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Heather Cox Richardson ·
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March 26, 2025 (Wednesday)
Monday’s astounding story that the most senior members of President Donald Trump’s administration planned military strikes on Yemen over an unsecure commercial messaging app, on which they had included national security reporter and editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, has escalated over the past two days.
On Monday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth looked directly at a reporter’s camera and said: “Nobody was texting war plans.” Throughout the day Tuesday, the administration doubled down on this assertion, apparently convinced that Goldberg would not release the information they knew he had. They tried to spin the story by attacking Goldberg, suggesting he had somehow hacked into the conversation, although the app itself tracked that National Security Advisor Michael Waltz had added him.
Various administration figures, including Trump, insisted that the chat contained nothing classified. At a scheduled hearing yesterday before the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats, during which senators took the opportunity to dig into the Signal scandal, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said: “There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.” Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe agreed: “My communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.” In the afternoon, Trump told reporters: “The attack was totally successful. It was, I guess, from what I understand, took place during. And it wasn’t classified information. So this was not classified.”
After Gabbard said she would defer to the secretary of defense and the National Security Council about what information should have been classified, Senator Angus King (I-ME) seemed taken aback. “You’re the head of the intelligence community. You’re supposed to know about classifications,” he pointed out. He continued, “So your testimony very clearly today is that nothing was in that set of texts that were classified.... If that’s the case, please release that whole text stream so that the public can have a view of what actually transpired on this discussion. It’s hard for me to believe that targets and timing and weapons would not have been classified.”
Meanwhile, reporters were also digging into the story. James LaPorta of CBS News reported that an internal bulletin from the National Security Agency warned staff in February 2025 not to use Signal for sensitive information, citing concerns that the app was vulnerable to Russian hackers. A former White House official told Maggie Miller and Dana Nickel of Politico, “Their personal phones are all hackable, and it’s highly likely that foreign intelligence services are sitting on their phones watching them type the sh*t out."
Tuesday night, American Oversight, a nonprofit organization focusing on government transparency, filed a lawsuit against Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—all of whom were also on the Signal chain—and the National Archives for violating the Federal Records Act, and suggested the administration has made other attempts to get around the law. It notes that the law requires the preservation of federal records.
Today it all got worse.
It turned out that administration officials’ conviction that Goldberg wouldn’t publicly release receipts was wrong. This morning, Goldberg and Shane Harris, who had worked together on the initial story, wrote: “The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions. There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.”
The Atlantic published screenshots of the message chat.
The screenshots make clear that administration officials insisting that there was nothing classified on the chat were lying. Hegseth uploaded the precise details of the attack before it happened, leaving American military personnel vulnerable. The evidence is damning.
The fury of Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), an Army pilot who was nearly killed in Iraq, was palpable. “Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar,” she wrote. “This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately.” Legal analyst Barb McQuade pointed out that it didn't even matter if the information was classified: it is “a crime to remove national defense information from its proper place through gross negligence…. Signal chat is not a proper place.”
The screenshots also raise a number of other issues. They made it clear that administration officials have been using Signal for other conversations: Waltz at one point typed: “As we stated in the first PC….” Using a nongovernment system is likely an attempt to get around the laws that require the preservation of public records. The screenshots also show that Signal was set to erase the messages on the chat after 4 weeks.
The messages reveal that President Trump was not part of the discussion of whether to make the airstrikes, a deeply troubling revelation that raises the question of who is in charge at the White House. As the conversation about whether to attack took place, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote about Trump’s reasoning that attacking the Houthis in Yemen would “send a message”: “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.” Later, he texted to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again. Let’s just make sure our messaging is tight here. And if there are things we can do upfront to minimize risk to Saudi oil facilities we should do it.”
Hegseth responded: “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.”
The decision to make the strikes then appears to have been made by deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who ended the discussion simply by invoking the president: “As I heard it,” he wrote, “the president was clear: green light, but we soon make it clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement.” If Europe doesn’t cover the cost of the attack, “then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”
“Agree,” Hegseth messaged, and the attack was on.
Also missing from the group message was the person who is currently acting as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Christopher Grady. In February, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., who took on the position in 2023 having served more than 3,000 hours as a fighter pilot, including 130 hours in combat, and commanded the Pacific Air Forces, which provides air power for U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region; the U.S. Air Forces Central Command, responsible for protecting U.S. security interests in Africa through the Persian Gulf; the 31st Fighter Wing, covering the southern region of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); the 8th Fighter Wing, covering southeast Asia; U.S. Air Force Weapons School for advanced training in weapons and tactics for officers; and 78th Fighter Squadron.
CONTINUED
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This gal reads Trump like a dime novel.
