Trump Administration Deals With Signal Group Chat Leak Fallout: What to Know

The Trump administration is dealing with the fallout of an extraordinary leak of internal national security deliberations, disclosed in an encrypted group chat that mistakenly included a journalist from The Atlantic.

In the group message among cabinet officials and senior White House staff, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed specific operational details two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, according to The Atlantic. Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to the group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app.

Here’s the latest.

What has the White House said?

President Trump told NBC News on Tuesday that the leak was “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, posted on social media that “no ‘war plans’ were discussed” and “no classified material was sent to the thread.” That contradicts Mr. Goldberg, who wrote that he had not published some of the messages in the thread because he said they contained sensitive information.

Mr. Goldberg’s report also raised concerns about administration officials using Signal, a nonsecure messaging platform, and setting the messages to automatically delete. Ms. Leavitt pushed back against those concerns.

“The White House Counsel’s Office has provided guidance on a number of different platforms for President Trump’s top officials to communicate as safely and efficiently as possible,” she wrote.

After the Atlantic report, Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said in a statement on Monday that the message thread “appears to be authentic.” Mr. Hughes said officials were “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”

The administration has tried to discredit Jeffrey Goldberg.

When Mr. Trump was first asked Monday about the report, he said he was not aware of the leak, but he immediately attacked the magazine.

“I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic,” he said. “To me, it’s a magazine that’s going out of business.”

For years, Mr. Trump has complained about Mr. Goldberg and his publication because of an article the journalist published in 2020 that said that Mr. Trump had declined to visit a cemetery of fallen American soldiers in France because it was “filled with losers.”

Mr. Hegseth similarly criticized Mr. Goldberg on Monday, calling him a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” after landing in Hawaii, his first stop on a weeklong trip to Asia.

“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Mr. Hegseth said.

Mr. Goldberg said “that’s a lie” on CNN in response to Mr. Hegseth’s comments.

Will Mr. Waltz face consequences?

Mr. Trump said Tuesday that Mr. Waltz would not face consequences after Mr. Goldberg wrote that the national security adviser had added him to the Signal chat.

“Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Mr. Trump told NBC News. The president said one of Mr. Waltz’s staff members had added Mr. Goldberg.

But even before Monday’s leak, Mr. Waltz faced skepticism from inside and outside of the administration. Some of Mr. Trump’s most conservative allies viewed him as not loyal enough to the president while some of the Republicans he formerly served with in Congress considered him too loyal.

What did Vice President JD Vance say in the chat?

In the Signal chat, Mr. Vance raised concerns about the Yemen attack, writing that he thought the administration was “making a mistake.” Mr. Vance said he worried Americans would not “understand this or why it’s necessary” to launch the attacks. He noted that only 3 percent of U.S. trade runs through the Suez Canal, a shipping route threatened by the Houthis, compared with 40 percent of European trade.

“I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself,” Mr. Vance wrote. He later wrote, “I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

Mr. Vance’s comments revealed some disagreement within the senior ranks of the administration, a remarkable development especially from Mr. Vance, who has gone to great lengths to present a unified front with the president. A spokesman for Mr. Vance denied any dissent from the vice president.

“The vice president’s first priority is always making sure that the president’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” the spokesman, William Martin, said in a statement. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The president and the vice president have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”

How are both parties responding?

Democrats are furious about the report, and they are demanding investigations into the disclosure of sensitive material. Some are also calling attention to the Trump administration’s efforts to downplay the incident, resurfacing clips of Mr. Waltz and other Trump allies criticizing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.

Ms. Clinton posted a link to the Atlantic article on social media on Monday with an emoji of two eyes and wrote, “You have got to be kidding me.”

Several Republicans on Capitol Hill expressed concerns about Mr. Goldberg’s inclusion in the chat and acknowledged that it was a mistake. Most, however, said they wanted a full briefing before drawing any conclusions.

Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CNN that his panel would send an inquiry to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and then determine whether a fuller investigation was warranted. But Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, dismissed the idea of additional investigations or discipline for the officials involved.

Still, some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal allies downplayed the incident. Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, said the story was a “smear” that is being “waged by the left.”