2nd District, are calling for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to testify before Congress following news that he and other senior officials shared war plans in a group chat that included a reporter.

In a letter Wednesday to committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., Golden requested that Hegseth be brought before the House to answer questions about the leak on the record. The letter came a day after other reported members of the group chat were grilled by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“We believe there is a pronounced urgency to the situation given the gravity of the questions raised by the reported events,” Golden wrote in the letter. “Therefore, we ask that you schedule this hearing as soon as possible during the upcoming three-week congressional work period.”

Hegseth and several other high-level Trump administration officials discussed then-upcoming attacks in Yemen on Signal, a commercial chat app. Signal is an encrypted messaging app capable of setting chats to be deleted after a certain amount of time. Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, was included in the chat — apparently by mistake — and learned about the plan hours before it began.

The letter, signed by all 27 Democrats on the committee, also charges that using the app may have violated federal record-keeping laws in addition to breaching confidentiality rules.

The hearing request came the same day The Atlantic released more complete transcripts of the text exchange. In screenshots, a user named “Pete Hegseth” shared the precise times and types of weapons to be used in the attacks.

Hegseth told reporters on Tuesday that “nobody’s texting war plans.”

A spokesperson for Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, referred questions about his next steps to a Tuesday interview on CNN, in which he pushed back on claims that the information shared was not classified.

“It doesn’t pass the straight-face test that somehow none of this was classified,” King said in the interview, which was taped before The Atlantic released the screenshots. “These are the top national security officials in the country, and they were on a text chain that the Pentagon themselves, ironically, had said ‘Don’t use for this kind of purpose.’ And they were discussing national security affairs.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has called the incident “extremely troubling and serious.”

A spokesperson for Collins said she still plans to submit questions to Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, including questions about the Signal group chat, following her absence from the Tuesday hearing. Collins was and remains sick with norovirus, for which she is receiving fluids, her office said.

Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, said Hegseth is deflecting the mistake instead of owning it and “needs to resign — or be fired — immediately.”

“This reckless behavior didn’t just create a national security crisis. It put our troops in danger,” Pingree said in a written statement.