Trump administration officials accidentally text a reporter Yemen ‘war plans’
The White House has confirmed a report by The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who says senior Trump administration officials accidentally included him in a Signal chat group in which they discussed plans to conduct strikes in Yemen.
Goldberg was included in a group chat in which US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials discussed upcoming strikes against Yemen’s Houthis. Trump announced strikes on March 15, but in a shocking security breach, Goldberg wrote that he had hours of advance notice via the group chat.
“The message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told reporters.
The security breach provoked outrage among Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Chris Coons, who wrote on X that “every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime.”
Signal, an open-source, encrypted messaging application, is not approved by the US government for sharing sensitive information.
White House accidentally texting a reporter Yemen attack plans ‘unprecedented’ blunder
It’s truly unprecedented and I’m sure people are going to be looking into it, whether or not the White House is going to investigate itself, which seems somewhat unlikely.
Jeffrey Goldberg is a really respected journalist here in Washington, especially when it comes to national security. He works for The Atlantic, and got a message that [US National Security Advisor] Michael Waltz wanted to connect via Signal, so he said, “Sure”.
But then a few days later, he got added to this group and it seemed like the people on it were the US vice president, the secretary of defence, the secretary of state, the director of national intelligence.
About 18 members in all, very high up in the Trump administration, and they talked about whether or not the US should strike Yemen.
And very unusually, JD Vance, the vice president, who never disagrees with the president in public, said he didn’t think it was a good idea, pointing out that only three percent of US goods are shipped through the Suez Canal.
Then Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth responded that they should do it and that [the US] are the only military with the capability to do just that. And then they talked about how, if the strikes were successful, they would want to see some sort of payment from both Egypt and Europe.
But the most remarkable part of this is, two hours before the first strikes were launched in Yemen, this reporter knew exactly what was going to happen, what assets were involved, what weapons, how exactly the strikes were going to be laid out.
That could have put a lot of US troops in jeopardy and then afterwards, there were a whole lot emojis going back and forth.