The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded the resignations of senior Trump administration officials who used a Signal thread to discuss a bombing campaign in Yemen.
During a hearing Tuesday, committee vice chair Mark Warner grilled intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard and slammed national security adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after they failed to conduct “security hygiene 101” without realizing The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was included in a text chain.
“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system, it’s also just mind boggling to me that all these senior folks were on this line and nobody bothered to even check,” Warner said. “Security hygiene 101 — who are all the names? Who are they?”
During the hearing, Warner posted on X that “incompetence is not an option.”
“Pete Hegseth should resign. Mike Waltz should resign,” he wrote.
In his opening remarks, Warner stressed to administration officials that intelligence suggests China and Russia “are trying to break into encrypted systems,” like the encrypted messaging app Signal.
“If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired,” he added. “This is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information, that this is not a one-off or a first-time error.”
This is a developing story
