Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed the exact time that American fighter jets would take off for strikes against Houthi fighters in Yemen to an unclassified commercial group chat that inadvertently included a journalist. Those sensitive details were revealed today when The Atlantic published a nearly complete transcript of the private conversation among President Trump’s most senior national security aides.
The nation’s top intelligence officials, two of whom were on the chat, were pressed today on Capitol Hill about the extraordinary security breach. In defense of itself, the Trump administration has leaned on a semantic argument: It said the discussions on the chat were not classified — which national security veterans said could be true now, but was probably not at the time — and that no “war plan” was revealed.
Technically, my colleague David Sanger told me, they may be right. But Hegseth’s descriptions of the plan were so detailed that it may be a distinction without a difference. “Had the chat leaked,” David said, “it could have given advance warning to the Houthis, who could have simply left the site and defeated the mission. They could have also prepared to launch against the planes, which would have put the pilots’ lives at risk.”
To better understand the debacle, I asked David, who has been covering the White House and U.S. national security for decades, to explain.
Why were they talking on a group chat?
David: An operation like this would normally result in a meeting in the Situation Room, because it’s a secure space.
The messaging app Signal has become more popular in recent times because of Salt Typhoon, a Chinese operation that successfully got inside American telecommunications networks. There was a movement among U.S. officials to move nonclassified but sensitive conversations to encrypted apps like Signal. It’s basically free, and quite good. But it is not a replacement or even a legal alternative to using a government classified system for the launch of military activity or the discussion of classified data.