One day after the revelation of a shocking security breach from top Trump administration officials, the White House is digging in and hoping it can convince Americans to dismiss the unprecedented lapse media-driven partisan squabbling even as Democrats are calling for resignations.
On Monday, The Atlantic reported that White House national security adviser Mike Waltz had inadvertently invited the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, into a Signal group chat bearing the name of “Houthi PC small group” on March 11, just days before Trump ordered the airstrikes.
The account detailed so-called “war plans” and the fact a journalist was let into the conversation raised alarms.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats slammed what they saw as rank negligence from Trump’s handpicked team, describing them as either unqualified or incompetent in their conduct as documented by The Atlantic.
“I think it’s clear that Secretary Hegseth is not ready for prime time, but he has the capacity to undermine the security of the United States,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a member on the Armed Services Committee, told The Independent.
Waltz told colleagues in the group — including — Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, plus Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator, Steve Witkoff, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller — that the group was being set up as a “principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours.”
According to the magazine’s top editor, that’s exactly what it was used for, giving him a close look at how the Trump administration’s top national security brass discussed the plans for the first major military action of the 47th president’s new term.
National Security Council Spokesman Brian Hughes later confirmed the authenticity of the messages Goldberg had received, making it clear that what the veteran journalist had witnessed was a shocking breach of protocol that led to highly sensitive national defense information discussed on an application that has never been cleared for use in discussing classified matters.
Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence got a chance to press two participants on the Signal chat — Gabbard and Ratcliffe — about their conduct during the panel’s annual Worldwide Threats hearing.
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, somewhat puzzlingly refused to say where she’d been included in the chat group under questioning from Virginia senator Mark Warner, the committee’s vice-chair. But Ratcliffe, who served as Director of National Intelligence during Trump’s first term after defending him on the House Intelligence Committee during the first of the then-45th president’s two impeachments, freely admitted to having participated.
While Goldberg’s account of the group chat in question included descriptions of intelligence and military matters so sensitive that he declined to spell them out in publication, Gabbard denied that any sensitive material had been discussed, telling the committee there were “no classified or intelligence equities” in the Signal group.
Democrats on the panel were not impressed with either official’s explanations.
“I thought they were inconsistent, preposterous, difficult to believe as true, and in particular, the refusal to admit that this was a colossal mistake is mind blowing,” Sen Jon Ossoff of Georgia told The Independent.
During the hearing Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the committee, called for their resignation.
“The thing about the Intelligence Committee is that it’s always been bipartisan,” Warner told The Independent, adding that the Intelligence Committee held Trump accountable during his first administration and “I cannot believe that my Republican colleagues don’t want to see this text chain as well.”
But the main question will be whether Republicans, who control both the House and the Senate, will use their oversight authority to investigate what would have been considered a staggering national security breach in any previous administration.
One GOP member of the upper chamber, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, told The Independent he would like to see a probe happen.
“I think that anytime you have something of this nature, some sort of a formal review, probably makes sense because what you don’t want to do is repeat it,” said Tillis, who only recently voted to confirm Gabbard and Hegseth despite expressing concerns about their lack of experience and qualifications. “It doesn’t look like, in this particular case, any damage was done, but it was clearly something that could’ve compromised the mission.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker said that he and ranking Democrat Jack Reed will move forward on a bipartisan strategy.
“I think we’ll want to get an accurate transcript to make sure that there aren’t any discrepancies between what was actually texted and what was reported in the story,” he told The Independent.
But at the White House, Trump and his team pushed back aggressively against the idea that anything had been done wrong by any of his top aides.
In a phone interview with NBC News Tuesday morning, Trump claimed that Waltz was “a good man” who had “learned his lesson” as a result of the bombshell reporting from The Atlantic.
He said the blunder had been committed by “one of Michael’s people” who’d added Goldberg to the group chat and called the error “the only glitch in two months” that had “turned out not to be a serious one.”
Hours later during a media availability alongside a group of U.S. ambassadors-designate, Trump again defended Waltz as “a very good man” who would “continue to do a good job” in his role.
He then pivoted to again denigrating The Atlantic and Goldberg, calling him “a sleazebag” and his publication “a failed magazine.”
Trump conceded that his administration would “be looking into” the use of Signal but he appeared to admit that “everyone else” in his orbit “seems to be using it” and suggested that the application may be OK to use because no one found out about the Houthi airstrikes in advance — other than Goldberg, who did not report on them while observing the planning process.
“Are people able to break into conversations? And if that’s true, we’re going to have to find some other form of device, and I think that’s something that we may have to do but some people like Signal very much,” he said.
Waltz said the White House has “technical experts” and “our legal team” looking into the top officials’ use of Signal because the administration is “going to keep everything as secure as possible” and, like Trump, pivoted to denigrating the press by accusing journalists of wanting “to talk about everything else, except for the hostages you’re getting out of the Middle East, Iran on its back foot, sea lanes getting reopened [and] peace in Europe.”
The national security advisor’s belligerent response echoed the official line taken by Trump’s team in the hours after the Senate hearing.
A press release put out by the White House communications team accused “Democrats and their media allies” of having “seemingly forgotten that President Donald J. Trump and his National Security team successfully killed terrorists who have targeted U.S. troops and disrupted the most consequential shipping routes in the world” and called reporting on the burgeoning national security scandal “a coordinated effort to distract from the successful actions taken by President Trump and his administration to make America’s enemies pay and keep Americans safe.”
Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, went further in demanding that the massive blunder be immediately forgotten by describing it in a series of posts on X as a “hoax” — a term frequently used by the president and his allies to describe facts, circumstances and reporting that reflect badly on him and his administration.
He called The Atlantic reporting — a story that was verified by the National Security Council as accurate — “nothing more than a section of the NatSec establishment community running the same, tired gameplay from years past.”
“From the ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ hoax of the first term to the fake documents case of the last four years… at every turn anti-Trump forces have tried to weaponize innocuous actions and turn them into faux outrage that Fake News outlets can use to peddle misinformation,” he wrote.
Cheung later added: “”Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax led to a witch hunt. Documents hoax led to a witch hunt. Signal hoax outrage… a witch hunt.”
