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Offer ends March 31st. See if you qualify at oracle .com slash nyt oracle .com slash nyt Hey everybody, it's Sabrina.
It's been a little while I know and that's because after three years of hosting the show with Michael, I'm leaving the job as host. I've decided to return to my first love reporting.
It was a really hard decision for me.
As you know, this is a very special show, and I'm really proud of the work I did on it.
I said reporting was my first love but YOU are dear listeners and the amazing thing that is this show is my other one.
I always loved hearing from you, knowing you were out there.
So, as you've probably noticed, there's been some new voices on the show as we figure out who's going to permanently step in.
And don't be surprised if I come back to visit as a guest or even to sit in as host. OK, here's today's show.
From the New York Times, I'm Rachael Abrams. comes, This Is The Daily.
It's being called a reckless and devastating breach of national security.
Revelations that top Trump officials inadvertently shared secret U .S. military plans with a prominent journalist by mistakenly adding him to a group chat.
Today, Atlantic Magazine editor -in -chief Jeffrey Goldberg explains how he initially thought the messages were a scam.
And now what he makes of the enormous fallout since going public.
It's Wednesday, March 26th.
Jeffrey, is that you?
Yeah, it's me. Well, hello, Jeffrey.
You've had quite a week.
It's only Tuesday morning.
Yeah, tell me what we're doing.
What is this for? So I'm with The Daily.
My name is Rachel Abrams. Oh, The Daily.
Oh yeah, I'm familiar with it.
Yeah, it's a little podcast of the New York Times.
Local newspaper in New Yorker.
We're just starting out, so thanks for bearing with us.
No, that's great. It's cool.
So do you have a lot of listeners?
Yeah, we know Jason, I'm up in my mom, my dad — My mom.
In my mom. Jeffrey and I talked on Tuesday morning.
It was a full day after a story came out about how he'd been added accidentally to a group chat with top Trump administration officials.
So, Jeffrey, we have never met before, but yesterday, I think I texted you, I emailed you, I called you, I called your publicist. I was desperate to get you on the show to talk about your story and the reaction to it.
Should've tried Signal.
Should've tried Signal.
That's right. So, as we're hinting at, you just wrote something that really everybody is talking about.
So, tell us, where does the story begin?
Well, the story begins in earnest about March 11th.
I received a message request on Signal from someone identified as Michael Waltz.
He's the National Security Advisor in the United States.
Signal the secure messaging app.
Yeah, the commercial, non -government, end -to -end encrypted app that a lot of people in journalism and outside of journalism use.
Because it's allegedly safer.
Right. And I don't know Waltz.
I met him a couple times.
But it struck me as unusual because I have a somewhat contentious relationship with the Trump administration or more to the point with Trump.
But certainly in the normal bandwidth of Washington experience for a magazine editor covers politics and foreign policy national security to get a message request from the National Security Advisor if it was indeed him.
I accepted the request, forgot about it.
A couple of days later I'm included in a group called the Houthi PC small group.
Can you translate that for us?
You have deep experience in foreign policy as a journalist, as you've said.
What is Houthi's PC small group mean to you in this moment?
Houthis are obviously the Iran -backed terrorist organization that runs part of Yemen and been and obviously attacking shipping, attacking Israel for the last year -and -a -half, becoming quite a menace to international shipping.
PC stands for principles committee, meaning that small group of principles, cabinet members, people who run intelligence agencies.
And you are certainly, I think we need to point out, not a principle in this context.
No. I have never been to a principles meeting.
Right, just to be clear.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what PC stands for.
Our small group is not actually that small.
It was 18 people, 19 people, I wouldn't consider that a small group.
I would consider it the medium group.
And who is in the group at this point?
J .D. Vance, Michael Walts, and the Secretary of State Defense, Treasury, CIA director, director of national intelligence, et cetera.
I mean, again, people who are identified as such on my phone, but I'm an appropriately suspicious journalist. And obviously, for reasons I can go into, I think this is a set up of some sort.
I think this is a hoax, a deception, a non -state actor trying to entrap a journalist. I don't know what it is, but that on the face premise of this is ridiculous, so it had to be something other than what it was purporting to be.
Right, basically, like you being on a group chat with really top tier officials in the administration, you're not believing this is the real thing.
Maybe I can be included on something having to do with like the Easter egg roll or something at the White House, but I'm not going to be in this.
And even though you think it's fake at this point, I'm sure you're still kind of curious, you're watching this thing.
Well, yeah, I mean...
Because what if? What if?
You know, let's be honest, you know, you become a journalist because the most interesting place on the planet is the other side of a closed door, right?
Right, right, of course.
I got to watch it one way or the other, you know.
So what do they start discussing?
Well, the first text in this chain is from Michael Walts saying that he's setting up this discussion group.
This is on a Thursday, I guess, for basically, you know, we're heading into this weekend.
There's this sort of elliptical promise of something happening over the next 72 hours.
And the Michael Walt's user name asks these other principals to give their weekend POC point of contact in case there's a reason to have a further discussion.
And so, one after another, six or seven people respond.
on Marco Rubio, or the person playing Marco Rubio, responds with a name from somebody from the State Department, and so on, the Defense Department, et cetera.
And most interesting in this moment, to me, is that the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, names a person and says, this person is going to be representing the CIA in this discussion.
Now, what I learned over time, is that the person he names is an active CIA officer, whose name has never been discussed in public.
I thought, well, like this is really weird. What is happening here?
But that's the initial foray.
And then the next day, there's a really interesting substantive policy debate about whether the U .S. should ramp up its military activities against the Houthis in Yemen.
And there's a lot of criticism in the chain of the Biden administration's inability to get the Houthi situation under control.
Mainly, what there is, is a lot of resentment expressed toward the Europeans for not being able to float navies that could actually do this work and criticism the Europeans for not being able to pay, you know, the sort of thing that we've heard for a while from these guys and JD Vance starts the conversation out by saying he disagrees with the decision to attack Yemen, at least right now.
He goes on to say that we're sending the wrong message to Europe and why do we have to do this?
and the European shipping that's in danger, not American shipping.
And furthermore, the president doesn't really understand the consequences of doing this.
And J .D. Vance's, he's doing this in front of half the cabinet.
People who work for the president, he's telling them, I disagree with the president.
And also, I'm not sure he gets it.
And J .D. Vance is playing the role that we understand J .D.
Vance to play, which is kind of a soft isolationism.
It's like why are we fighting Yemen?
What are we doing? And then the more traditional muscular interventionist philosophy is represented by Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor, and Pete Hexet, the Secretary of Defense is, yes, we recognize that Europe is pathetic, and this is what Hexet says about Europe.
It all caps, by the way.
They recognize this European dynamic, but they're more interested in just like let's get this thing going against the Houthis.
So, this conversation, just to recap, is them discussing whether ramping up attacks on the Houthis militarily will be a good political strategy.
Yes. And you're telling it sounds like they're having kind of a polite disagreement.
JD Vance is seemingly disagreeing with the position that Trump has.
And that disagreement seems like it hinges on whether or not we're making the Europeans pay enough, which is something we've talked about on the show quite a bit.
Right, exactly. So I wanna check in with you here because in this moment, do you still think that this is a hoax?
Are you starting to sense that it could be real?
I am suspecting that it could be real because it's pretty accurate depiction of what these guys sound like, but again, and let me put this in like, it can't be true.
That's what's keeping me from believing that it's true.
It can't be true. It can't be true.
Like, come on. like you know I've been around this world for a long time they don't I don't do this.
No, Bob Woodward has spent an entire career trying to infiltrate groups like this.
So how could you possibly have just been added to a group chat?
Yeah, yeah I mean you know and and also it's weird that substantive government conversations will be taking place over Signal because Signal is not by the US government standards secure in part because obviously it's open to you technically open to anyone, including yours truly, and I know that previous administrations have used different messaging services, but not for substance, right?
I mean, I think in the Biden Administration, it's a good example, they used Signal, but my impression is, based on some reporting, my impression is that they used Signal to do things like setting up lunch appointments, or, hey, I've just left Saudi Arabia, I'll call you from a skiff when I get to whatever.
And just to be clear, this, the skiff is a?
The skiff is a compartmentalized facility that is built to protect the conversations electronically.
You know, you can't even take your phone or your Apple watch or your Fitbit.
These are very, very, very secure facilities.
And by the way, the senior people in the national security apparatus of the United States have these things built into their houses when they're serving.
So they can just go down to the basement and make the secure phone call.
And the whole idea is to protect these conversations from foreign surveillance.
So what happens after this?
How does this discussion progress from here?
Well, it progressed very quickly, so that on Saturday the 15th, I am running some errands and the signal chat lights up, and it's probably the most important text in this entire series of texts, It comes from the account user Pete Hexeth, who provides what I would call basically the attack sequence, a summary of the war plan.
And it's detailed. It tells the exact time that attack will be launched.
It tells the exact time the effects of the attack will be felt in Yemen.
It talks about the weapons packages being used.
It talks about some specific targets.
It's like actual military planning that has settled business and about to happen.
A forthcoming attack on Yemen.
I'm also sitting there in my car it's 11 .44 AM Eastern time.
I get this text. The text promises that the effects of the first wave of attacks will be felt in Yemen at 13 .45, 1 .45 PM Eastern time.
So it's two hours right?
And I'm thinking to myself, well I guess in two hours I'm going to find out if this is a real chain or not, right?
Definitively. So, you know, I basically just kind of sit there and at 1 .55 or so, I go into Twitter and I, you know, put Yemen in the search bar, and then sure enough, there's bombs falling all over Yemen just as the user identified as Pete Hegseth promised two hours earlier.
Breaking news overseas right now, where officials are confirming that U .S. air and naval assets hit dozens of Houthi targets in Yemen, including missiles, radar, drones and air defense systems. These are the most significant airstrikes since President Trump returned to the White House, and the first time U .S. jets obstruct these Iranian -backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since President Trump returned to the White House.
Trump announced the strikes on social media, threatening the Houthi rebels with, quote, overwhelming lethal force.
The US says it will keep attacking targets in Yemen until the Houthis stop their assault on global shipping in the Red Sea.
I want you to describe to us what you're seeing in this group chat after the attacks start.
It's a couple of updates on the consequences of the attack.
That's all I'll say.
the damage that they think that they have done, combine with some, you know, congratulatory texts.
And this is of course, where they start using emojis.
Emojis, which emojis are they using?
Before the attack started, there was the prayer emoji used by a couple of people.
And then during the attacks, when the reports are coming in that's going well from the American perspective, there's the flexed bicep, I guess.
Emoji, there's the fire emoji.
there's an American flag emoji.
And sometimes they repeated a couple of times and there, I'm sitting there watching that and going, wow, every workplace is the same, huh?
So what do you do next?
So, I'm sitting in the car, I'm watching the Signal Chat react to the Yemen attack.
I'm realizing that this is almost certainly a real signal group and not some sort of deceptive disinformation campaign.
And so then I had to begin to make serious decisions, consulting with colleagues, that ultimately led me to remove myself from the Signal group later that day.
Knowing that the group administrator in Signal, and the members, I believe, of a group as well, are notified that you have left the group.
I assumed at that point that Mike Waltz was gonna call and say, hey who is this?
Or call and say, why'd you leave the group?
And then I would say, director waltz or whatever, do you even know who this is?
But nobody, look, I mean, here's the truth of it is, is nobody noticed when I was added and nobody noticed when I was left. And can you tell us why you decided to leave the group chat?
You know, I think people can make their own deductions here, but I can get into for various reasons the conversations I subsequently had with colleagues and others about my decision -making.
All I will say is that I remove myself from the group understanding the consequences of that.
And what I do is I decide, oh, I have to write a story about the world's weirdest signal group.
On Monday, I texted and emailed the relevant people in the chat.
I used the signal contact.
I sent long emails to a large number of players in this drama asking various questions.
And what was the response?
Well, I mean, I got one official response back from the National Security Council, which came pretty quickly saying, apparently this is a real chain and we're investigating why a journalist was inadvertently invited to the chain.
But I think they had to acknowledge it, and they did.
And once they acknowledge that it's real, I published our first piece on the subject.
We'll be right back.
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Mr. President, you're reacting to the story in the Atlantic that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides have been discussing very sensitive material through the signal, and included in an Atlantic report.
What is your response to that?
Then I don't know anything about it.
I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic.
It's, to me, it's a magazine that's going out of business You're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so -called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.
I just can't to this moment get over the idea that during the days that group was going on, and not one of the participants said, we shouldn't be doing this on signal.
Do you believe that this warrants a congressional investigation?
Well, it will. Common sense says this was a major screw -up and somebody should be held accountable.
Clearly, I think the administration has acknowledged it was a mistake, and they'll tighten up and make sure it doesn't happen again.
Should Mike — Should Mike Walton accept me on discipline?
No. Jeffrey, I want to talk about the immediate reaction.
This is such a breach of security protocols.
Can you explain the hazards of this from a security point of view?
Yeah, put aside the the weirdness of inviting a journalist by mistake.
I mean, okay, it's hard to put aside, obviously, given what's happened.
But one of the things that people not understand, I think, about why there are rules governing privileged conversations within the national security community is that signal might be end -to -end encrypted and it might be very hard to hack.
But foreign intelligence services spend a lot of time trying to target the actual devices that belong to government officials, right?
Like, in other words, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is walking around with a cell phone in his pocket.
It should not surprise anyone to know that the Chinese government is very interested in knowing what's going on inside that phone and it uses all kinds of methods where, in a remote way, you can target that phone.
In this particular scenario, this particular attack on the Houthis, if a foreign adversary had gotten this information that you saw, what is the worst -case scenario?
Like, can you just play out the possibilities a little bit?
But if somehow the Houthis understood that American warplanes were heading in their direction, that would give them conceivably more time to prepare a response which would obviously put the pilots of those planes in danger.
You're the National Security Advisor of the United States.
You're the CIA Director.
You don't want your target in Yemen to know that in an hour or so he's going to get blown up.
So yes, like if you put this stuff out in the wild and in signal, and you're not talking about this in a secure way face to face, theoretically the danger level goes up.
I mean, this is so obvious to me, like logic dictates this.
Yeah, I just don't wanna breeze over it, I wanna make it really clear for people that the reason it is important for the government to take all of these precautions and conceal these types of plans is that this information getting out there could compromise a military mission, It could put military service members at risk.
At greater risk. Greater risk.
Grader risk. Those are the stakes here.
And also the success and failure of your mission.
Right. Of course. And because these are the stakes, did they break any laws here?
We're talking about sort of how things are typically done, but did the existence of this group chat, adding you, was any of this illegal?
I can't answer that question.
I'm not a national security lawyer.
We've interviewed national security lawyers who say that there are various risks associated When they're connected with doing this the way they did it, that will be discovered in the fullness of time.
And there's a lot of chatter right now in military forums and government forums of people who are saying, I'm an army captain in the artillery, right?
But every year, I have to be recertified in cybersecurity.
And I have to watch videos of how to make sure that your information is correct and what kind of information can you put on your personal phone and what kind of information can't you put on your personal?
law. And there are people who get kicked out of the military, there are people who go to prison for compromising security at a much lower level than, we're about to attack Yemen.
Here's how the attack is going to go.
Right, right. So I can imagine that if you are a member of the military or the State Department, you are frustrated, to say the least. That's that's what you're because you are held to a very, very high standard that these folks, at least for now, do not seem like they were holding themselves to.
Right, right. That's why there was no sympathy among government employees.
There's no particular sympathy for Hillary Clinton, for having government emails on her personal server, but still, you know, guys, you make these rules, you gotta follow them.
Is there any chance that anybody on this group chat could believeably say that they didn't know that they were supposed to take different kinds of precautions?
I mean, I guess you could say that.
It's the beginning of an administration they're two months in, but is ignorance of the law, you know, does that absolve you of following the rules?
Although some of them have obviously served, Marco Rubio is on the Intelligence Committee, John Ratcliffe was the former DNI, Pete Hexeth served in the army, and so on.
Also, like, here's the thing.
I mean, even at that level, there's like kind of an orientation moment.
Here's your office.
Here's your computer.
Here's your Skiff. Here's your skiff.
This is the computer that you can communicate with other intelligence agencies with, but that you cannot have your personal email on it.
It's a closed system.
And this is the computer that you get to use to do internet research. And this is the, you know, I mean, you're presumably told all this stuff.
It really makes you wonder what else is being communicated this way.
How many other small groups are there?
And also, why would these folks be communicating this way?
I mean, just, you know why?
Why? You know why? Tell me.
Because going into a skiff is a pain in the neck.
Even if it's in your basement?
I mean, I had to go to the supermarket.
Maybe they got to go to the supermarket.
I mean, you know, you got to go to the supermarket.
You got to go take your kid to little league.
I mean, all these people do have security details, mind you.
They're driven in armored suburbins and they have very extensive communications devices associated with those vehicles.
I mean, the idea is to make it maximally convenient.
And by the way, this is...
So that's it. That's, it's convenience.
That's... I don't know.
Or if you talk about an on signal, well, you're obligated to make a copy of that discussion and send it to an official government account so that it can be archived by the National Archives.
But, Signal is a disappearing app.
Obviously, you know, the messages disappear.
Well, they can, you can set it to disappear.
Is that what happened here?
Yeah, and these were set to disappear.
I see. And so, there is the plausible explanation that they're like, we just wanna have real talk and we don't want this to be archived forever in the National Archives.
Right. Okay. So that sounds like it potentially could be a legal problem.
Well, I mean, so it's convenience and also a way of having a way of protecting your conversation from future congressional oversight.
It's a lot of other things.
I think the natural question is to say under normal circumstances, there would probably be an investigation led by Congress.
Democrats are obviously calling for that.
But it just feels like there must be so little interest in an investigation from anybody with the power to do it.
And I just want to give you some examples of the reaction to your story that make me say that, because over the past 24 hours, the Republicans have really played this down.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has said, this is not our issue.
Senator John Kennedy said a mistake was made, it happens.
A House Republican called it a learning moment.
Trump himself said, Mike Waltz is a good man, he's learned a lesson.
Do you think there be any consequences for the people who initiated or participated in this breach of national security.
Nothing that's been said by the administration so far suggests to me that they're treating this seriously or treating it the way they would treat it if this were Democrats who had done this.
You mentioned Hillary Clinton earlier, but I want to bring it back to her for a second because it seems noteworthy that a lot of the people on this signal chat, and certainly President Trump.
All of these people made a very big deal about Clinton and how she used a private email server for official business when she was Secretary of State and everybody remembers the chance to lock her up.
And every turn, they described what she did as a very serious breach of national security that should face consequences.
And can you, for a second, putting aside whether or not this is hypocritical, could you ruminate on whether you think what you have seen is as serious, more serious, far more serious, just by comparison to what she did.
If this is not a big deal, then people like Pete Hexeth and Marco Rubio and all the rest have to go back into time and say that Hillary Clinton wasn't a big deal either.
Right, I mean this is this kind of arid, dispiriting Washington game where when you commit a crime, it's the worst thing that ever happened on the planet.
And when I do it, it's perfectly acceptable and understandable.
Here's the thing and this is sort of what I would love to say to Pete Hegseth, six months ago, if Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of Defense and the Joe Biden Administration were communicating with Kamala Harris over Signal about an imminent military attack and describing to Kamala Harris which weapons are going to be used in the attack and they mistakenly included a journalist in that conversation, do you really think Pete Hexeth would say it's not a big deal?
Do you think that the mistake here is being accidentally included in this getting out or having you signal in the first place?
What I understand from inside the White House, I've talked to a couple of people and obviously read some of the reporting in the last period of time, And they think that Mike Waltz is a dope for including me in the chat and they're really focused on that.
I mean, there's not a fantastic record of Democrats being completely assiduous about the storage and safekeeping of classified information.
I mean, nobody's perfect here, but we're coming out of a situation where the current president was actually indicted for hiding classified information in a bathroom.
This is the president, of course, who is known to have discussed classified operations on the veranda of Mar -a -Lago.
Mm -hmm. So you know, the tone is set from the top.
I mean, there are people who take security very seriously.
Mm -hmm. And there are people who don't take it very seriously.
I wouldn't... You know, I don't think anybody would say that Donald Trump is one of those presidents who took it extremely seriously.
I think this sort of speaks to the question I asked you about whether you think there are going to be any consequences.
audiences. Because like all of the examples you just laid out, those suggest that maybe these are folks that think the mistake here was most likely just including you, which makes me wonder, do you think that you are gonna be now targeted by the administration?
And I just want to quote from Pete Hegseth here, because immediately after your story came out, he denied that he had shared war plans.
He said that you yourself were a deceitful and highly discredited so -called journalist who made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.
And just given how aggressive this administration has been toward the press, generally, I just wonder if you think you might be the only one, ironically, that could face any punishment from this.
Oh, I don't think about that.
By the way, those are words that hurt.
I'm really sorry that he said that.
Donald Trump has called me terrible things for five years.
Just a few months ago he called me a radical, left, disgraceful, I can't even remember.
It's like a bunch of words.
The usual words that he uses when he's mad at a reporter.
So, A, I'm used to it, B, I don't care.
C, I'm gonna do my job harder when I'm running up against opposition.
D, this is our current reality in America and someone has to just keep trying to do accountability journalism, even though there are a lot of pressures on people not to do accountability journalism.
I got to push back on you because every journalist at a major institution right now is thinking about whether or not the administration is going to be more aggressive with its journalists.
And when you are in the position that you found yourself, you are consulting with people at the Atlantic.
Every major news organization has teams of lawyers, has people to talk to when you find yourself in situations where you're wondering what should I do next?
Are there any legal consequences?
And you had mentioned earlier that people could deduce why you left that chat ultimately, and I respect the fact that you can't go into the details, but I do want to ask you whether part of the reason why you left was that you were concerned you could get in trouble for it.
Like, were you worried at all that you had stayed in that chat too long?
And not just you, but the people that you're talking to at The Atlantic that presumably you're getting advice from.
I'm going to, Your Honor, I'm going to respectfully decline to answer that question on the grounds that I can't answer the question.
I take the nation's laws very seriously, but I am not in a position to discuss decision -making related to the type of material that I was seeing.
I understand. And obviously at the end of the day, The Atlantic published your story, and I just want to zoom out for a second, because, as we mentioned earlier, you have covered foreign policy for decades.
You have covered a lot of White Houses.
And I assume that this is not the first time that you have had to weigh the public interest in publishing information that could be embarrassing or that the government doesn't want you to publish.
This is not the first time that you've weighed that against, you know, national security risks.
And clearly, you decided that the story was worth publishing in the public interest to know how national security leaders are the flouting security protocols, and I'm wondering as you're sitting here now at 11 .41 AM on Tuesday, how are you thinking about this calculation?
Do you think that we're safer now knowing what you reported?
First and foremost, what I discovered was what I consider to be a massive security breach, a breach you can drive a Mack truck through.
The idea of reporting and the idea of having a free press and the idea of holding government officials accountable, is that you make the world a better place by telling the citizens what's going on, and what the government is doing.
And so, let's assume that this is a functional government, and it responds in ordinary ways to the discovery of flaws.
With any luck, they'll tighten up their procedures and policies.
I guess the answer to my question depends on if they actually do anything.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know.
It's too early to say.
I mean, we all can speculate about the unusual qualities of this administration, and whether they respond in the way that other administrations would respond to these kind of events or these kind of revelations.
Do you think that this event was so egregious that it'll break through — actually, just to regular people?
Or is this going to be kind of the same thing that we're so used to, which is one side gets very upset, the other side tries to dismiss it, downplay it until it eventually goes away?
Like, is this so bad that it'll break through to the immunity people feel to claims of hypocrisy?
Look, 10 years ago, Donald Trump insulted the war record of John McCain.
I listened to that.
I thought, oh, well, that's it for the Donald Trump campaign because the one thing you don't do is attack war heroes, but the rest is history.
We know what happened four years ago, five years ago, I reported that Donald Trump referred to the World War I and World War II war dead as suckers and losers, and there are people who said, so what?
There's always a contingent of people these days who say, so what?
For partisan reasons.
And so I've gotten out of the prediction business.
The ordinary rules of political physics don't really apply anymore.
But if it does get brushed off, like what does that say to you?
It says that we're in a dangerous place.
Successful countries respond to observable reality by changing course to account for that reality.
If these guys go back to using Signal to discuss war planning, that's on them.
That is what you would call reckless behavior.
If they're going to not change certain procedures because they don't like the media or because because they think that the Democrats are also bad.
It just doesn't sound like a healthy country.
It doesn't sound like a healthy way to run a country.
Jeffrey, I want to thank you very much for your time.
Thank you. During a contentious hearing on Tuesday in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, two members of President Trump's Cabinet, who were included in the tax exchanges with Jeffrey Goldberg, CIA Director John Radcliffe and Director of National Intelligence, Telsi Gabbard, both denied that any classified material was shared in the messages.
That prompted expressions of disbelief from several senators, including Angus King of Maine and Independent.
Secretary Hedssef put into this group text a detailed operation plan, including targets, the weapons we were going to be using, attack sequences, and timing, and yet you've testified that nothing in that check in that chain was classified.
Wouldn't that be classified?
What if that had been made public that morning before the attack took place?
Senator I can attest to the fact that there were no classified or intelligence equities that were included in that chat group at any time.
At one point during the hearing, Democratic Senator John Ossoff of Georgia pressed Radcliffe to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation.
Director Radcliffe, this was a huge mistake, correct?
No. Hold on, no no you hold on.
The answer is the reason I say no. Director Radcliffe, I ask you a yes or no question and now you hold on.
A national political reporter You can characterize it as how you want.
was made privy to sensitive information about imminent military operations against a foreign terrorist organization.
And that wasn't a huge mistake.
That wasn't a huge mistake.
Well, I think that they characterized it as a mistake.
This is utterly unprofessional.
There's been no apology.
There has been no recognition of the gravity of this error.
On Wednesday morning, a day after senior administration officials insisted there was nothing classified in the Signal Group Chat, it.
Jeffrey Goldberg released more of the messages containing details of strike plans.
The texts, published in The Atlantic, show that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared the precise times that U .S. military jets would take off to strike Houthi targets.
Information that is typically highly classified.
We'll be right back.
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Here's what else you need to know today.
Ukraine and Russia agreed to cease fighting in the Black and to hash out the details for halting strikes on energy facilities in what would be the first significant step toward a ceasefire three years after Russia launched its war against Ukraine.
But the deal falls short of a complete pause in fighting, and it remains unclear how and when the limited troops would be carried out.
And President Trump signed a pardon for Devin Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden whose congressional testimony two years ago helped to fuel House Republicans investigation into the Biden family.
Archer, who had been convicted in a fraud case, earned fans on the right after he testified against Hunter Biden.
Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennis Ketter, Carlos Prieto, and Mary Wilson.
It was edited by Paige Cowett and Maria Byrne, contains original music by Pat McCusker, Alicia Behateren, and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood.
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I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.
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