Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) harped on President Donald Trump’s national security officials after a journalist was inadvertently added to an encrypted group chat that discussed military strikes before they occurred — despite his own recent history of secret messages with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch closely allied with Vladimir Putin getting leaked.
Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, dug into CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard, and FBI Director Kash Patel during a hearing Tuesday, after the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg published “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans” on Monday.
Goldberg, who wrote a 2020 hoax story claiming Trump called slain U.S. service members “suckers” and “losers,” reported that National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally added him to a Signal group with the most senior officials in the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Ratcliffe, Gabbard, and others.
Signal, an encrypted messaging platform, is routinely used professionally within the CIA, Ratcliffe told Warner while being questioned before the committee.
Goldberg said he was added into the chat, called “Houthi PC small group,” on March 13 and initially did not think it was real before the U.S. military actually carried out the discussed attacks in Yemen two days later.
Repeatedly calling the app an “unclassified system” that was used to send “classified information” — a claim that Gabbard repeatedly denied — Warner failed to recognize how having his own scandal exposed in 2018 makes him look like a hypocrite:
A Fox News report revealed extensive communications between Warner, who was leading a congressional investigation into the faked Trump-Russia collusion at the time, and Adam Waldman, a lobbyist for Russian billionaire and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska, who was offering the senator access to former British spy and dossier author Christopher Steele.
Screenshots of the messages, dating back to February 2017, were obtained by Fox from a Republican source after they were turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee by Waldman in September 2017.
“Can you talk tomorrow want to get with ur English friend,” Warner texted on March 20, 2017.
“We have so much to discuss u need to be careful but we can help our country,” he said two days later.
“I’m in,” Waldman, whose firm reportedly has ties to Hillary Clinton, replied.
In another message, Warner wrote that he would “rather not have a paper trail” of the communication with Waldman or a potential private meeting with Steele, the creator of the infamous anti-Trump Steele dossier.
Trump reacted to the Fox report exposing Warner’s dealings at the time, writing in a February 2018 X post that the senator is “tied into Crooked Hillary”:
A senior Republican Senate leadership aide called Warner the “biggest hypocrite imaginable” in an exclusive statement to Breitbart News.
“Senator Mark Warner is the biggest hypocrite imaginable. He loves using Signal to advance the Russia Collusion Hoax, then he gets on the fainting couch when Trump’s great security team takes out the terrorist Houthi barbarians,” the aide said.
After the senator called on Hegseth and Waltz to resign over the group chat incident, X users slammed him for his own leaked messages:
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