A contentious Senate hearing Tuesday raised questions about how Trump administration officials handle sensitive national security information and communications, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to share details of a planned U.S. military operation in a group chat.
Of the more than dozen senior U.S. officials on a Signal text chain that was inadvertently leaked to a journalist, Hegseth was the only one who shared details of the planned U.S. airstrikes in Yemen.
In the group chat, an account labeled “Pete Hegseth” relayed “operational details” of upcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen, “including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, reported.
Goldberg said he received the text messages about the operation at 11:44 a.m. on March 15. Media reports about the bombing of Houthi targets emerged about two hours later. Signal, an encrypted messenger app available to the public, is generally not authorized for government communications.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that Hegseth and the Defense Department had the “classification authority” to decide whether certain military information was classified or not.
Their answers raised the possibility that Hegseth had revealed classified information on the group chat or that he had declassified the information beforehand.
Asked by reporters whether he declassified the information he put into the Signal chat, Hegseth said, “Nobody’s texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say.” He then praised the bravery of the pilots who conducted the strikes.
Democratic lawmakers and former national security officials said details of planned military operations have always been considered classified and argued it’s hard to imagine why such plans would not be in this case.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at NATO headquarters in Brussels in February.Remko de Waal / ANP / Redux
Republicans at the hearing steered away from the subject, with some saying they would ask for clarification in a closed session. But privately, some Republican lawmakers were angered by the episode and with Hegseth in particular.
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a retired Air Force general, scoffed at Hegseth’s assertion that no war plans had been shared on the text chain.
“That’s baloney,’ Bacon told reporters. “Just be honest and own up to it.”
More significantly, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would investigate the text chain with his Democratic colleagues on the panel.
“We’re very concerned about it and we’ll be looking into it on a bipartisan basis,” Wicker told reporters.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., downplayed the incident. She said adding Goldberg to the White House officials’ Signal chat was “incredibly sloppy” but added that “it was a mistake, and I am, I can say for certain, they’re going to put protocols in place so that doesn’t happen again.”
Nine years ago, Hegseth, speaking on Fox News on Election Day in 2016, harshly criticized Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.
“Any security professional, military, government, or otherwise, would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information,” he said.
From left, National Security Agency Director Timothy Haugh, FBI Director Kash Patel, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Jeffrey Kruse at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday.Andrew Harnik / Getty Images
Questions about Gabbard’s phone
At the hearing Tuesday, Democratic lawmakers demanded answers about not only the leaked text chain but also whether Trump administration officials were regularly discussing sensitive national security topics on personal phones or commercial apps like Signal instead of secure government platforms.
Gabbard declined to say whether she was using her private or her government phone for the leaked text exchanges on Signal, telling Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., that she would refrain from saying more pending a government review of the episode.
Reed said he was puzzled by her answer. “What is under review? It’s a very simple question: Were you using a private phone or officially issued phone? What could be under review?”
Gabbard replied, “The National Security Council is reviewing all aspects of how this came to be, how the journalist was inadvertently added to the group chat and what occurred within that chat across the board.”
Cybersecurity experts say that government-issued phones are generally more secure and that a personal phone is likely to be more vulnerable to foreign intelligence hacking. The use of Signal is generally not authorized for government communications devices, current and former officials told NBC News.
But at the hearing, Ratcliffe said that the Signal app was installed on his office computer when he started as CIA director and that he was told it was “permissible” to use it for government communications.
President Donald Trump listens as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks in the Oval Office on Friday. Annabelle Gordon / AFP – Getty Images
Several days before The Atlantic revealed the chat, the National Security Agency issued a bulletin to some government employees about “a vulnerability” in the Signal messenger application.
Russian hacking groups were using “phishing” attacks to try to penetrate the “linked devices” feature on Signal, the warning said. The bulletin, obtained by NBC News, was relayed to elements of the Pentagon workforce and included steps to safeguard the Signal app.
Signal said that it was inaccurate to say the application had a vulnerability and that hackers were using phishing scams to gain access to users’ phones and then see their Signal messages.
Earlier Hegseth remarks
In January, after an army helicopter collided with a passenger jet in Washington, D.C., killing 67 people, Hegseth and Trump answered questions from reporters in the White House press room.
Hegseth said the helicopter was performing a “routine annual retraining of night flights on a standard corridor” for a continuity of government mission.” He was later told that he should not have publicly disclosed that it was a continuity of government mission, which involves U.S. officials and military forces practicing how the government would react in the event of an emergency, two sources told NBC News.
The next month, Hegseth was criticized for deviating from prepared remarks in a major speech in Europe. Ahead of an address Hegseth was to deliver in Brussels on Feb. 12, some State Department officials advised Hegseth’s team that he shouldn’t publicly say Ukraine would not gain membership in NATO as part of any peace deal with Russia, four administration and congressional officials told NBC News.
In his speech, though, Hegseth departed from a draft prepared earlier in the day and delivered a blunter message about Ukraine’s prospects for NATO membership than originally written. “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” he said.
Hegseth’s statement prompted criticism that the United States was ceding to a key Russian demand regarding Ukraine and NATO before negotiations with Moscow had even begun.
The following day, Hegseth, who has said his comments were made in coordination with the rest of Trump’s national security team, tempered his language, saying “everything is on the table” in negotiations.
Trump told reporters at the time that he hadn’t asked Hegseth to walk back his remarks, but noted that Hegseth’s tone had gotten “a bit softer.” Trump added that he thought Hegseth’s initial remarks “were pretty accurate,” which fueled further confusion.
After the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday, a source close to the White House said that Trump was privately frustrated with “Signalgate” and wanted to see the story out of the headlines.
Publicly, though, Trump defended his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who started the Signal chat and the officials who participated in it, saying there was no need for Waltz to apologize.
But Trump’s comments suggested that other members of his administration may be using Signal, as well.
“We’ll look into it,” Trump said, “but everybody else seems to be using it.”
Gordon Lubold
Kyle Stewart contributed.
