Heads are still spinning in Washington in the wake of journalist Jeffrey Goldberg\u2019s bombshell report<\/a> in the Atlantic<\/em> that he was accidentally included in a group chat on Signal with the senior-most national security officials in the Trump administration as they discussed impending U.S. strikes against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.<\/p>\n Despite two members of the group chat, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, having been grilled on the matter by senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, numerous questions remain about how this shocking national security breach happened and what it all means for the people involved as well as for the country more broadly.<\/p>\n Here are five big questions we still have about this escalating scandal.<\/p>\n This remains perhaps the biggest mystery of all.<\/p>\n Goldberg wrote that U.S. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz sent him the initial connection request on Signal\u2014a feature that allows the platform\u2019s users to control who is able to communicate with them\u2014which Goldberg accepted, \u201choping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.\u201d<\/p>\n Goldberg said that two days later, he received a notice on Signal that he had been added to a group chat called the \u201cHouthi PC small group.\u201d<\/p>\n The White House has said it\u2019s reviewing how Goldberg was inadvertently added to the chain, but so far no officials have offered an explanation. When asked during Tuesday\u2019s committee hearing about it, Ratcliffe said<\/a> he did not know how Goldberg was invited to join the chat and that he had seen \u201cconflicting reports\u201d about who had invited the journalist, despite Goldberg having said unequivocally that it was Waltz.<\/p>\n Goldberg also reported that he eventually left the chat after determining that it was genuine. When someone leaves a group on Signal, the group\u2019s creator is notified. But Goldberg said no one reached out to him after he departed the chat. It\u2019s unclear if Waltz did not notice Goldberg leaving or simply chose not to react.<\/p>\n In addition to the U.S. national security advisor, CIA director, and director of national intelligence, officials in the group reportedly included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, among several others.<\/p>\n Many of these people have significant experience dealing with classified national security information and should have known better than to discuss details about impending U.S. military operations over Signal (and with a journalist on the group chat). Rubio<\/a> was a U.S. senator who was a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Gabbard<\/a> is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and as a member of Congress served on the House Armed Services, Homeland Security, and Foreign Affairs committees. Ratcliffe was director of national intelligence during President Donald Trump\u2019s first term.<\/p>\n A number of the officials in the chat have also made public statements in the past on the importance of operational security and avoiding using unsecured channels that could compromise sensitive national security information\u2014often in relation to former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of a private email server during her tenure as the top U.S. diplomat.<\/p>\n Waltz touched on the Clinton email scandal in a 2023 post on Twitter (now X). \u201cBiden\u2019s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton\u2019s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing,\u201d Waltz said<\/a> at the time while sharing a 2016 Politico<\/em> report regarding Sullivan\u2019s connection to the Clinton email scandal.<\/p>\n Hegseth has also repeatedly criticized Democrats, including Clinton, in relation to their handling of classified information. \u201cIf it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton, they would be in jail right now,\u201d Hegseth said<\/a> in 2016.<\/p>\n In other words, the officials involved appear to be fully aware of the laws surrounding sharing sensitive information and the potential for unsecured platforms to be compromised, but they still went forward with using Signal to discuss an upcoming U.S. military operation. Why none of them raised concerns as the chat remained active over the course of several days stands as one of our biggest open questions.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are matters that should in fact have been discussed in the Situation Room before a Presidential decision was even made. Yet, per The Atlantic report, apparently no one on the chain ever raised these points,\u201d former U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton said<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n A hearing meant to discuss global threats to the United States was quickly overtaken by \u201cSignalgate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cSounds like a huge screw-up,\u201d one Republican senator said. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The Trump administration\u2019s group chat breach underscores that Beijing might have the edge in information warfare.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Sensitive national security information is generally discussed via secured channels or in the White House Situation Room\u2014not on an open-source, commercial messaging app such as Signal, which is susceptible to being hacked by foreign adversaries despite being encrypted. The U.S. Defense Department recently sent out a departmentwide advisory<\/a> warning of the app\u2019s \u201cvulnerability\u201d\u2014just days after the inadvertent leak to Goldberg.<\/p>\n Waltz apparently set up the Signal group as a way of bringing together what is known as the principals committee, a jargony term for a group of high-ranking officials. National security experts say using Signal for such discussions completely broke with standard protocol designed to avoid seeing intel fall into the wrong hands.<\/p>\n \u201cThe principals committee is really the apex of the national security decision-making process within the U.S. government,\u201d former State Department spokesperson Ned Price told Foreign Policy<\/em>. \u201cAlmost by definition, principals committees take place in the White House Situation Room.\u201d Officials who can\u2019t join in person due to travel can connect via what\u2019s known as SVTC, or secure video teleconference, Price said, which can beam them into the Situation Room.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re the secretary of state or the secretary of defense, oftentimes you are called upon to be traveling around the world, and that\u2019s totally acceptable and expected. But these principals have teams that will travel ahead of them, set up what are usually tents in their hotel room\u2014or sometimes they go to the embassy\u2014to make sure that they always have access to the top-secret system,\u201d Price said. In extraordinary circumstances, principals can use top-secret phone lines and have their audio beamed into the Situation Room, Price added.<\/p>\n Price, who also previously worked as an intelligence analyst at the CIA and more recently as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has sat on the principals committee and is baffled that Trump officials apparently held high-level conversations on national security via Signal.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea that this type of discussion would be held on a commercial application that is susceptible to hacking and penetration by state and non-state actors is totally mind-boggling,\u201d Price said. \u201cThere is no such thing as secure communication except for one venue, and that is classified U.S. government systems.\u201d<\/p>\n Along these lines, Republican Rep. Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, also ripped into the Trump administration over the emerging scandal in comments to CNN on Monday. Bacon said<\/a> he is a \u201csignals intelligence officer by trade\u201d and can \u201cguarantee\u201d that Russia and China are monitoring the phones used by the U.S. officials in the group chat.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone should know better than putting top secret war plans on an unclassified phone. Period. There is no excuse,\u201d Bacon said.<\/p>\n Similarly, Bolton told<\/a> CNN that he was \u201cshocked\u201d by the revelation that top national security officials were using Signal to discuss a military operation.<\/p>\n \u201cI couldn\u2019t imagine anybody would use Signal,\u201d Bolton said. \u201cYou know, some of the guests have commented that Signal\u2019s highly encrypted. I\u2019ll just say this, if you think Signal is equivalent to U.S. government secure telecommunications, think again.\u201d<\/p>\n Signalgate, as it\u2019s now being called, could also make U.S. allies nervous about sharing intelligence with Washington moving forward.<\/p>\n \u201cIntelligence cooperation and sharing relies on trust,\u201d Price said, adding that \u201csomething like this really erodes the fabric of trust that friendly intelligence agencies have with us.\u201d These agencies will \u201cthink twice\u201d about sharing some of their \u201cmost sensitive secrets if they don\u2019t feel like we can protect\u201d them, Price said.<\/p>\n Indeed, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney<\/a>, whose country is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership that also includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, has already spoken out about the Trump administration\u2019s Signal leak, calling it a \u201cserious, serious issue.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trump administration is scrambling to contain the fallout from this scandal. The White House has confirmed the existence of the group chat but says the information discussed was not classified and no \u201cwar plans\u201d were shared.<\/p>\n Gabbard and Ratcliffe repeated that assertion under oath while testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.<\/p>\n But Democratic senators on the committee were not buying it. Sen. Mark Warner said to Gabbard: \u201cIf it\u2019s not classified, share the texts now.\u201d The Trump administration has not made the texts public, and we only have a partial picture of what was discussed via Goldberg\u2019s report.<\/p>\n Goldberg reported that the plans discussed in the chat \u201cincluded precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing,\u201d and national security experts are highly skeptical of the notion that the information was not classified.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think there is any question that we are dealing with classified information. These are war plans,\u201d Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary, told<\/a> MSNBC regarding Signalgate on Tuesday. Panetta said what was described in the report all qualifies as \u201chighly classified information.\u201d<\/p>\n Goldberg in his report wrote that \u201cHegseth, Ratcliffe, and other Cabinet-level officials presumably would have the authority to declassify information, and several of the national-security lawyers noted that the hypothetical officials on the Signal chain might claim that they had declassified the information they shared.\u201d<\/p>\n But he went on to note that Signal is not approved by the U.S. government for sharing classified intelligence. As such, legal experts have raised the possibility that officials in the chat violated the Espionage Act, among other laws.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile we won\u2019t know anything for certain until we see the entirety of the text chain, it strains credulity to believe that the information provided by Hegseth in particular was not classified. Military plans, armaments, and operations, particularly pre-decisional details, clearly fall within the scope of classified information,\u201d Bradley Moss, a Washington-based national security lawyer, told Foreign Policy<\/em>.<\/p>\n Moss said the White House\u2019s response so far is \u201cmore political spin than anything of legal substance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cUsing Signal for official communications can be permissible, but it cannot include classified information and would still have to be archived for purposes of the Federal Records Act. The Espionage Act as well as provisions [on the unauthorized removal of classified documents] are certainly the type of criminal provisions that could be implicated by classified information spillage into Signal,\u201d Moss said.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s an open question whether federal law enforcement will investigate the matter, particularly given the steps that Trump has taken to ensure extreme loyalty across the government.<\/p>\n \u201cI doubt anyone will be held to account for events described by The Atlantic unless Donald Trump himself feels the heat,\u201d Bolton said<\/a> on X, adding, \u201cI have no faith that the Department of Justice will prosecute anyone involved.\u201d<\/p>\n If Trump does begin to feel pushed in a corner, another question is who will take the fall for the scandal. Will it be Hegseth, as the classification authority regarding military plans? Or perhaps Waltz, who started the chat in the first place? Time will tell.<\/p>\n Signalgate raises many questions regarding the Trump administration\u2019s general practices when it comes to sensitive information and national security. Was this Signal group chat the only example of Trump officials discussing intelligence on unsecured channels?<\/p>\n \u201cMy real fear is that this was the tip of the iceberg,\u201d Price said. \u201cIf the national security advisor was creating a Signal chat for this, what other Signal chats did he create? Was there a Russia principals committee small group? Was there a China small group, was there an Iran small group, a nuclear weapons small group? Where did this start, and where did it end?\u201d<\/p>\n Trump already has a well-documented history of not showing caution when it comes to safeguarding intelligence. He once tweeted a classified satellite photo<\/a> of Iran, for example, and famously shared classified information with Russian officials<\/a> in the Oval Office in 2017. Though the president has the authority to declassify intelligence information as he sees fit, there is a process in place for doing so; it is not usually done on a whim. Trump was also indicted<\/a> in 2023 in relation to his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office, though the case was dropped after he was reelected.<\/p>\n At Tuesday\u2019s committee hearing, Warner said<\/a> Signalgate was \u201cone more example of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly toward classified information\u201d from Trump and those around him.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Signal fiasco is not a one-off,\u201d Warner added.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n1. How did Goldberg get added to the group chat in the first place?<\/h3>\n
\n2. Why did none of the officials in the chat, which occurred over several days, raise concerns about Signal being an inappropriate way to communicate about sensitive national security information?<\/h3>\n
Read More<\/span><\/h2>\n
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\n3. What are the security implications?<\/h3>\n
\n4. What are the possible legal consequences?<\/h3>\n
\n5. What does this tell us about the Trump team\u2019s broader handling of national security?<\/h3>\n