More details emerge about the leaked chat as intel leaders are grilled again
What Have We Learned about the ‘Signaling’ of the Pentagon, and Why Have We Been There? Earlier this week President Trump downplayed the Security Breakdown
If Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic decide not to release any more information, that’s what Chang said. You asked Gabbard today. You said, well, if nothing’s classified, then share the contents with the committee. What should I do at that point if I want to look at contents that aren’t classified?
Warner: … whether she was using her phone or a government phone, but Ailsa step back for a moment — even with what we know right now, we have the vice president disagreeing with others about an imminent bombing — having that information, if it had gone out ahead of time, I can tell you that Russia and China, Iran, that’s what their spies would love to have. That information could not be disclosed because it is classified and would be viewed as such in any traditional way.
Chang: Can you tell me if your Republican colleagues will speak out against what happened without their support in seeking accountability?
Mark Warner. I believe they do. And I think it was extraordinarily telling that none of my Republican colleagues came to these folks’ defense. If anybody hasn’t heard, let’s just review very quickly there was a Signal — a good encrypted application, but it is not a classified means of transmitting information. Russia and China have been identified as trying to break into Signal-based systems. The senior level of individuals communicating on the non-classified channel and the fact that there was a journalist on the line makes it hard to know whose person was on the line.
The Director of National Intelligence, and the head of the CIA, was the focus of sharp words today from you and your fellow Democrats. Notably, none of your Republican colleagues seemed intent on focusing at all on this whole Signal episode. Do you have a sense of whether any of the Republicans share your concerns?
NPR recently learned that a Pentagon-wide advisory went out last week warning against using the app, even for unclassified information, saying “a vulnerability has been identified.”
Speaking to reporters after the Senate hearing, President Trump downplayed the massive security breach. “There was no classified information, as I understand it,” Trump said, adding that many people in the government use Signal.
“It was a chilling thing to realize that I’ve inadvertently discovered a massive security breach in the national security system of the United States,” he said in an interview with All Things Considered.
The use of civilian software to discuss sensitive military and government matters came to light after Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, said the Signal account of national security adviser Michael Waltz had added him to the Principals Committee group chat.
Warner stated that there was a senior level of people communicating on the non-classified channel and nobody bothered to check who they were talking to.
The top senator from Virginia slammed the incident as “mind-boggling” and reprimanded members of the administration.
Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the armed services committee, said he and Wicker would be meeting Tuesday to chart out a course forward, and collecting evidence as part of conducting a probe. He told NPR that it was an egregious violation.
Warner: Can I add one last thing? If it was the first time. It would be worse than it is right now. The same administration accidentally let slip the names of 200 CIA new agents. Many of those who can’t be deployed and this is the administration that Elon Musk and his so-called DOGE boys released classified information almost on a daily basis.
Warner: One of the things I have loved about the [Senate] Intelligence Committee, I was chair under the last administration and vice chair now, is that we have a tendency of almost always being bipartisan. I absolutely believe if the administration tries to stonewall this, we will have bipartisan support for us as the Intelligence Committee, the oversight committee that’s supposed to be making sure things are appropriate. We’ll get a look at this at the transcript.
Goldberg says he saw the plans days after being added to a Signal chat called “Houthi PC small group” by a user named Michael Waltz, the name of President Trump’s national security adviser. Goldberg told NPR’s All Thing Considered that it was a chilling experience to find out that he inadvertently discovered a massive security breach in the United States.
The Signal Room: Ned Price’s conversations with former colleagues about the high-ranking U.S. officials’ conversations before the March 15 attack
The Republican who was a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard said that any one of them served in the military and would live in the same place as him.
“Heads are exploding,” Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who was deputy to the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. in the Biden administration, told NPR’s Morning Edition as he described conversations with former colleagues about high-ranking Trump officials’ Signal chat.
The White House Situation Room is where the Principals Committee meetings are held, and it is the most secure place in the U.S. government.
“These secure rooms are built to discuss classified information,” NPR’s Greg Myre reports. “You can’t take a phone into these rooms. You can’t take documents out, and all of these top-ranking national security officials have SCIFs at their offices and at their homes.”
“This is a top secret network that beams them into the White House Situation Room,” Price says, adding that if a member is traveling, a national security team accompanies them to set up a secure tent and other equipment to protect their communications.
But earlier this month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared details about targets and weapons via the Signal app hours before the March 15 U.S. attack, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
Goldberg did not share what he said could be damaging elements of the communications sent to him, including what he called “operational details of forthcoming strikes.”
The National Security Director of the National Intelligence and CIA Director Revisited at a Senate Apparent Action on the Signal Message App
Journalists at NPR and other outlets use the Signal to keep their messages private. The first Trump administration targeted such apps because their messages couldn’t be cracked even with a warrant, and they complained five years ago.
But experts say sensitive government communications normally occur via official devices and through elaborate security measures, not by using open-source software offered by a nonprofit.
Vice President Vance, the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and “S M,” an apparent reference to the Trump adviser, are among 18 members of the Principals Committee chat. The Director of National Intelligence and the CIA Director appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday.
The agencies are obsessive about secure communications, says NPR’s Greg Myre. “Yet based on Goldberg’s account, no senior national security official raised concerns about sharing war plans on Signal.”
Last week, a Pentagon-wide email went out warning staff about a vulnerability in the messaging app, according to NPR’s Tom Bowman. The notice stated that there were risks of Russian professional hacking groups working to spy on the communications. The notice was apparently sent days after Goldberg told Waltz that he had somehow been added to the PC group, and left the chat.
Democratic senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee strongly disagree with claims made by the CIA Director and the National Intelligence Director.
The National Security Council ruled out the Gabbard-Goldberg Intrusion in a Not-So-Disguised Signal Chat Group
A signal message group is completely permissible and lawful, but did not include classified information.
Gabbard refused to say whether she was on the Signal chat group, but added that she has not shared any classified information outside of proper channels.
Goldberg said that there were 18 people who participated in the text chain, which included Vice President Kumar Deva and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Goldberg said he initially thought it might be a hoax, but came to believe it was real as he read the texts over the course of several days. It must have been an accident that he was in the group. He speculated that Waltz, or an aide handling his account, intended to include someone else with the same initials as Goldberg — “JG.”
The National Security Council confirmed the authenticity of the message thread on Monday, saying it was “reviewing how an accidental number was put into the chain.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have criticized the security breach, saying the incident raises questions about the Trump administration’s handling of sensitive information.
Democrats in Congress were against many of Trump’s security and intelligence picks for their lack of experience during the nomination process, and now they are calling for more investigation.
The leaders of the House and Senate, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, have both gone public with their call for an investigation of what they termed an unnecessary and irresponsible national security breach.
Roger Wicker told reporters on Monday that his committee would look into the matter directly.
Maine Senator Susan Collins is a member of the Intelligence Committee. Collins said it was “easily doable to me”.
Another member of the intel panel, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., suggested ahead of Tuesday’s hearing that the committee would have a deeper conversation on the breach behind closed doors.
“I don’t think it was a good thing, but I want to hear an explanation of it from the individuals involved in it in a classified setting so I get the full story before I make a judgement on it,” Rounds told NPR.
Source: Intelligence leaders: We didn’t share classified information in Signal chat group
Zero-Click Spyware: What Have We Learned in the Senate, How Have We Solved Our House and Where Do We Go From Here?
Republicans in the House have been more circumspect. The issue did not come up during the House GOP weekly meeting on Tuesday, signaling hopes to downplay the matter.
He said that the mistake and the one that was serious were both ones that had to be fixed. But Johnson described the participants in the chat as “patriots,” adding, “that was a successful mission.”
There is no way to make a phone unhackable. In secure rooms where Washington officials conduct their most sensitive conversations, phones aren’t allowed in the door.
So-called zero-click spyware is now sold to regimes and corporations around the globe. Users in 150 countries have been notified by Apple that they have been targeted. A program from a single Israeli spyware maker, the NSO Group, has been deployed in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Hungary, India, Mexico and Rwanda. Frank Figliuzzi, the F.B.I.’s assistant director for counterintelligence, says junior collegiate countries now have the power to succeed. You don’t have to be very smart.
Sen. Mark Warner’s Challenge to the “Houthi PC Small Group” Signal Chat: It’s a Weapons System, Is It Really Leaked?
“The assertions by numerous administration officials that we are misrepresenting the content of the Signal texts have made us believe that people should see the texts themselves, and we think that this is what they should do,” the story states.
The leaders told senators that they had not shared any classified information in an improper or unlawful way — prompting a challenge from the ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.
It’s the second trip to Capitol Hill in two days for Gabbard and Ratcliffe, who were grilled about the gaffe on Tuesday by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Look, it is what it is,” Alina Habba, counselor to the president, told reporters at the White House Wednesday morning. “At the end of the day, this is — in my opinion — something that they’re making a big to-do about nothing. A reporter that is trying to get clout.”
“This is classified information,” Krishnamoorthi replied. “It’s a weapons system as well as sequence of strikes, as well as details about the operations.”
The “Houthi PC small group” Signal chat was recreated by Krishnamoorthi with a large placard bearing an enlarged picture of the chat. The Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was asked if those are weapons systems.
The Illinois Democrat cited an executive order and a Defense Department manual as saying that information could be classified if it was leaked to the public.
“I’ve seen things much less sensitive be presented to us with high classification,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. “And to say that it isn’t is a lie to the country.”
Source: U.S. intel leaders are grilled again about the leaked Signal chat as more details emerge
A Chat with the Director of National Intelligence on an Open-Source Message App about a Plan for a Bombing Campaign in Yemen
The director of national intelligence was part of a high-level chat on an open-sourced messaging app about plans for a bombing campaign in Yemen.