Senate Democrats confronted top Trump officials about the alleged leak of a highly sensitive Signal chat detailing plans for airstrikes in Yemen, with the ranking member of the Intelligence panel blasting it as “mind-boggling.”
Why it matters: Democrats are arguing that the Signal fiasco reveals widespread mismanagement of classified information under the Trump administration — a message they sought to drive home during an Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday.
- Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Intelligence panel Democrat, pressed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe to confirm whether they were, in fact, participants in the Signal chat in question.
- “So you were the John Ratcliffe on that chat?” Warner asked Ratcliffe, who responded, “I was.” Gabbard declined to comment on whether she participated but asserted that no classified information was shared.
- Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said there “ought to be resignations, starting with the National Security Adviser and the Secretary of Defense.”
Driving the news: Warner set the tone for Democrats in his opening remarks, calling the alleged leak “mind-boggling” and just “one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly toward classified information.”
- President Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz accidentally invited the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a group text in which top officials debated highly sensitive plans for bombing Yemen, the magazine reported Monday.
