US officials reacted with shock— and in many cases, horror — to revelations in The Atlantic that top members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet sent detailed operational plans and other likely highly classified information about US military strikes on Yemen to a group thread on a messaging app to which a reporter had accidentally been added.
The Trump administration acknowledged the messages, sent over the nongovernment encrypted chat app Signal, seem to be authentic without offering any explanation for why senior officials were discussing national defense information outside of approved classified government systems.
Almost immediately, senior officials scrambled behind the scenes to review the use of Signal amid concerns that Trump administration officials are relying too heavily on it to conduct sensitive government work – posing a potentially grave risk to US national security, current and former officials said.
As soon as the story published, it was blasted out in multiple text threads throughout the Trump administration, with officials reacting with disbelief, according to those who spoke to CNN privately.
Multiple administration officials told CNN they were shocked, with at least two speculating that this could result in the dismissal of one of their colleagues.
And career national security officials expressed deep dismay to CNN, noting that having such sensitive conversations on an unclassified platform risked exposing the information to foreign hackers – and that any other employee who had done so would almost certainly have been immediately fired and probably referred for prosecution.
According to the Atlantic, national security adviser Mike Waltz earlier this month convened a text conversation with top US officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to discuss strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen who had been threatening international shipping in the Red Sea. Waltz, apparently accidentally, added Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the chain.
The messages started with a discussion about when the action should be launched while Goldberg followed along. The strikes were carried out and the principals congratulated themselves on a job well done during a brief after-action discussion before Goldberg removed himself.
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