Military Plans accidentally disclosed to reporter

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President Donald Trump stood by his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally added to a private, high-level chat on the messaging app Signal where military plans were being discussed.

"Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man," Trump said Tuesday in a phone interview with NBC News.

Trump's comments were his first substantive remarks since The Atlantic broke the story, which detailed how journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added to a group chat on a private messaging app where plans for military strikes in Yemen were discussed. Goldberg said he was added to the discussion after receiving a request from a user identified as Waltz.

When asked what he was told about how Goldberg came to be added to the Signal chat, Trump said, “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”

Trump said Goldberg’s presence in the chat had “no impact at all” on the military operation.

The president expressed confidence in his team, saying he was not frustrated by the events leading up to The Atlantic's story. The situation, Trump said, was "the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one."

The Atlantic’s story sent shockwaves across Washington on Monday. Democratic lawmakers demanded answers from the White House in multiple letters, with one from a group of Senate Democrats calling the situation “an astonishingly cavalier approach to national security.”

Top Democrats on the House Armed Services, Intelligence, Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees wrote a separate letter, pushing for answers about other instances in which senior officials discussed national security issues “using the Signal messaging service or any other messaging service application that has not been approved for the transmission of classified information.”

Trump and Waltz spoke on Monday about The Atlantic’s story, according to two sources familiar with their conversation. Waltz has not yet commented publicly on the story.

Goldberg reported that he was skeptical about the Signal chat's authenticity at first. But when bombs began falling in Yemen at the time officials in the group chat had discussed it, Goldberg concluded that the chat was “almost certainly real” and left shortly after.

Putin and Xi laughing their heads off...

This level of incompetence should be expected from the Trump regime. They're not hired based on competence, they're hired based on their willingness to lick the right boots.

The Atlantic on Wednesday published a transcript of text messages showing that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth detailed U.S. military attack plans in Yemen in a Signal group chat that inadvertently included the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

In an article titled “Here Are the Attack Plans That Trump’s Advisers Shared on Signal,” Goldberg quoted from texts in which Hegseth specified types of U.S. military aircraft and the timing of recent airstrikes against Houthi militias in Yemen. The texts did not include information about specific targets.

“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” one of the texts says, referring to a type of military aircraft. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s).”

Goldberg and Shane Harris, a national security and intelligence reporter at The Atlantic, published the latest article a day after President Donald Trump’s administration attempted to downplay the magazine’s first report about the Signal thread.

In testimony at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe both claimed no classified material was shared in the group chat. Ratcliffe said his “communications ... in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information.”

The intelligence officials both testified Tuesday that Hegseth was the “original classifying authority” on the chat.

Goldberg and Harris, in the article published Wednesday, wrote that “statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump — combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts — have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.”

“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” Goldberg and Harris added.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt forcefully pushed back against The Atlantic’s latest report in a post on X, calling the story a “hoax” written by a “Trump-hater.”

When reached for comment, the White House referred NBC News to Leavitt’s post.

Vice President JD Vance, one of the participants in the Signal chat, retweeted a post Wednesday showing The Atlantic called the messages “war plans” in its first report and “attack plans” in its latest report — a distinction the administration has repeatedly made as it suggests the revelations in the messages were not significant.

The National Security Council said Monday it was reviewing how Goldberg was accidentally added to a group text on Signal, an encrypted messaging platform that is widely believed to be more secure than other commercial texting applications but traditionally isn’t used for high-level government communications.

“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain,” the National Security Council said in a statement.

Goldberg reported that e had been added to a group chat called “Houthi PC small group” on March 13. He described his initial skepticism, recalling that he discussed with colleagues whether the texts were “part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service, or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization” seeking to embarrass journalists.

When the journalist came to believe the chat was authentic, he left. “No one in the chat had seemed to notice that I was there. And I received no subsequent questions about why I left — or, more to the point, who I was,” Goldberg wrote.

The incident has provoked intense criticism from Democratic lawmakers, some of whom have called for the resignations of Hegseth and Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz. Goldberg has said a Signal user named “Michael Waltz” added him to the chat in the first place.

A contentious Senate hearing Tuesday raised questions about how Trump administration officials handle sensitive national security information and communications, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to share details of a planned U.S. military operation in a group chat.

Of the more than dozen senior U.S. officials on a Signal text chain that was inadvertently leaked to a journalist, Hegseth was the only one who shared details of the planned U.S. airstrikes in Yemen.

In the group chat, an account labeled “Pete Hegseth” relayed “operational details” of upcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi forces in Yemen, “including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, reported.

Goldberg said he received the text messages about the operation at 11:44 a.m. on March 15. Media reports about the bombing of Houthi targets emerged about two hours later. Signal, an encrypted messenger app available to the public, is generally not authorized for government communications.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that Hegseth and the Defense Department had the “classification authority” to decide whether certain military information was classified or not.

Their answers raised the possibility that Hegseth had revealed classified information on the group chat or that he had declassified the information beforehand.

Asked by reporters whether he declassified the information he put into the Signal chat, Hegseth said, "Nobody’s texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say." He then praised the bravery of the pilots who conducted the strikes.

Democratic lawmakers and former national security officials said details of planned military operations have always been considered classified and argued it's hard to imagine why such plans would not be in this case.

Republicans at the hearing steered away from the subject, with some saying they would ask for clarification in a closed session. But privately, some Republican lawmakers were angered by the episode and with Hegseth in particular.

Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a retired Air Force general, scoffed at Hegseth’s assertion that no war plans had been shared on the text chain.

“That’s baloney,’ Bacon told reporters. “Just be honest and own up to it.”

More significantly, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he would investigate the text chain with his Democratic colleagues on the panel.

“We’re very concerned about it and we’ll be looking into it on a bipartisan basis,” Wicker told reporters.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., downplayed the incident. She said adding Goldberg to the White House officials’ Signal chat was “incredibly sloppy” but added that “it was a mistake, and I am, I can say for certain, they’re going to put protocols in place so that doesn’t happen again.”

Nine years ago, Hegseth, speaking on Fox News on Election Day in 2016, harshly criticized Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

“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,” he said.

Questions about Gabbard’s phone
At the hearing Tuesday, Democratic lawmakers demanded answers about not only the leaked text chain but also whether Trump administration officials were regularly discussing sensitive national security topics on personal phones or commercial apps like Signal instead of secure government platforms.

Gabbard declined to say whether she was using her private or her government phone for the leaked text exchanges on Signal, telling Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., that she would refrain from saying more pending a government review of the episode.

Reed said he was puzzled by her answer. “What is under review? It’s a very simple question: Were you using a private phone or officially issued phone? What could be under review?”

Gabbard replied, “The National Security Council is reviewing all aspects of how this came to be, how the journalist was inadvertently added to the group chat and what occurred within that chat across the board.”

Cybersecurity experts say that government-issued phones are generally more secure and that a personal phone is likely to be more vulnerable to foreign intelligence hacking. The use of Signal is generally not authorized for government communications devices, current and former officials told NBC News.

But at the hearing, Ratcliffe said that the Signal app was installed on his office computer when he started as CIA director and that he was told it was “permissible” to use it for government communications.

Several days before The Atlantic revealed the chat, the National Security Agency issued a bulletin to some government employees about “a vulnerability” in the Signal messenger application.

Russian hacking groups were using “phishing” attacks to try to penetrate the “linked devices” feature on Signal, the warning said. The bulletin, obtained by NBC News, was relayed to elements of the Pentagon workforce and included steps to safeguard the Signal app.

Signal said that it was inaccurate to say the application had a vulnerability and that hackers were using phishing scams to gain access to users’ phones and then see their Signal messages.

Earlier Hegseth remarks
In January, after an army helicopter collided with a passenger jet in Washington, D.C., killing 67 people, Hegseth and Trump answered questions from reporters in the White House press room.

Hegseth said the helicopter was performing a "routine annual retraining of night flights on a standard corridor" for a continuity of government mission." He was later told that he should not have publicly disclosed that it was a continuity of government mission, which involves U.S. officials and military forces practicing how the government would react in the event of an emergency, two sources told NBC News.

The next month, Hegseth was criticized for deviating from prepared remarks in a major speech in Europe. Ahead of an address Hegseth was to deliver in Brussels on Feb. 12, some State Department officials advised Hegseth's team that he shouldn’t publicly say Ukraine would not gain membership in NATO as part of any peace deal with Russia, four administration and congressional officials told NBC News.

In his speech, though, Hegseth departed from a draft prepared earlier in the day and delivered a blunter message about Ukraine’s prospects for NATO membership than originally written. “The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” he said.

Hegseth's statement prompted criticism that the United States was ceding to a key Russian demand regarding Ukraine and NATO before negotiations with Moscow had even begun.

The following day, Hegseth, who has said his comments were made in coordination with the rest of Trump’s national security team, tempered his language, saying “everything is on the table” in negotiations.

Trump told reporters at the time that he hadn’t asked Hegseth to walk back his remarks, but noted that Hegseth’s tone had gotten “a bit softer.” Trump added that he thought Hegseth’s initial remarks “were pretty accurate,” which fueled further confusion.

After the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday, a source close to the White House said that Trump was privately frustrated with "Signalgate" and wanted to see the story out of the headlines.

Publicly, though, Trump defended his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who started the Signal chat and the officials who participated in it, saying there was no need for Waltz to apologize.

But Trump's comments suggested that other members of his administration may be using Signal, as well.

“We’ll look into it,” Trump said, “but everybody else seems to be using it.

Hillary is feeling a lot of schadenfreude right about now.

While serving as former President Barack Obama's secretary of state, Clinton sparked controversy by using a private email server for official communications instead of the government-managed system. The issue remained polarizing and politically damaging throughout her unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign against Trump.

In a post to X, formerly Twitter, Clinton on Monday posted a preview of The Atlantic's article and said: "You have got to be kidding me." Clinton's post had nearly 4 million views as of 6:46 p.m. ET.

Users resurfaced posts by current Trump officials who called out Clinton over her emails. Sarah Longwell, founder and publisher of The Bulwark, posted to X on Monday, highlighting Secretary of State Marco Rubio's 2016 post.

"I'm going to spend the rest of my afternoon posting clips of high-level officials on that Signal text chain demanding 'accountability' for Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information," Longwell said.

President Donald Trump expressed frustration with national security adviser Michael Waltz on Thursday in conversations about his decision to withdraw Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, according to two Republican sources with knowledge of the conversations.

Trump’s frustration is twofold, the sources said. The president is angry that Waltz fumbled a Signal group chat created to coordinate among senior national security officials. According to screenshots published by The Atlantic, a Signal user with Waltz's name added Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine's editor-in-chief, to the group chat. The episode has created a multiday controversy for the White House.

But Trump is also annoyed that the race to replace Waltz in Congress is shaping up to be more competitive than it should be for Republicans — and next week's special election in Florida only opened up because Trump selected Waltz for his post in the administration.

Even though GOP leaders are confident the Republican candidate in that special election, Randy Fine, will pull off a win, Trump is still worried that the optics are fueling a negative narrative and making the party look bad, the sources said. Trump is holding tele-town halls Thursday night for Fine and another Republican candidate in a second Florida special election. Had Stefanik been confirmed as U.N. ambassador, it would have created another special election and removed a Republican from the tightly divided House amid efforts to pass Trump's legislative agenda.

Trump's frustration with Waltz comes as a chorus of allies have called for Trump to fire the national security adviser as a fall guy for the group chat fiasco.

ut while Waltz came in for criticism because Goldberg's inclusion in the chat ultimately resulted in its publication, others have scrutinized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth more closely, because he shared details of military plans over a commercial app instead of using traditional government channels for sensitive information.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Thursday asked the Defense Department's inspector general to open an investigation into the Signal chat and, specifically, whether department policies on classification and sharing sensitive information were broken. Wicker and the ranking member on the panel, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., sent the letter to the inspector general together.

“The information as published recently appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that, based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified,” Wicker told reporters on Wednesday.

A federal judge today ordered Trump administration agencies involved in the group chat about the attack on Yemen to “preserve all Signal communications between March 11 and March 15.”

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg directed the government to provide him a status report by Monday laying out what steps they've taken to preserve the records.

Boasberg issued the order after the watchdog group American Oversight sued to make sure the records are preserved. He noted that the group is not seeking the messages, many of which were disclosed after the editor of The Atlantic was included in the group chat.

Judge orders agencies to keep Signal chat messages, continued
“The plaintiff here is not asking me to require the government to disclose the Signal communications,” Boasberg said. “Disclosure is not part of the suit.”

He seemed pleased the parties had been trying to come to a solution without much court intervention — the Treasury Department said it already had some of the messages, and the Defense Department indicated it was already working on complying.

Boasberg, whom Trump and his allies have repeatedly criticized for his rulings in another case involving the Alien Enemies Act, began the hearing by explaining how he was chosen to hear the case — a computer-based system sorts cases by type and automatically and randomly assigns judges to them.

A federal worker accidentally includes a journalist on a detailed message in advance of a government operation.

While that sounds like the case of The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief being added to a group Signal chat by Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed military attack plans in Yemen, it’s not.

It’s what happened to a longtime Department of Homeland Security employee who told colleagues she inadvertently sent unclassified details of an upcoming Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation to a journalist in late January, according to former ICE chief of staff Jason Houser, one former DHS official and one current DHS official. (The two officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they do not want to endanger their current or future career opportunities.)

But unlike Waltz and Hegseth, who both remain in their jobs, the career DHS employee was put on administrative leave and told late last week that the agency intends to revoke her security clearance, the officials said.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has largely rallied around Waltz and Hegseth, with Trump on Wednesday calling it “all a witch hunt.”

The episode involving the career DHS employee has not been previously reported. Experts say it raises questions about unequal punishment for inadvertent leakers in the Trump administration.

Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division, which investigates the mishandling or leaking of classified information, said the two cases should be treated the same way.

"Both of these are examples of carelessness in the handling of highly sensitive information, the disclosure of which could put U.S. government employees or military members in danger," added McCord, who is now a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center. "We should expect the Signal chat breach to be taken at least as seriously" as the DHS employee's breach.

The DHS employee who was put on leave did not speak to NBC News. The officials who did speak didn't want to identify her out of fear she would face retaliation from members of the public who are pro-immigration enforcement.

The DHS employee told colleagues she accidentally added a reporter from a conservative Washington-based print publication to an email that included information about upcoming ICE operations in the Denver area. The officials said the information was not classified but considered law enforcement sensitive because it included the time of day for the operation and possible home locations where targets could be identified.

Realizing her mistake immediately, the employee called the reporter who agreed not to disclose the information, the officials said.

The ICE operation took place without incident, the officials said.

But another person on the email group flagged the blunder to higher-ups at DHS at a time when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan were blaming leaks to the media for lower-than-expected arrest numbers during ICE roundups, the officials said.

Days later, the employee was placed on leave pending an investigation, the officials said. She was asked to take a polygraph test and surrender her personal cellphone, which she declined. She was then notified that the agency intends to revoke her security clearance, the officials said, which could keep her from working in the homeland security space again.

The employee has 30 days to appeal the revocation, one official said.

The employee has served in various agencies across DHS since President George W. Bush’s administration, including during the entirety of Trump’s first term, the officials said.

A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment.

Houser, the former ICE chief of staff, said the employee had a reputation for being "mission-focused" and "apolitical."

"Targeting a career official who dedicated her service to protecting public safety and enforcing the law — while excusing political appointees who leaked sensitive war plans — shows this administration punishes integrity and protects recklessness. That doesn’t just betray her, it weakens every public servant who risks their career to do the right thing," Houser said.

"It's staggering hypocrisy," he added. Houser noted that the career official was put on leave for sharing information that was not classified, "while political appointees leak classified war plans and face zero consequences. This isn’t just a double standard — it’s reckless and dangerous."

One former DHS official told NBC News that the Trump administration should review its handling of the case of the DHS career employee who accidentally emailed ICE plans in light of the news of the Signal chat involving Waltz, Hegseth and Goldberg.

"Career civilians and military suffer severe penalties for inadvertent mistakes significantly less serious," the former DHS official said. "The inconsistency is appalling."

Israeli officials are furious over the Signal chat leak involving senior Trump administration officials because it included sensitive intelligence Israel provided to the U.S. from a human intelligence source in Yemen, CBS News has learned.

While the Signal chat messages published by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic this week may not have compromised the effectiveness of the airstrike, given the publication's restraint on releasing the information, it did compromise a human source who provided the intelligence to the Israelis, who then provided it to the U.S. for targeting, a senior American intelligence official and a source with knowledge of the Israelis' ire told CBS News. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national security matters.

The Wall Street Journal on Thursday first reported about the Israelis complaining to U.S. officials about Mike Waltz, President Trump's national security adviser, who set up the group chat and apparently added Goldberg by mistake. The group spent several days earlier this month exchanging messages about possible plans to strike Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen, who have repeatedly launched missiles at Israel and targeted shipping in the Red Sea.

According to Goldberg's report, one of Hegseth's messages said:

"Trigger Based" F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)

The senior American intelligence official told CBS News that in this context, "Trigger Based" refers to an operation that is contingent upon a specific condition or event — essentially, a go or no-go decision to launch an airstrike based on confirmation of the target's presence.

As a barrage of criticism rolled in this week towards those involved in the Signal chat, senior Trump administration officials have repeatedly said the information was not classified and that no sources or methods were compromised.

"No locations. No sources & methods. No WAR PLANS," Waltz wrote on X on Wednesday. "Foreign partners had already been notified that strikes were imminent."

But the sources who spoke to CBS News say Israeli intelligence is angry that the intelligence they provided to the U.S. was revealed. It's unclear what the fallout will be, if any, between the U.S. and Israel over the situation.

CBS News reported Thursday that President Trump has been privately venting his irritation about the Signal chat leak and is closely monitoring the news to see if the fallout quiets down, according to sources familiar with the matter.