A catastrophic security leak has sparked bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that it misbroadcast a highly sensitive military plan through a signal group chat with journalists reading.
On the Senator’s floor on Monday, minority leader Chuck Schumer called it “one of the most surprising violations of military information I’ve read for a very long time,” urging Republicans to “seek a full investigation into what this happened, the damage it produced, and how it could be avoided in the future.”
“Each of the government officials in this text chain is committing a crime, even by chance,” Delaware Sen. Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We cannot trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”
New York president Pat Ryan called the incident “fubar” (an acronym for “a mess beyond all perceptions”) and threatened to “quickly” launch a Congressional investigation of himself if House Republicans fail to act.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly invited to be more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, national security advisers, Mike Weltz, Mike Weltz, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegses, and more, according to reports in the Atlantic.
The report exposes not only historically false misconceptions of national security information, but also the sensitive military plans regarding the airstrikes of Yemen’s Houthi rebels casually shared by auto-deletion functions and encrypted group chats.
“It made us look vulnerable to our enemies,” California Senator Locanna told the Guardian. “We need to take cybersecurity even more seriously and we look forward to leading it.”
As a top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Jim Himez oversaw countless classified briefings. However, the signal group chat leak of the imminent war plan made him “terrifying.”
“If true, these actions are brave violations of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans who do harm and serve. These individuals know the dire risk of sending information classified across uncategorized systems.
Sen. Mark Warner, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Email Committee, posted on social media.
Hakeem Jeffries, a House Democrats’ minority leader, called for a “substantial investigation into this unacceptable, irresponsible national security breaches,” saying the leak was “completely outrageous and shocking my conscience.”
Republican Sen. John Cornyn explained the incident more colloquially, telling reporters it was a “huge screw-in” and suggesting that “ministers are looking at it” to determine how such critical security took place.
The White House has confirmed the leak. National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told the Guardian:
However, the White House attempted to defend communication, and Hughes described the message as an example of “deep and thoughtful policy coordination among senior officials.”
“The continued success of Operation Houthi shows that there was no threat to the military or national security,” Hughes said.
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But most lawmakers don’t see it that way. Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reid said in X that the incident represented “one of the worst security and common sense failures I’ve ever seen.”
An echo of the controversy in past documents also bothered some of the senior Chat staff, previously criticising similar security breaches. In 2024, current national security advisor Waltz said, “Biden’s sitting national security advisor Jake Sullivan sent the best secret message to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it?”
In 2023, Hegseth was subject to unique criticism that Biden Administration was dealing with a document classified as “Flipple,” saying there are “no accountability at the top” and “two layers of justice.”
When he was forced onto reporters about group chat on Monday, Hegses attacked Goldberg as “deceived and highly unreliable” without rebutting details from the Atlantic narrative, saying that “no one has texted the war plan.”
In response to the accidental leak, Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin asked Hegses to step down or be fired from his position as Secretary of Defense.
In a statement, Martin said: “It is clear that our men and women in uniform deserve better, and we cannot leave our national security in Hegses’ incompetent and unqualified hands.”
Bomb revelations could also violate federal record-keeping laws. The federal records law, which requires government communications to be kept for two years, was usually scheduled to require that records be kept for two years, and signalling messages were automatically deleted within four weeks.
Mike Lawler, the president of the New York Republican Party, summarised the bipartisan consensus.
