Trump Officials Insist ‘War Plans’ Signal Chat Not Classified, Dems Skeptical

Democrats today ripped into Trump administration officials over their “war plans” Signal chat, with Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Mark Warner calling the incident “sloppy” and a “colossal screw-up.”

At a hearing on Capitol Hill, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard both insisted that the chat did not include classified information, which Sen. Warner, a Virginia Democrat, said “didn’t make sense.”

On Monday, Jeffrey Rosenberg, editor of The Atlantic, revealed that he was accidentally added to a Signal group chat of top Trump officials, who earlier this month discussed plans for a bombing campaign in Yemen over the course of several days. That attack took place on March 15, but none of those on the chat, including Ratcliffe, Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, noticed Goldberg was there.

Today’s hearing on worldwide threats, which also included FBI Director Kash Patel, was scheduled before the Atlantic story published. However, every Democrat took their time at the mic to excoriate the Trump officials over the misstep, while Republicans largely ignored it. (Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota said he’d ask about it in a closed session scheduled for this afternoon.)

Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton tried to give Ratcliffe and Gabbard some cover when he argued that each agency has its own classification system, suggesting that neither the head of the CIA nor director of national intelligence should be required to know whether Defense Department information is classified. Sen. Warner called that logic “strange” and criticized the officials for not even acknowledging that they made a mistake.

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“This was a huge mistake, right?” Sen. John Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, asked Ratcliffe. “No,” the CIA director responded, before conceding that including Goldberg was an “inadvertent mistake.”

Ratcliffe admitted that he was on the Signal chat in question. Gabbard was more circumspect. “I’m not going to get into the specifics,” she told Sen. Warner when he asked if she was on the chat, though she insisted that “no classified material” was shared. She also declined to say whether she was using a personal or government-issued phone for the chats. “It’s under review by the National Security Council,” she said.

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According to Rosenberg’s story, Defense Secretary Hegseth shared “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”

When asked if this was true, Ratcliffe and Gabbard both said they did not recall discussions about weapons. Gabbard struggled to answer whether targets were mentioned, responding after a long pause that “I believe there was discussion around targets in general.”

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Ratcliffe argued that government employees are allowed to use third-party apps like Signal for non-classified discussions. That appears to be true. However, a Pentagon memo sent to employees this month warning of a Signal-related scam noted that Signal is “NOT approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information,” and all uses must “abide by DoD and NSA/CSS policy.”

The memo didn’t discuss whether adding journalists to high-level discussions is allowed. Ratcliffe and Gabbard didn’t have much to say about that at the hearing. FBI Director Patel, who was not on the chat, was also asked about it, but he said he’d only been briefed on it last night and didn’t have anything to add.

The question now is whether the information discussed on the “war plans” chat was classified. “We’ll find out,” Sen. Warner said. “This is too important to our national security.”

About Chloe Albanesius

Executive Editor for News

I started out covering tech policy in D.C. for The National Journal, where my beat included state-level tech news and all the congressional hearings and FCC meetings I could handle. I later covered Wall Street trading tech before switching gears to consumer tech. I now lead PCMag’s news coverage and manage our how-to content.

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