Fox News’ chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin said the group chat that Trump officials inadvertently added a reporter to ahead of a recent bombing campaign in Yemen was possibly “FAR MORE sensitive” than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims.
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported Monday that national security adviser Michael Waltz added him to a group chat earlier this month on the messaging app Signal, in which members discussed classified “war plans,” which Hegseth has denied.
“There is a debate about whether the operational details … Hegseth shared in the Signal Group Chat were ‘classified’ or not,” Griffin wrote Wednesday on X, formerly Twitter, adding that she has since “surveyed a range of current and former US defense officials” about this.
Griffin said these unnamed officials “agreed ‘war plans’ is not the right term but what was shared may have been FAR MORE sensitive given the operational details and time stamps ahead of the operation, which could have placed US military pilots in harms way.”
“This information was clearly classified,” one former senior defense official told her.
Hegseth claimed Monday that “Nobody was texting war plans” on Signal, only for Goldberg — who had initially withheld sharing some of the messages over concerns that their content was too sensitive — to publish damning exchanges Wednesday suggesting otherwise.
“What Hegseth shared two hours ahead of the strikes were time sensitive ‘attack orders’ or ‘operational plans’ with actual timing of the strikes and mention of F18s, MQ9 Reapers and Tomahawks,” Griffin wrote later that evening.
One former senior defense official told Griffin that if such “attack orders” fell into the wrong hands, they would allow “the enemy to move the target and increase lethal actions against US forces” and put American servicemembers “directly and immediately at risk.”
“This information is typically sent through classified channels to the commanders in the field as ‘secret, no forn’ message,” Griffin wrote Wednesday. “In other words the information is ‘classified’ and should not be shared through insecure channels.”
A burgeoning group of Republicans have since come to agree with that position, joining aghast Democrats in reacting to the blunder. Hegseth’s claim that he never discussed “war plans,” meanwhile, is “pure semantics,” one former senior defense official told Griffin.
“If you are revealing who is going to be attacked (Houthis - the name of the text chain), it still gives the enemy warning,” they told the veteran reporter. “When you release the time of the attack - all of that is always ‘classified.’”