Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The Atlantic magazine has published more excerpts of the Trump administration’s group chat on Signal that detail timings of military strikes in Yemen, a day after senior officials claimed the exchanges contained no classified information.
The messages will heap more pressure on the administration over what is being described as one of the most spectacular security breaches in the upper echelons of power in Washington in recent years.
Donald Trump has dismissed the scandal as a “glitch” and stood by Mike Waltz, his national security adviser, who set up the group chat on the Signal messaging app and inadvertently invited Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, to take part.
In its latest publication, The Atlantic cites one text timed at 11.44 on Saturday, March 15 from defence secretary Pete Hegseth that reads: “Just CONFIRMED w/ CENTCOM [Central Command, the military’s combatant command for the Middle East] we are a GO for mission launch.”
“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”, the text continues.
Critics say it is virtually unprecedented for senior officials to discuss such highly sensitive information touching on vital US national security interests on an unofficial, commercially available messaging platform.
Senior lawmakers in the Democratic party have seized on the incident to lambast what they see as incompetence at the highest levels of the Trump administration.
The Atlantic decided to release the full transcript after senior officials in the Trump administration, including CIA chief John Ratcliffe and Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, testified in the Senate on Tuesday that no classified material was shared in the Signal chat.
The magazine said it had initially decided to withhold specific information related to weapons and to the timing of the attacks found in certain texts, saying it did not as a rule publish information about military operations if it “could possibly jeopardise the lives of US personnel”.
But it said the assertions of administration officials “led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions”.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” it said.
Goldberg wrote in the new Atlantic article that he had received information on the attacks against the Houthis two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing of their positions.
The Hegseth texts published by The Atlantic appear to detail exact times at which planes would take off from US aircraft carriers and launch their missiles — information that is generally considered classified. The texts did not, however, identify the actual targets of the attacks, using only words such as the Houthi “Target Terrorist”.
In response to The Atlantic’s article, Waltz wrote on X: “No locations. No sources & methods. NO WAR PLANS”. He said foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent. “BOTTOM LINE: President Trump is protecting America and our interests,” he added.
Alina Habba, a senior Trump aide, played down the latest revelations and insisted the administration had been completely transparent in response to the revelations.
“We were upfront about it,” she told reporters. “We went in yesterday, as you saw, for the better [part] of the day and got questions and answers by everybody.”
She said The Atlantic was “making a big to-do about nothing”. “We’re allowed to have communications. That’s period — the end.”
Habba added that President Trump continued to stand by Waltz.
The issue dominated hearings of the Senate intelligence committee in Washington on Tuesday, with Democrat Mark Warner saying it was “one more example of . . . sloppy, careless, incompetent behaviour, particularly towards classified information”.
Ratcliffe told senators that his communications in the Signal message group “were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information”.
He said the use of Signal had been approved at the highest level, as a “mechanism for co-ordinating between senior-level officials”, though he acknowledged that it was not considered a substitute for more secure communications platforms to discuss classified information.
Read the full article here
