Outrage after White House accidentally texts journalist war plans: ‘Huge screw-up’

 

Outrage after White House accidentally texts journalist war plans: ‘Huge screw-up’

 

Security leak triggers bipartisan anger after Atlantic reveals officials inadvertently broadcast highly sensitive military plans

 

Joseph Gedeon in Washington

Tue 25 Mar 2025 00.52 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/24/journalist-trump-yemen-war-chat-reaction

 

A catastrophic security leak is triggering bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that senior Trump administration officials accidentally broadcast highly sensitive military plans through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.

 

On the Senate floor on Monday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time” and urged Republicans to seek a “full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created and how we can avoid it in the future”.

 

“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally,” the Delaware senator Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”

 

The New York representative Pat Ryan called the incident “Fubar” (an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition”) and threatened to launch his own congressional investigation “IMMEDIATELY” if House Republicans fail to act.

 

According to reporting in the Atlantic, the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally invited into a Signal chat group with more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials including Vice-President JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, national security adviser, Mike Waltz, secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and others.

 

The reporting exposes not only a historic mishandling of national security information but a potentially illegal communication chain in which sensitive military plans about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen were casually shared in an encrypted group chat with automatic delete functions.

 

“It has made us look weak to our adversaries,” the California congressman Ro Khanna told the Guardian. “We need to take cybersecurity far more seriously and I look forward to leading on that.”

 

As the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes has overseen countless classified briefings. But the Signal group chat leak of impending war plans has made him “horrified”.

 

“If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way,’ he said. “These individuals know the calamitous risks of transmitting classified information across unclassified systems, and they also know that if a lower-ranking official under their command did what is described here, they would likely lose their clearance and be subject to criminal investigation.”

 

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, posted on social media: “This administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.”

 

Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic minority leader, called for a “substantive investigation into this unacceptable and irresponsible national security breach”, saying the leak was “completely outrageous and shocks the conscience”.

 

The Republican senator John Cornyn described the incident more colloquially, telling reporters it was “a huge screw-up” and suggesting that “the interagency would look at that” to determine how such a significant security lapse occurred.

 

The White House confirmed the leak. The national security council spokesperson, Brian Hughes, told the Guardian: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”

 

But the White House attempted to defend the communications, with Hughes describing the messages as an example of “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,” Hughes said.

 

But most lawmakers don’t see it that way. The Rhode Island senator Jack Reed said on X that the incident represented “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen”.

 

The echoes of past document controversies are also coming back to haunt some of the senior officials in the chat, who previously criticized similar security breaches. In 2024, Waltz – the current national security adviser – had said “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.”

 

In 2023, Hegseth had his own critique of the Biden administration handling classified documents “flippantly”, remarking on Fox News that “If at the very top there’s no accountability”, then we have “two tiers of justice”.

 

When pressed by a reporter about the group chat on Monday, Hegseth said that “nobody was texting war plans” and attacked Goldberg as “deceitful and highly discredited” without refuting any specifics from the Atlantic story.

 

In response to the accidental leak, Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, called on Hegseth to resign or be fired from his position as defense secretary.

 

In a statement, Martin said: “It’s crystal clear that our men and women in uniform deserve better – and that our national security cannot be left in Hegseth’s incompetent and unqualified hands.”

 

The bombshell revelation also potentially violated federal record-keeping laws. The Federal Records Act, which mandates preservation of government communications, typically mandates that records are kept for two years, and the Signal messages were scheduled to automatically delete in under four weeks.

 

The New York Republican representative Mike Lawler summed up the bipartisan consensus: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels – and certainly not to those without security clearances. Period.”