I imagine that this entire administration shares an unspoken mutual understanding that telling Trump the truth about literally anything is more of a nuisance than it’s worth. Hegseth lying to Trump about this is probably factual and probably no one else was even explicitly told about that because they all just correctly assumed that’s what was happening. I’d bet basically everyone there has a story like this that puts them at risk of being thrown under the bus with all of their peers having plausible deniability.