The top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee have jointly called on the Department of Defense’s inspector general to conduct an inquiry into the Trump administration’s Signal usage.
More than a dozen senior administration officials were involved in a group chat on Signal in which they discussed the merits of starting a new military campaign against the Yemen-based Houthis. They continued to use the chat as the U.S. military began those operations, but unbeknownst to them, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been added to the group chat from the outset.
Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-RI) published a letter on Thursday that the duo sent to DoD acting inspector general Steven Stebbins, which was dated one day earlier.
“This chat was alleged to have included classified information pertaining to sensitive military actions in Yemen,” they wrote. “If true, this reporting raises questions as to the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.”
The two senators asked the office of the inspector general to provide them with an assessment of the “facts and circumstances” regarding the incident, the DoD’s policies and adherence to them regarding sharing classified information, and whether anyone “transferred classified information from classified systems to unclassified systems.”
Wicker and Reed did not provide a date for the OIG to respond.
The Trump administration has verified that the group chat was authentic and that Goldberg was accidentally added. The president’s national security council Mike Waltz has taken “full responsibility” because “I built the group,” and he added, “My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.”
“Of course, I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else,” Waltz added. “The person I thought was on there was never on there.”
Simultaneously, administration officials have tried to downplay the contents of the chat thread, which they argue did not show anyone revealed classified details. Despite their argument, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth included details about the timing of the strikes, what U.S. weapons systems would be involved, and concepts of operations.
Hegseth shared those details without knowing that a reporter was in the group chat, and Goldberg waited more than a week to publish details of the conversation. Had another person, possibly an adversary, gotten access to that information either by hacking one of the participants in the chat or getting accidentally added, they could’ve potentially thwarted the success of the U.S. mission and risked the lives of the troops involved in the mission. Hegseth has sought to discredit the Atlantic’s reporting, citing how they changed the phrase “war plans” to “attack plans” in a follow-up story.
Waltz also said in the thread of senior U.S. officials that a top Houthi official was targeted once he arrived at his girlfriend’s building, which an airstrike ultimately flattened. The detail from Waltz was an operational detail that could contradict the Department of Defense’s statement that no civilians were killed in the strike.
Despite more than a week of daily strikes, the Houthis were able to launch two missiles toward Israel on Thursday.
“CENTCOM is conducting strikes across multiple locations of Iran-backed Houthi locations every day and night in Yemen,” a defense official told the Washington Examiner.
HEGSETH, TRUMP OFFICIALS PERFORM ‘RHETORICAL GYMNASTICS’ OVER ‘WAR PLANS’ VS ‘ATTACK PLANS’
Israel’s military said on Thursday it had intercepted two missiles launched by the Houthis before they crossed into Israeli territory after sirens warning of an incoming attack sent civilians into bomb shelters across the country.
The Houthis have repeatedly conducted similar attacks toward Israel since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack in Israel put the entire region on a war footing. The Yemen-based group has also conducted more than a hundred attacks on commercial vessels sailing off Yemen’s coasts through the Red Sea, forcing many of these companies to avoid the region for more expensive and arduous routes.
