A catastrophic security leak is triggering bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that senior Trump administration officials accidentally broadcast classified military plans through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.
“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally,” Delaware senator Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”
New York representative Pat Ryan called the incident “Fubar” and threatened to launch his own congressional investigation “IMMEDIATELY” if House Republicans fail to act.
According to reporting in the Atlantic, editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally invited into a Signal chat group with more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials including vice-president JD Vance, secretary of state Marco Rubio, national security adviser Mike Waltz, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and others.
The reporting exposes not only a historic mishandling of classified information but a potentially illegal communication chain where sensitive military plans about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen were casually shared in an encrypted group chat with automatic delete functions.
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, posted on social media: “This administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.”
Republican senator John Cornyn described the incident more colloquially, telling reporters it was “a huge screw-up” and suggesting that “the interagency would look at that” to determine how such a significant security lapse occurred.
The White House confirmed the leak. National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes told the Guardian: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
But the White House attempted to defend the communications, with Hughes describing the messages as an example of “deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials”.
“The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security,” Hughes said.
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But most lawmakers don’t see it that way. Rhode Island senator Jack Reed said on X that the incident represents “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen”.
The bombshell revelation also potentially violated federal record-keeping laws. The Federal Records Act, which mandates preservation of government communications, typically mandates that records are kept for two years, and the Signal messages were scheduled to automatically delete in under four weeks.
New York Republican representative Mike Lawler summed up the bipartisan consensus: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels – and certainly not to those without security clearances. Period.”
