The Trump administration’s deny, deny, deny tactic to brush off its Signal chat scandal about airstriking another country is starting to make its own officials look wildly uninformed.
Members of Trump’s Cabinet accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen earlier this month.
And during a pre-scheduled Senate hearing Tuesday to discuss national security threats, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s repeated efforts to shirk the classified label only made the intelligence leader appear increasingly uninformed or blind to the core principals of her job.
Senator Angus King torched Gabbard for conducting such sensitive business on an unofficial channel via a private company, strongly disagreeing with the national intelligence leader’s definition of classified information.
“Secretary Hegseth put into this group text a detailed operation plan, including targets, the weapons we were going to be using, attack sequences, and timing, and yet you’ve testified that nothing in that chain was classified. Wouldn’t that be classified?” asked King, referring to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “What if that had been made public that morning, before the attack took place?”
But Gabbard opted to dodge the question.
“Senator, I can attest to the fact there were no classified or intelligence equities that were included in that chat at any time,” Gabbard said.
“So the attack sequencing, and timing, and weapons, and targets, you don’t consider should have been classified?” King pressed.
“I defer to the secretary of defense and the national security council,” Gabbard answered.
“Well, you’re the head of the intelligence community,” King scoffed. “You’re supposed to know about classifications.”
King then argued that if the information is not classified, the entire text thread should be released to the American public so that they could draw their own conclusions about the Trump administration’s behavior.
In another heated exchange with Senator Mark Kelly, Gabbard refused to say that details regarding a potential strike on another country would constitute classified information. Instead, CIA Director John Ratcliffe threw Gabbard under the bus, capitulating that a “pre-decisional strike deliberation” should be conducted through “classified channels.”
Continuing to deny that the chat ever took place—or that a journalist that Trump officials have derided as “deceitful and highly discredited” was accidentally sent sensitive details—won’t do the administration any good. A spokesperson for the National Security Council, Brian Hughes, already confirmed to Goldberg that the chat was real.
The monumental slip-up was a horrific omen for U.S. national security, whose weakest link is apparently a crew of Cabinet members who can’t accomplish the basic due diligence of double-checking who they’re adding to a group chat hosted by a private company.
