You’re the C.I.A. director. Why didn’t you call out that he was present on the Signal thread. I don’t know if you use Signal messaging app. I do. I do not for classified information, not for targeting, not for sending remotely. Neither do I. “It’s a national security scandal that nobody saw coming. And the first major test of the limits of a new administration that prides itself on breaking norms. This week, we learned that some of the highest-ranking officials in Washington were planning a bombing campaign in Yemen via Signal. Their messages, which were accidentally shared with a journalist from The Atlantic, have sparked a backlash over the administration’s handling of state secrets —” I think that it’s by the awesome grace of God that we are not mourning dead pilots right now. These are important jobs. This is our national security. “— and opened a rare window into how national security decisions are made in the emoji era. From The New York Times. This is the roundtable. I’m Jess Bidgood with Helene Cooper, David Sanger and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Thank you so much for being here and for turning off your phones for a full 30 minutes on what I know is like a really busy news day for all of you. I was in the New York Times Washington bureau on Monday. Zolan and I sit kind of near each other. You two sit on the other side of the bureau. And there we were when all of a sudden, at some point Monday afternoon, I just heard this collective gasp. And what had happened: The Atlantic had posted that story. Helene, you’ve been covering defense for a long time. If I want to know something about the Pentagon, the military, I come to you. What was going through your mind as you read these text messages and why is this all such a big deal? When the story first dropped, by The Atlantic, the first thing I saw in there was not the fact that they were having a Signal group chat. It was the fact that Pete Hegseth had put the strike sequencing in there. That was, for me, from the start, the biggest deal. Jeff Goldberg wrote in the article that there was — I think the word, he used the word sequencing. And that means, in military terms, it’s what time fighter jets are going to leave the aircraft carrier. And then it’s what time — they call that the strike window. And that is the window of time that American fighter pilots are going to be in the air. That is so highly guarded in the Pentagon. It’s been drummed into every military reporter’s head. You do not compromise operational security like that. They’re having this conversation on a Signal group chat, and that’s a big deal. But what’s the really big deal is that not the conversation — it’s that he put these plans in there. So it’s not just the fact that it’s happening on Signal, it’s what they’re specifically — For me, it’s what specifically they were saying. Absolutely. David, I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit. Why is it — why is this kind of stuff really not supposed to be in any place other than the most secure spaces that we build for this kind of information. Well, Helene’s absolutely right. If you took out that sequencing, then all you had was an embarrassment that came from the conversation taking place on Signal. With it — as one senior American commander texted me in midweek — with that in, he said, the good news is no harm was actually done. The operation went off perfectly well. He said the bad news is, had it been midlevel Pentagon people who did this and put this on, he said you’d be watching court-martials now. And that took you to what I think were the fascinating, connected layers of this. The first layer is just the arrogance of doing this on Signal because it is convenient, versus — to your point, Jess — what the way you normally do this, which is in the situation room, right? With no phones around, very little, except for those people who had to be channeled in on a U.S. government phone. The second is the arrogance, once it came out, of trying to pretend that this wasn’t classified data. The conversation was candid and sensitive. But as the president and national security adviser stated, no classified information was shared. There were no sources, methods, locations or war plans that were shared. And then the final sort of big level that’s going on here of remarkable nature of this is trying to go blame Jeff Goldberg, an extremely experienced, good reporter — I’ve known Jeff for 30 years. He is among the best national security reporters who are around here. He’s also the editor of The Atlantic. And somehow it’s his fault that they put him on the Signal chat. But that’s part of a usual playbook by this administration that we’ve seen for a while. When there’s a story and it actually signals just how much alarm it’s causing in this White House. The playbook being when a story is really bothering the high ranks of the White House, then you see Trump and his top aides establish an opponent, establish an enemy to blame. In this case, it being the journalist. He’s made up a lot of stories. And I think he’s basically bad for the country. You’re talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again. And then, on the other hand, belittle actually what was in that story that’s causing so much concern. Again, the attacks were unbelievably successful, and that’s ultimately what you should be talking about. What’s been interesting and a little unusual about this response is just actually how incoherent it’s been even with that baseline. You have had some officials say that it wasn’t classified information. Then the president started to walk it back. You’ve had Mike Waltz on one day, tried to take, it seemed, responsibility for this chat, since he was the one that organized it and invited people in. Look, I take full responsibility. I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated. And then the next day, have White House officials say, actually, this is a hoax. So even on that — and then Marco Rubio said, It’s a great mistake. Obviously someone made a mistake. Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you ain’t supposed to be on that thing. He’s the only one who’s actually acknowledged the severity of it. That’s right. And you had Hegseth as saying it was a hoax, and hours later, maybe it was a little bit before, actually, the director of the C.I.A., John Ratcliffe, comes out and says, no, that looked like it was exactly the chain we were all on. I mean, he confirmed that it was for real. I think that gets at something that I think is really important about this story, and that is that as revealing as the text messages themselves were, the reaction has been just as revealing the reaction from top members of the administration, as they have kind of obfuscated, changed their explanations, struggled to explain it. And I’m wondering, Zolan, what do you think is at stake for the administration here. What is this a test of? Competence. I mean, a perception of competence. You had an administration come in and put a lot of government officials on leave and a lot of programs under this name of restoring merit and competence to the government. This doesn’t look competent — to organize a Signal chat on a commercial platform and discuss sensitive details, including the timing of these jets taking off that has caused national security officials and veterans of national security to say that it actually put pilots at risk. I ran into a former Justice Department official who was talking about what he described as the carelessness of this whole episode, and really emphasizing the concern that it brought for the national security reputation of this administration. And then on the other end, too, I think that if you asked most reporters in Washington, would any Republican be calling for a means of oversight against this administration. They would probably say that’s dubious. That’s doubtful. Trump has a grip on this party. But you are seeing not only Democrats, but some Republicans criticize this. And what does accountability look like in a moment like this? What would it have looked like in the past, and what do you think it can conceivably look like now? Well, I’d like to go back to your question that you asked Zolan, which is, What does the reaction tell us? Sure. Because that I’ve been working for the last two days on a story that looks at the reaction and how that is being felt among fighter pilots. These are the men and women who are strapping into cockpits every day on behalf of this country, and they have an expectation that their commander in chief and their defense secretary and the people who command them are going to have their back. And the fact that Pete Hegseth — what they are most angry about, every single one that I talked to — what they are most angry about is not necessarily the disclosure on Signal — the fact that he put these strike plans on Signal — because, as one fighter pilot told me, everybody makes a mistake. It’s the fact that he stood up afterwards — Pete Hegseth — and said, There’s nothing wrong with this. There’s no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information. The fact that he’s not acknowledging that he’s made a mistake means that, de facto, defense secretary of the United States is saying it’s O.K. to put these flight plans in a commercial Signal app. So does that mean, then, that all of these decades of operational security, all of the lengths that pilots go to to maintain, they have burn rooms in — on aircraft carriers where they burn every piece of paper that might indicate what their flight plan is or anything like that. Their radio silence. They’re not talking about their Red Sea operations on radios because they know people are listening. They know the Iranians are listening. They know the Chinese are listening. They know the Russians are listening. So you have this level of operational security that they’re going through. But then the secretary of defense doesn’t abide by it and is saying it’s O.K. not to abide by it, and they’re pissed. I mean, let’s put a fine point on that. They are trained to literally burn their plans. Yes. That’s how secret this is supposed to be. Yes. And in his response to all of this, do you think Pete Hegseth is — he’s managing up? He’s trying to come up with a response that he thinks will please President Trump. And in the process, he’s not addressing the concerns of the troops who serve the country. I’m not going to try to get into Pete Hegseth’s head, but I can certainly tell you that he has lost a lot of confidence among the 1.3 million servicemen and women in the active-duty American military. I can say that when Trump brings people into his cabinet and into his close inner circle, he is measuring loyalty and how much they adopt the Roy Cohn strategy of fighting against any sort of criticism. Pete Hegseth was brought into this administration in part because of how he defended the president on television. And on Fox News. Almost entirely. He wasn’t brought in for his deep experience. And I think we learn some things about the players in the course of this. So for Pete Hegseth, we learned, first of all, it was amateur hour. We learned about JD Vance. He raised a really interesting dissenting point. He raised the possibility that the president may be not be fully informed about the nature of the trade-offs here. He had to go do some damage control on that. Right. And this concern, this key concern, it was about how it looks, right? How it looks to the allies, how it looks to the public. The allies all came to the conclusion that in private, JD Vance is even more dismissive of them than he is in public. And he was pretty dismissive of them in public. So they’re beginning to think, well, gee, if we actually got into trouble with the Russians are the Americans coming to help us? No. It was interesting to — just on the JD Vance note, you mentioned containing the fallout and damage control. The only damage control that he did was in terms of the dissent, the perception of dissent. His team issued one statement saying that he is aligned — paraphrasing, but that he’s aligned with Trump. Did not address the idea that the concerns around discussing national security on this — on a commercial app, Pete Hegseth sharing the details of actually the planning for this strike — He’s never addressed the core issue. No, because to it — at least based off their statement, to him, the core issue was any perception that he’s breaking with the president. And imagine the credibility he could have gained by stepping out and said: “You know, in retrospect, while it didn’t do any damage, I shouldn’t have put that on a Signal chat. I’ve learned my lesson from this, and we’ll recommit ourselves to doing this right.” That is not the theme of this administration. No, that would require a level of humility that I don’t think we have seen displayed by any of these administration officials. I think one other thing that was really interesting about the Signal chat is who wasn’t on the chat — is both who was, you had the White House chief of staff. You had the Treasury chief of staff, but also who wasn’t. Who wasn’t there was the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is the senior military advisor to the defense secretary and the president. This is the highest- ranking military official. So he’s supposed to be on there, and he is the one who is not on there. But when you think of the people who might have been ones to step up and say, Maybe we shouldn’t be putting this on a chat, or, We’re going to have to change this strikes. We can’t this have on this. But Adm. Christopher Grady, who’s the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was not invited to the chat. And I asked the Hegseth people why. And the response I got from press secretary Sean Parnell this was a political chat. It’s perfectly normal that you wouldn’t have the military generals in there. Of course. Think about this. You normally people who are left out of chats, right, would have FOMO. That’s what happened. That’s what I’m sure. It’s not in there. Who among us has not realized, Oh my gosh, all my friends are texting each other and I’m not in that group chat. This one is like, whew. This is the one that in retrospect, maybe you’re glad that you’re not a part of. But I do think — you raised the point that he might have been the person to say, Hey, let’s keep this information out of the chat. But anybody could have done that at any point — Including Susie Wiles — — any one of them. — the chief of staff to the president, who might have said, Hey, should we be having this conversation downstairs in the sit room? And what it tells you is how fundamentally absent experience they are. Because if this had happened in the first Trump term, you would have had the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who had been a commander, run one of the largest commands in the U.S. military, and so forth. He would have known just how you went and did this. And so would a range of other officials. But by turning away from experience to get the loyalists that you heard about from Zolan, that’s what they gave up. Also, you asked an interesting question before, which I don’t think we’ve answered, which was who should be investigating this? Well, clearly the Pentagon inspector general. Oh, wait — we don’t have a Pentagon inspector general. All the inspector generals were fired. Right. This question of accountability, of what can accountability actually look like in this moment, I think is really important. So O.K., the Pentagon inspector general is gone. Does this, does this some kind of test or does this raise questions for Pam Bondi? She stepped out and said this was sensitive but not classified. It was sensitive information, not classified and inadvertently released. I don’t know how she could have done it. I also don’t understand why that is a factor in whether you would have launched an investigation. The Espionage Act doesn’t mention — hinge on classified information. It hinges on information before there was classified. So I don’t think we should get tied up in this whole classified, classified discussion at all. That’s just — again, a lot of what the administration has been doing is trying to hide behind semantics. They hide behind, Oh, it wasn’t war plans. It was strike sequencing. They hide behind this whole classified versus not — unclassified. Hegseth has the power to declassify anything. So he, as defense secretary, could theoretically have declassified the war plans after he — presumably he would have done it before he put that out there on a Signal chat with a journalist. But it’s not about — forget about all of these semantics. And I think it’s just really important that we look at what actually happened and you look at what actually was done, and you ask yourself how you would feel if you were a fighter pilot for this country, and you got in a cockpit, and you knew that senior officials were discussing what you were about to do on a commercial chat. And as we hear this kind of semantic response from the White House about what was classified and what wasn’t, I think we also have to remember that a lot of these individuals talked a lot about classified information and the importance of keeping it secret. Are you talking about Hillary? After Hillary Clinton and her emails. Apparently, the standard operating procedure inside the Clinton secretary of state office was to send emails that couldn’t otherwise be printed to the maid, to print them out of a secure area or from a secure area, and then hand them off. Any security professional, military, government or otherwise, would be fired on the spot for this type of conduct and criminally prosecuted for being so reckless with this kind of information. Now, as Zolan said before, this has given Democrats a unified line of attack. But at the same time, we are seeing Democrats who over the years have downplayed the emails issue suddenly demanding resignations and going all out on this. Is there an element of hypocrisy there, do you think? I think this moment kind of shows how much hypocrisy is attached to Washington. And as is tied to really the foundation of politics at times. For Democrats, you said, spent years downplaying that there was any issue with the Hillary Clinton episode with emails and are now, as I said, after weeks of — could have been there were plenty of times they could have said, we’re going to attack the Trump administration on this or that, putting workers on leave, various immigration policies. And it was inconsistent. Now coalescing around this. At the same time, Republicans for years have attacked Democrats over the handling of information, over the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Remember, “Lock her up” was such a theme during the Trump campaign. So crooked Hillary. Wait, crooked. You should lock her up, I’ll tell you. By the way, also Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the two people we were talking about any level of oversight — were two people in the past that homed in on that and said that Hillary Clinton should face some form of prosecution. We are not seeing that reaction this time from Republicans. We are seeing them also mostly across the board try to belittle this and play it down and move on. So we are seeing that there’s a time to seize on an issue like this, to criticize when it’s politically advantageous for your party. Well, Attorney General Bondi said this morning, If you want to see classified data, not sensitive data, go look at Hillary’s email and email server. Well, I covered that. Helene covered that during that time, and my memory of those memos — And this makes no excuse — she should not have had the server at home. She should not have been putting anything that was classified on it. They were not operational details. They were debates about diplomatic disputes they were having with various countries. Shouldn’t have gotten out, but didn’t have a life and death nature to it, the way the operational details do here. There’s one other great irony here, and that is that just this same week, we saw the administration go to court and invoke the state secrets privilege. So they wouldn’t have to describe the flights that were taking gang members, or suspected gang members, out of the country. That was a state secret. But the sequencing that Helene has been describing is just sensitive, but not really classified. I mean, I just don’t know. Not war plans, right. So, I mean, I just don’t run into a lot of national security people in the course of the day. I have not found one this week who just didn’t consider the arguments here to be farcical. And by the way, those deportation flights had already happened. And they’re saying that is a state secret here. Whereas in this case, we’re talking about information that was discussed on a commercial app two hours before the strike happened. But that’s not — This is an administration, as you said, David, that invokes secrecy when it is convenient to do so, when it sees this — when it sees it in its interest to do so. One person that we haven’t talked a lot about is national security adviser Mike Waltz. He is the one who made this Signal chat in the first place. He then went on TV to try to explain himself, talked a little bit incoherently about the idea that Jeffrey Goldberg might have been sucked into the chat in some way. But how did the number — Have you ever have you ever had somebody‘s contact that shows their name and then you have and then you have somebody else’s number. I never make those mistakes. You’ve got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact. So of course, I didn’t see this loser in the group. What are we learning about him, and what are we learning about what might be next for him? Yeah, I mean, I’ve never heard of somebody getting sucked into a chat, without being invited first. First? Anybody would like to suck me into any chats, by the way. Go right ahead. The first time that we saw Waltz respond to this was actually in front of Trump when Trump was being asked about this. This journalist, Mr. President, wants the world talking about more hoaxes and this kind of nonsense rather than the freedom that you’re enabling. Then we actually saw later on, in a TV interview, him take some responsibility for this. And you did see the president say Mike Waltz is a good man. He’s doing a good job, and defend him. But we have seen a more aggressive defense from the present for Pete Hegseth as well. Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this. How do you bring Hegseth into it? He had nothing to do. Look, look, it’s all a witch hunt. Before this all happened, Mike Waltz was running a little bit on shaky ground. At one point, everybody thought that he was going to be the next secretary of defense. That’s right. He was — he was considered for that. So he’s experienced. He knows what’s going on. In some ways you have to feel a little bit sorry for him because who here has not typed the wrong — Not this bad. I haven’t done this. Something like this? And certainly not a military operation. But, he made an error here. And whereas Hegseth made a decision to place a timeline for attack into an unclassified channel. And that’s part of what makes it notable that Trump seems to be doing so much to stand by Hegseth in this moment. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll just have to see how Mike Waltz survives on this and how Hegseth does. And Hegseth has a long relationship with the president that will probably stand him in good stead. His bigger problem now is with the allies and with his own troops, as as Helene pointed out. And with Congress. and he’s going to have trouble with Congress. I mean, it’s clear that Hegseth looks the part of what Trump likes. He’s got the Fox News look, he’s got the hair. Trump clearly likes that. But I think that Hegseth was confirmed — JD Vance had to come in and make the deciding tiebreaking vote. He was confirmed 50/50 by the Senate, barely by the skin of his teeth. And he’s had one stumble after another. So I think Hegseth, for all the trouble that Mike Waltz may be in, I think that Hegseth is probably in as much trouble. Absolutely. And now, one thing that this whole episode raises, I think is a question: What other chats are out there? What else is being planned in unsecure places? Who might be doing that? Do we have any sense if there is a broader security issue in government? What are the questions it raises for you? Well, the fact that nobody on that chat at any point while Jeff Goldberg was on there said, Hey, maybe we should take this to the situation room, tells you that they’re doing this all the time. I mean, this seemed completely normal. There was no — Well, they were until Monday. Yes. So I would say there probably many, many others that have been going on, maybe — You think they’ve stopped? Well, probably for that kind of planning. Signal serves a really important point. I mean, we all use it, right? And we all use it because it’s the best encryption out there that is available on a commercial — in this case, free basis. White House, military, intelligence officials frequently use it for communicating with people outside their world. They’ve got to do that. But the trick here is knowing what it’s to be used for and what it’s not to be used for. And of course, we know that China and Russia are trying to get into Signal as well. There’s been a scam around that doesn’t get at a flaw in Signal, but just how you link up your phone with your computer, that is a way for the Russians to try. In particular, they’ve been trying to get into the system that way. But I think people are going to have to come to some real understanding about what you use Signal for and what you don’t use it for. Just in case they don’t come to that understanding. I want to end with one last question for you guys, which is, What is the group chat that you would like to be accidentally added to? I doubt that they’re in one, but I wouldn’t mind being in the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris group chat. As we still assess what happened with the previous election, and we still try and look back on the relationship between those two — Absolutely. — and maybe let’s add some of their senior staffers to tackle some of the questions, like, Should the vice president have broken with the president earlier? But I suppose that’s for a different roundtable, One that I would be happy to have. How about you? I’d love to be in the Taiwan group chat. Wouldn’t that be a good one? Who’s on — who’s on that? Who’s in that chat? Everybody who was in the other chat. Yeah. Yeah. I want to be on the chat when they realize that Jeff Goldberg was in their chat. The cleanup chat. Oh, the secondary chat. The secondary. Oh my God. Did you see what just happened? When they saw “J.G. has left the chat.” Yes. Well, I would like to be in a group chat with all of you. Thank you so, so much for joining us today and taking time out of your schedules. And I cannot wait to read your next stories on this. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jess. I was going to say I wanted to be on Zolan‘s next party group chat. I’m leaving you there. I was two seconds away from saying, Don’t do it. Are you having parties and not inviting me? Well, that’s the only way. I just said what.
