The Atlantic reported that its top editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a group chat where Trump’s national security team plotted an attack on Houthi militants in Yemen.
Top officials in the Trump administration discussed highly sensitive military planning using an unclassified chat application that mistakenly included a journalist, the White House acknowledged Monday, a development that swiftly drew criticism from Democrats and Washington’s national security establishment.
Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said the message thread revealed in an extraordinary report by the Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, “appears to be authentic,” and that administration officials were “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
The “inadvertent number” belonged to Goldberg, whose article details a robust policy discussion that occurred in the lead-up to a March 15 military operation targeting Yemen’s Houthi militants. Goldbergreported being added to the group chat, which occurred on the encrypted messaging platform Signal, by President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. Other participants appeared to include Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and several other senior aides, the Atlantic article says.
Hughes, the National Security Council spokesman, characterized the discussion as “a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials” executing Trump’s national security strategy. But the disclosure immediately raised questions about how the administration has discussed classified national security matters and whether anyone will be disciplined.
Senior Trump administration officials have warned in recent days that they will investigate unauthorized leaks to journalists, citing reporting in a number of publications. Several of them also for years criticized the handling of classified information by Democrats in other cases.
Trump, who did not appear to be included in the group chat, distanced himself from the imbroglio, saying after the article’s publication “I don’t know anything about it” and “I’m not a big fan of the Atlantic.” Goldberg invoked Trump’s ire during the president’s first term in office, when the publication reported in 2020 that he had privately disparaged U.S. service members who died in wartime
Hegseth, who according to the Atlantic’s report disclosed to the group how the Yemen strike would take shape before it occurred, forcefully denied any wrongdoing and attacked Goldberg in personal terms — calling him a “deceitful” journalist who “peddles in garbage.”
“Nobody was texting war plans,” Hegseth told reporters after landing in Hawaii late Monday, “and that’s all I have to say about that.”
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce dismissed questions about the group chat. “I have two very short things to say to you. First is that we will not comment on the secretary’s deliberative conversations; and secondly, that you should contact the White House,” she told reporters at the State Department.
The CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment.
Monday’s revelation was greeted by Democrats with exasperation and anger, with at least one lawmaker, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (Mississippi), demanding an FBI investigation. The Justice Department declined to comment.
“If true, this story represents one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen,” Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the Senate Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement. “Military operations need to be handled with utmost discretion, using approved, secure lines of communication, because American lives are on the line. The carelessness shown by President Trump’s cabinet is stunning and dangerous.”
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) and other Republicans most loyal to Trump downplayed those claims, with the House leader asserting that the leak showed “top-level officials doing their job” and “no one was jeopardized because of it.” The administration had “acknowledged it was a mistake, and they’ll tighten up and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Johnson added. GOP lawmakers withnational security oversight responsibilities acknowledged being concerned about the Atlantic report but said they would reserve judgment until more details become available.
Goldberg reported that he received an invitation to connect on Signal on March 11 from an account identified as belonging to Waltz. Goldberg, who uses his initials “JG” on the messaging platform, wrote in his article that while he assumed it was the president’s national security adviser, he also wondered whether the unsolicited outreach might be someone else pretending to be him.
Two days later, Goldberg wrote, he received a notification through Signal that he was to be included in a group chat titled “Houthi PC small group,” an apparent reference to a principals committee meeting that typically includes Cabinet members and other senior national security officials. Several of the accounts appeared to designate subordinates as their representatives, including Andy Baker, Vance’s national security adviser, and Dan Caldwell, a senior aide to Hegseth.
Vance, according to the Atlantic article, said in the group chat that he thought the Trump administration was “making a mistake” by launching what U.S. military officials have since declared an open-ended operation against the Houthis. The vice president noted that about 3 percent of U.S. trade runs through the Suez Canal, where the Houthis have concentrated attacks on commercial shipping transiting the Red Sea, and that there is “real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary.”
Hegseth, according to the Atlantic’s report, responded a short time later that he understood Vance’s concerns and fully supported the vice president raising them with Trump. The defense secretary then added that the “messaging is going to be tough no matter what” because “nobody knows who the Houthis are,” and so those who will announce the operation should aim to convince the American public that “1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” Those were apparent references to the Biden administration not being able to stop Houthi attacks, which the militant group began in response to Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, and Tehran’s long-standing backing of the group.
Contrary to Vance, Hegseth advocated taking action soon, saying there was a risk the Trump administration’s plans to attack could leak publicly or that Israel could attack the militants first, leaving the administration unable to “start this on our own terms,” Goldberg recounted in his article.
As the plan to conduct an attack on the Houthis moved ahead, Hegseth shared details that Goldberg said he believed could put at risk the safety of U.S. troops or intelligence officials, especially those deployed in the Middle East. Those details, the Atlantic article says, allegedly included the specific weapons to be used and in which sequence the Houthi targets would be hit.
Hegseth, a National Guard veteran and former Fox News personality who has not previously held senior positions in government, has said repeatedly that he will bring accountability back to the Pentagon. Before joining the Trump administration, he skewered Justice Department officials in 2023 for not doing more to scrutinize Joe Biden’s handling of classified information when he was vice president, saying that “if at the very top there is no accountability,” there are “two tiers of justice that exist.”
Signal’s encryption is quite strong, but the platform is not suitable for highly sensitive, classified conversations for two reasons, said Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University. First, he said, Signal runs on “fundamentally insecure devices” — smartphones and laptop computers attached to the internet that may be “subject to all sorts of attacks against the devices that have nothing to do with the security of the software.”
“If the device is compromised, everything that uses the device is compromised,” Blaze said.
Second, Signal has a feature allowing stored messages to disappear after a time specified by the user — from minutes to weeks. A foreign intelligence service or another skilled agency, should they obtain a phone involved in a sensitive conversation, may be able to access the stored messages, Blaze said.
“Signal does as much as it can to delete messages when disappearing messages expire, but it’s still running on a fundamentally vulnerable platform,” he said.
The seriousness of the issue should not be dismissed, said Kevin Carroll, a lawyer who specializes in national security cases and previously worked as a CIA officer. Presuming the Trump officials did disclose and discuss classified material while weighing the Yemen operation, as the Atlantic article suggests, the Signal group chat would appear to violate federal laws governing the handling of secret information, Carroll said.
“I have defended service members accused of violating the Espionage Act through gross negligence for far, far less,” Carroll said. “If these people were junior uniformed personnel, they would be court-martialed.”
Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior CIA and NSA official, said top administration officials like those involved in the group chat have U.S. government-approved communications with them 24 hours a day, even when traveling.
“Back in my time, it would have included secure phone, computer and video teleconference. In the office and at home,” said Pfeiffer, who also was senior director of the White House Situation Room. “And there was a travel kit that would be with them on the road and in the air.”
Among those who weighed in Monday was Hillary Clinton, whose use of an unclassified email server upended her presidential campaign against Trump in 2016. Sharing the story on social media, she said: “You have got to be kidding me.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), a member of the Senate Armed Services committee, urged his Republican colleagues to treat the issue with the “high degree of seriousness it warrants.” He added: “It seems so appallingly fundamental. I’m searching for words to describe how staggering it is.”
Sen. Mark R. Warner (Virginia), the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, wrote on X that the Trump administration is “playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.”
On Tuesday, the committee will hear testimony from at least two of the officials implicated in the Signal leak — Gabbard and Ratcliffe — who are scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill to offer their assessments of the top national security threats facing the United States. “Expect this to come up in tomorrow’s hearing,” a Warner spokeswoman said.
Reactions from Republicans were more muted, but some also voiced concerns.
Sen. Tom Cotton (Arkansas), chairman of the Intelligence Committee, declined to comment when asked whether he is concerned by the administration’s apparent use of Signal to communicate about military operations and whether Congress should investigate the matter.
Rep. Michael Lawler (R-New York) said on X: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels — and certainly not to those without security clearances, including reporters. Period.”
“Safeguards must be put in place,” he added, “to ensure this never happens again.”
Mariana Alfaro, Liz Goodwin, Missy Ryan, John Hudson and Perry Stein contributed to this report.
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