Top intelligence officials from the Trump regime, including CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, appeared before lawmakers on Tuesday where they were asked about a Signal group chat that accidentally included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. The big takeaway: the officials insisted that none of the information they discussed was classified, but refused to share the information that was discussed and when asked whether the Atlantic editor could share it with the public, they wouldn’t give the green light for him to do that either.
Ratcliffe and Gabbard were testifying to the Senate intelligence committee Tuesday for a hearing that had been scheduled long before the story in The Atlantic broke Monday. Ratcliffe and Gabbard were just two officials on a large group chat discussing plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen, a chat that included others like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. It appears Waltz was the one who accidentally added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, according to the journalist’s reporting.
The hearing was not planned with the intention of discussing The Atlantic’s bombshell story, but the Democratic members of the committee naturally steered their questions to that topic. One of the main questions at issue was whether there was classified information discussed in the group chat. Ratcliffe kept suggesting the information wasn’t classified, but the more he talked it started to become clear he was wording his answer carefully enough to simply say he hadn’t shared any classified intelligence over the chat. Gabbard attempted to stonewall much more than Ratcliffe, often refusing to answer the most basic questions under the pretext that an investigation was ongoing.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia was the first to ask Gabbard if she was involved in the group chat and right off the bat she wouldn’t answer.
“So you refuse to acknowledge whether you are on this group chat?” Warner asked.
“Senator, I’m not going to get into the specifics,” Gabbard said.
“Why aren’t you going to get into the specifics? Is this… is it because it’s all classified?” Warner shot back.
“Because this is currently under review by the National Security Council,” Gabbard said.
“Because it’s all classified? If it’s not classified, share the text now,” Warner said during the heated exchange.
Democratic Sen. Reed of Rhode Island also asked Gabbard if she was overseas at any point during the group chat discussions. Gabbard said that she was but refused to answer a question from Reed about whether she was using an official government-issued phone or her personal device.
“I won’t speak to this because it’s under review by the National Security Council,” Gabbard said. “Once that review is complete, I’m sure we’ll share the results with the committee.”
That response perplexed Reed, who asked why she couldn’t answer such a simple question.
“National Security Council is reviewing all aspects of how this came to be, how the journalist was inadvertently added to the group chat, and what occurred within that chat across the board,” Gabbard said.
It was also discussed in the hearing that one of the people on the chat, top Trump advisor and unofficial Secretary of State, Steve Witkoff, was in Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin while the chat was taking place.
Democratic senators like Reed, Warner, and Bennet of Colorado all made quite a dramatic show Tuesday in the face of stonewalling by Gabbard. But all three men voted in favor of Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Navy John Phelan on Monday, even after The Atlantic story broke. Phelan has no military experience and donated handsomely to President Trump. But they all voted to confirm him, despite previously talking tough about stopping Trump’s unqualified nominees.
Gabbard was also asked by Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona about what she considers classified information, and Gabbard wouldn’t give a straight answer. “The deliberation as to whether or not we should launch a strike on another country, would you consider that classified information, Ms. Gabbard?” Kelly asked.
“The information was not classified,” Gabbard said. Kelly clarified that he wasn’t even talking about the Signal group chat specifically, but was instead seeking an answer more generally about whether discussion about the decision to bomb another country should be considered classified. Gabbard refused to give a straight answer, saying “There are other factors that would go into determining that classification.”
Later in the hearing, Sen. Warner of Virginia asked why they wouldn’t just share the information at issue since they kept insisting it wasn’t classified.
“The idea, somehow, that none of this is classified but you can’t talk about it here… you can’t have it both ways,” Warner said.
And that desire to have it both ways could present some serious issues if the most sensitive parts of their chat are ultimately released. Goldberg spoke to the news outlet the Bulwark on Tuesday, where he said he was contemplating a release of the texts that got into the war plans. The editor had decided not to include many of those details in his article because he was trying to protect national security. But if the director of national intelligence says nothing in that group chat was classified, there would appear to be no reason to withhold them.
Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said there appeared to be crimes committed and called for the resignation of top officials, “starting with the national security advisor and the secretary of defense.”
But its unclear the secretary of defense will face any real consequences. Hegseth was asked about the scandal on Monday and insisted “nobody was texting war plans,” a claim contradicted by Goldberg’s reporting. The defense secretary referred to Goldberg as “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.”
The “hoaxes” Hegseth claimed Goldberg was peddling included several things that were proved to be accurate, including Trump’s ties to Russia, and the fact that he said there were “fine people on both sides” after the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017. Goldberg also broke the story about Trump referring to U.S. military veterans as “suckers and losers,” during his first term, something that Trump denied but was heard by Trump’s own chief of staff John Kelly.
“So this is the guy that pedals in garbage. This is what he does,” Hegseth said about Goldberg Monday.
For his part, Trump has defended his officials, telling NBC News in a phone interview Tuesday that the job of his national security advisor was safe, at least for now. “Michael Waltz has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man,” Trump reportedly said,” insisting it was, “the only glitch in two months, and it turned out not to be a serious one.”
Meanwhile David French, a New York Times Opinion columnist and former Army officer and JAG lawyer published a piece calling for Hegseth’s immediate resignation. “There is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that,” he wrote. “It would normally result in instant consequences (relief from command, for example) followed by a comprehensive investigation and, potentially, criminal charges.”
