Congressional Republicans acknowledged that top officials in Donald Trump’s administration badly fumbled by inadvertently sharing highly sensitive national security information with a reporter for The Atlantic Magazine on the messaging app Signal.
“Sounds like a huge screwup. I mean, is there any other way to describe it?” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters on Monday. “I don’t think you should use Signal for classified information.”
“Somebody fucked up,” Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Montana) added bluntly, while Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) offered the Trump administration some basic messaging tips.
“You got to know who you’re sending your text to,” he told HuffPost.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, said in a story published earlier on Monday that Trump national security adviser Michael Waltz accidentally added him to a emoji-filled group chat on Signal with other top Trump administration officials discussing U.S. military strikes in Yemen that took place last week.
In addition to Waltz, Goldberg said the conversation included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who shared detailed war plans, as well as Vice President JD Vance; Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Goldberg wrote, disclosing he left the conversation at that point.
The breathtaking story sent national security experts and Democratic lawmakers into a frenzy. Many said that Hegseth and Waltz, who added Goldberg to the chat, should resign or be fired, while others called on the Trump administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to launch an investigation.
“In my 30 years of experience working with the Intelligence Community, I have never before seen such horrifying incompetence in the securing of our nation’s intelligence,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wrote in another social media post.
Some Republicans expressed similar concerns about the national security breach.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it “an extremely troubling and serious matter.”
“Obviously, there needs to be some accountability,” added Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in an interview with HuffPost.
Even Republicans who defend nearly every Trump administration move struggled to come up with a fulsome response.
“Do I wish it hadn’t happened? Of course,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said. “Do they wish it hadn’t happened? Of course. But this is not keeping the American people up at night.”
“Obviously, a mistake was made,” he added. “But mistakes happen, and this is, trust me, this is not going to lead to the apocalypse, OK?”
Hegseth, who worked as a Fox News host before being confirmed to lead the Pentagon, claimed that no war plans were shared in the Signal group chat. He accused Goldberg, a highly respected journalist, of being “deceitful” and “discredited” during a conversation with reporters in Hawaii.
But National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes confirmed the messaging thread was real in an earlier statement on Monday.
“This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” he wrote in the statement. “The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security.”
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