Democrats have called for further investigations and possible resignations after top national security officials texted military plans to a Signal group chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine.
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said that the officials, including Michael Waltz, the National Security Adviser, should resign.
Wyden called the Signal chat “obviously reckless, obviously dangerous, both the mishandling of classified information and the deliberate destruction of federal records or potential crimes that ought to be investigated immediately.”
“I’m of the view that there ought to be resignation, starting with the national security adviser and the secretary of defense, Director Radcliffe and Director Gabbard.”
Ron Wyden
This came as news that the Atlantic’s top editor was added to a group chat where US national security officials discussed their plans to bomb Yemen loomed over the Senate intelligence committee’s annual hearing into global threats facing the United States.
Among the guests at the hearing were two reported members of the group chat; Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe, the CIA Director.
As the hearing began, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the committee, condemned the leak.
Warner called the leak “one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information.”
He also called it a “pattern of an amazing cavalier attitude towards classified information.”
“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system,” he said, “it’s also just mind-boggling to me that all these senior folks were on this line and nobody bothered to even check security hygiene 101. Who are all the names? Who are they? Well, it apparently included a journalist…
“The erosion of trust from our workplace, from our companies, and from our allies and partners can’t be put back in the bottle overnight.”
Mark Warner
Warner grilled Gabbard and Ratcliffe about the chat that discussed war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen.
Ratcliffe said that, when he was confirmed as CIA Director, he was briefed by agency officials about “the use of Signal as a permissible work use” and “a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”
Gabbard, on the other hand, claimed that “there was no classified material” in the Signal chat.
She later dodged questions about her involvement in the Signal group chat to which an Atlantic journalist was added.
Trump Dismisses Signal Chat Leak
Meanwhile, US President, Donald Trump commented on the group chat security leak, dismissing it.
Trump told a news agency in a phone call that it was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one”, adding his national security adviser Michael Waltz had “learned a lesson.”
It is unlikely this will placate critics of the President, who see this leak as a serious breach of national security.
Separately, The President of Signal defended the messaging app’s security after top Trump administration officials mistakenly included a journalist in an encrypted chatroom they used to discuss a looming US attack on Yemen’s Houthis, Reuters reports.
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker did not directly address the blunder, which Democratic lawmakers have said was a breach of US national security.
However, she described the app as the “gold standard in private comms” in a post on X, which outlined Signal’s security advantages over Meta’s WhatsApp messaging app. “We’re open source, nonprofit, and we develop and apply (end-to-end encryption) and privacy-preserving tech across our system to protect metadata and message contents,” she said.
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