It was a hoax. The information wasn’t classified. Somehow the journalist got “sucked into” the Signal chat, either deliberately or through some kind of technical glitch.
In the days since the editor in chief of The Atlantic revealed he had been inadvertently included in a group chat of top U.S. officials planning a military strike on Houthi militants in Yemen, senior members of the Trump administration have offered a series of shifting, sometimes contradictory and often implausible explanations for how the episode occurred — and why, they say, it just wasn’t that big a deal.
Taken together, the statements for the most part sidestep or seek to divert attention from the fundamental fact of what happened: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used Signal, an unclassified commercial app, to share sensitive details about an imminent attack in an extraordinary breach of national security.
Here’s a look at the main players and what they’ve said about what happened, and how much their reasoning matches up with what transpired.
President Trump said the Atlantic’s article was a “witch hunt” and called the journalist a “total sleazebag.”
President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the fervor over the Atlantic’s article was “all a witch hunt,” suggesting that perhaps Signal was faulty, and blaming former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for not having carried out the strike on Yemen during his administration.
“I think Signal could be defective, to be honest with you,” he said, after complaining that “Joe Biden should have done this attack on Yemen.” The fact that he didn’t, Mr. Trump added, had “caused this world a lot of damage and a lot of problems.” While the Trump administration has criticized Mr. Biden for not being aggressive enough against the Houthis, his administration led allied nations in several attacks on Houthi sites in Yemen in 2024.
Mr. Trump has insisted that no classified information was shared among the members of the group, including the editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg — and that it wasn’t uncommon for members of the government to use Signal for official business.
But he has also spent a lot more energy disparaging Mr. Goldberg and The Atlantic than defending his national security officials.
“I happen to know the guy is a total sleazebag,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Goldberg on Tuesday, speaking to reporters from the Cabinet Room. He added: “The Atlantic is a failed magazine, does very, very poorly. Nobody gives a damn about it.”
The president and the secretary of defense have the ability to assert, even retroactively, that information is declassified. Former national security officials have said they were skeptical that the information shared by Mr. Hegseth ahead of the March 15 strike was not classified, given its specificity and the life-or-death ramifications.
Mr. Hegseth said the details he shared were not technically “war plans.”
“No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information,” Mr. Hegseth wrote Wednesday on X. He added: “We will continue to do our job, while the media does what it does best: peddle hoaxes.”
In seeking to discredit The Atlantic, the White House has insisted that the information shared on Signal was not a “war plan,” as the headline on the initial story called it, but an “attack plan.” National security experts say this is very likely a distinction without a difference.
According to the messages released by The Atlantic, Mr. Hegseth included time stamps and other secret details in his messages, hours before the attack began — all of which could have upended the strikes had they fallen into the wrong hands.
Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, suggested the journalist may have been ‘sucked into’ the group chat.
On Fox News, Mr. Waltz laid into Mr. Goldberg, calling him “scum” and suggesting that he might have intentionally managed to insert his number into Mr. Waltz’s phone.
Mr. Goldberg has said he was inadvertently added to the Signal group chat by Mr. Waltz.
Mr. Waltz said that he was “not a conspiracy theorist,” but that he was suspicious about how Mr. Goldberg “somehow gets on somebody’s contact and then gets sucked into this group.”
“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number there?” Mr. Waltz added, noting that “it looked like someone else.” He also said “we’re trying to figure out” whether the journalist was added to the group deliberately or through “some other technical mean.”
The host, Laura Ingraham, seemed confused by his responses, asking him if a staff member might have made such an error. Mr. Trump told NBC News on Tuesday that “it was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.”
On Fox, Mr. Waltz insisted that “a staffer wasn’t responsible.”
“Look, I take full responsibility, I built the group,” he said, while also insisting he had never texted Mr. Goldberg and that he wasn’t on his phone at the time of the chat. He said that Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who is a Trump adviser, had some of “the best technical minds” looking into what might have happened.
Tulsi Gabbard, the spy chief, said she wasn’t really involved.
Ms. Gabbard told members of Congress on Wednesday that the messages proved she wasn’t involved in sharing or discussing any of the details related to the strike.
“What was shared today reflects the fact that I was not directly involved with that part of the Signal chat” she said in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee.
According to the messages published in The Atlantic, Ms. Gabbard weighed in early in the exchange to name Joe Kent, who has been a top aide to Ms. Gabbard as he awaits Senate confirmation to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, as her representative to coordinate meetings. She did not text again until the end of the chat, writing “Great work and effects!” following the strike.
John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, insisted he personally did nothing wrong.
Mr. Ratcliffe defended his actions on Wednesday while expressing indignation at how The Atlantic had characterized certain information he had posted to the Signal group.
“Those messages were revealed today and revealed that I did not transmit classified information,” Mr. Ratcliffe told members of the House Intelligence Committee. He accused Mr. Goldberg of having misrepresented a detail from his contributions to the exchange.
Mr. Goldberg, he said, “indicated that I had released the name of an undercover C.I.A. operative in that Signal chat. In fact, I had released the name of my chief of staff, who is not operating undercover.”
“That was deliberately false and misleading,” Mr. Ratcliffe concluded.
In the original article, Mr. Goldberg did not refer to that person as an undercover operative, but as an “active intelligence officer.” In the second article, in which he published the Signal group’s messages, he said the C.I.A. requested that Mr. Goldberg not publish his name, so he did not. The C.I.A. likes to keep its officers’ names secret so they can still take future assignments overseas.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said he didn’t have his phone on him as the plans were under discussion.
Mr. Witkoff’s only contribution to the Signal chat was one message that he sent after the strike. It was just five emojis: two prayer hands, one muscle, and two American flags.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on Tuesday wrote that Mr. Witkoff had been in Russia at the time that plans to strike Yemen were being discussed on the Signal group.
Mr. Witkoff acknowledged that he was visiting Moscow at the time, but in a post on social media denied that he had his phone with him, saying he only had “a secure phone provided by the government for special circumstances when you travel to regions where you do not want your devices compromised.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the incident was a “big mistake” and suggested it could inspire reforms.
Mr. Rubio said it was obvious that someone had made a “big mistake” by including a journalist in the Signal group.
“Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you ain’t supposed to be on that thing,” Mr. Rubio told reporters while traveling in Jamaica.
“I think there will be reforms and changes made” as a result of the mistake, he added.
But otherwise, he echoed the argument voiced by others in the administration that because no war plans had been disclosed in the Signal group, the concerns were being overblown.
“There were no war plans on there,” Mr. Rubio told reporters. He said the chat was intended to keep Trump’s aides informed of the operations so they could talk with their counterparts in other countries about the strikes.
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