What the Washington Signal Leak Reveals

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The Signal Chat That Shook Washington

The revelation of confidential plans to attack Signal has sparked a storm of criticism in Washington. We discuss the fallout from the scandal and what it says about national security decision-making under President Trump.

You’re the CIA director. Why didn’t you mention he was in the Signal thread? I don’t know if you use the messaging app Signal. I do. I don’t use it for classified information, not for targeting, not for sending remotely. Me too. “It’s a national security scandal no one saw coming. And the first major test of the limits of a new administration that prides itself on breaking norms. This week, we learned that some of Washington’s top officials planned a bombing campaign in Yemen via Signal. Their messages, accidentally leaked to a journalist at The Atlantic, have sparked a backlash against the administration’s handling of state secrets — “I think it’s by the great grace of God that we’re not mourning the pilots who died right now. These are important jobs. This is our national security.” — and offered a rare window into how national security decisions are made in the age of emojis. From The New York Times. This is a roundtable discussion. I’m Jess Bidgood with Helen Cooper, David Sanger, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Thank you so much for being here and turning off your phones for a full 30 minutes on what I know is a very busy news day for all of you. I was in the Washington bureau of the New York Times on Monday. Zolan and I are sitting a little bit next to each other. You two are sitting on the other side of the bureau. And there we were, when suddenly, at some point on Monday afternoon, I just heard this collective gasp. And what happened was The Atlantic published this story. Helen, you’ve covered defense for a long time. If I want to know anything about the Pentagon, about the military, I come to you. What was going through your mind when you were reading these text messages, and why is this all so important? When this story first appeared in The Atlantic, the first thing I saw was the fact that they had a Signal group chat. And there was the fact that Pete Hegseth put the strike sequence in there. That was the biggest deal to me from the beginning. Jeff Goldberg wrote in an article that there was – I think that’s the word, he used the word sequence. And that means, in military terms, that’s what time the fighters are going to leave the carrier. And then that’s what time – they call it the strike window. And that’s the window of time that American fighter pilots are going to be in the air. That’s so closely guarded in the Pentagon. That’s been drummed into the head of every defense reporter. You can’t compromise operational security like that. They’re having this conversation in a Signal group chat, and it’s a big deal. But what’s really big is that it’s not the conversation – it’s that he put those plans out there. So it’s not just that it’s on Signal, it’s that they specifically – To me, that’s specifically what they said. Absolutely. David, I wonder if you can talk about that a little bit. Why is it – why should this kind of thing really not be anywhere but the most secure spaces that we build for this kind of information. Well, Helen is absolutely right. If you take away that sequence, all you had was the embarrassment that came from the conversation happening on Signal. With that – as one senior US commander wrote to me midweek – with that, he said, the good news is that no harm was actually done. The operation went very well. He said the bad news is that if this had been done and it had been done by mid-level people in the Pentagon, he said you would now be watching courts-martial. And that led you to what I thought were fascinating, interconnected layers of this. The first layer is just the hubris of doing it on Signal, because it’s convenient, compared to – to your point, Jess – the way you normally do it, which is in the situation room, right? With no phones around, very few, except for the people who needed to be directed by the US government phone. The second layer is the arrogance when this came out, when they tried to pretend that this was not classified information. The conversation was frank and sensitive. But as the president and the national security adviser have said, there was no classified information being shared. There were no sources, methods, locations, or war plans that they were not sharing. And then the last big layer that's happening here, which is remarkable in its nature, is the attempt to blame Jeff Goldberg, an extremely experienced, good reporter – I've known Jeff for 30 years. He's one of the best national security reporters we have here. He's also the editor of The Atlantic. And somehow it's his fault that they put him on the Signal chat. But this is part of a pattern of this administration that we've been seeing for a while now. When there's a story and it actually signals how unsettling this White House is. The tactic is that when a story really bothers the highest levels of the White House, what you see is that Trump and his top aides are setting up an opponent, setting up an enemy to blame. In this case, it’s a journalist. He’s made up a lot of stories. And I think he’s basically been bad for the country. You’re talking about a dishonest and deeply discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of spreading hoaxes over and over again. And then on the other hand, they’re downplaying what was in the story that was so troubling. Again, the attacks have been incredibly successful, and that’s what ultimately needs to be talked about. What was interesting and a little unusual about this response is how inconsistent it was, even given that premise. You had some officials saying it wasn’t classified information. Then the president started backtracking. One day you had Mike Walz appearing to take credit for this chat because he was the one who organized it and invited people. Look, I take full responsibility. I set up the group. My job is to make sure everything is coordinated. And then the next day, White House officials say that it was actually a hoax. So even in this – and then Marco Rubio said, “This is a big mistake.” Obviously, somebody made a mistake. Somebody made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you shouldn’t be in this case. He’s the only one who actually acknowledged the seriousness of this. That’s right. And you had Hegseth saying it was a hoax, and a few hours later, maybe it was a little earlier, actually, CIA Director John Ratcliffe came out and said, “No, it was like the very chain we were all on.” I mean, he confirmed that it was real. I think that gets to what I think is really important about this story, which is that as revealing as the text messages themselves were, the reaction was as revealing as the reaction of senior members of the administration, as they sort of obfuscated, changed their explanations, struggled to explain it. And I’m curious, Zolan, what do you think is at stake for the administration here. What is this test? Of competence. I mean, the perception of competence. You had an administration that has put a lot of government officials on furlough and a lot of programs called restoring the integrity and competence of the government. It looks incompetent to host a Signal chat on a commercial platform and discuss sensitive details, including the takeoff times of these planes, which has led national security officials and national security veterans to say that this is actually putting the pilots at risk. I ran into a former Justice Department official who spoke about what he called the sloppiness of this entire episode and really underscored the concerns it has raised for the national security reputation of this administration. And on the other hand, I think if you asked most reporters in Washington whether any Republican would call for oversight of this administration. They would probably say it’s questionable. It’s questionable. Trump has control of this party. But you see that not only Democrats, but some Republicans are criticizing this. And what does accountability look like at a moment like this? What would it have looked like in the past, and what do you think it might conceivably look like now? Well, I wanted to go back to your question that you asked Zolan, which is: What does the reaction tell us? Sure. Because I’ve been working on a story for the last two days that looks at the reaction and how it’s felt among fighter pilots. These are the men and women who strap themselves into their cockpits every day on behalf of this country, and they expect their commander in chief, their secretary of defense, and the people who command them to have their back. And the fact that Pete Hegseth — the thing they’re most angry about, every single one of the people I’ve talked to — the thing they’re most angry about is not necessarily the disclosure on Signal — the fact that he posted these strike plans on Signal — because as one fighter pilot told me, everybody makes mistakes. It’s the fact that he stood up after that — Pete Hegseth — and said, “There’s nothing wrong with this.” There are no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information. The fact that he won’t admit that he made a mistake means that the de facto Secretary of Defense of the United States is saying that it’s okay to post these flight plans on a commercial app called Signal. So does that mean that all these decades of operational security, all the lengths that pilots go to maintain them, they have burn rooms on aircraft carriers where they burn every piece of paper that might indicate their flight plan or anything like that. Their radio silence. They don’t talk on the radio about their operations in the Red Sea because they know people are listening. They know the Iranians are listening. They know the Chinese are listening. They know the Russians are listening. So you have this level of operational security that they go through. But then the secretary of defense doesn’t comply and says it’s okay not to comply, and they get mad. I mean, let’s put it this way. They’re trained to literally burn their plans. Yeah. That’s how secret it needs to be. Yeah. And in his response to all of this, do you think Pete Hegseth is doing a good job? He’s trying to come up with an answer that he thinks President Trump will like. And in the process, he’s not addressing the concerns of the troops who serve this country. I’m not going to try to get inside Pete Hegseth’s head, but I can tell you for sure that he’s lost a lot of trust among the 1.3 million servicemen and women in the active-duty American military. I can tell you that when Trump brings people into his cabinet and into his inner circle, he’s measuring loyalty and how much they embrace the Roy Cohn strategy of combating any criticism. Pete Hegseth was brought into this administration in part because of the way he defended the president on television. And on Fox News. Almost entirely. He wasn’t brought in because of his depth of experience. And I think we’re going to learn something about the players along the way. So for Pete Hegseth, we learned, first of all, that this was amateur hour. We learned about J.D. Vance. He raised a really interesting specific issue. He raised the possibility that the president might not be fully informed about the nature of the trade-offs here. He had to go in and do some damage control on this issue. Right. And that problem, that core problem, was what does this look like, right? What does it look like to the allies, what does it look like to the public. All the allies have come to the conclusion that J.D. Vance is even more dismissive of them in private than he is in public. And he's been pretty dismissive of them in public. So they start to think, well, gosh, if we're really in trouble with the Russians, are the Americans going to come to our aid? No. It was interesting — just in J.D. Vance's memo, you mentioned containment and damage control. The only damage control he did was in terms of dissent, the perception of dissent. His team put out one statement saying he agreed — to paraphrase, but he agreed with Trump. Didn't address the idea that there were concerns about the national security debate in this — in the commercial supplement, Pete Hegseth shares details of the actual planning of this strike — He never addressed the core issue. No, because for him, at least based on their statement, for him, the core issue was any perception that he was breaking with the president. And imagine the credibility he could have had if he had come out and said, “You know, in retrospect, while it didn’t do any damage, I should not have put it on the Signal chat. I’ve learned from it, and we’re recommitting to doing this the right way.” That’s not the theme of this administration. No, that would have required a level of humility that I don’t think we’ve seen from any of these administration officials. I think the other thing that was really interesting about the Signal chat was who wasn’t in the chat — who was, you had the White House chief of staff. You had the Treasury chief of staff, but you also had someone who wasn’t. Who wasn’t there was the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s the senior military adviser to the secretary of defense and the president. That’s the most senior military official. So he was supposed to be there, and he's not there. But when you think about the people who could have come forward and said, “Maybe we shouldn't have this on the table,” or, “We're going to have to change this.” We can't do that. But Admiral Christopher Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not invited to the chat. And I asked the Hegseth people why. And the answer I got from press secretary Sean Parnell was, it was a political chat. It's totally fine for military generals not to be there. Sure. Think about it. Normally, you people who are not allowed in chats would have FOMO. That's what happened. That's what I'm sure of. He's not there. Who among us hasn't realized, “Oh, my god, all my friends are texting each other, and I'm not in this group chat.” That one's like, wow. That's the one that, looking back, you're probably glad you weren't a part of. But I think — you raised the point that he could have been the person to say, “Hey, let’s not put this information on the table.” But that could have been anyone at any time — including Susie Wiles — any of them — the president’s chief of staff, who could have said, “Hey, should we have this conversation down in the briefing room?” And that tells you how fundamentally inexperienced they are. Because if this had happened in Trump’s first term, you had Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who was a commander, who ran one of the largest commands in the U.S. military, et cetera. He would have known how you did it. And so would a number of other officials. But by giving up that experience to get the loyalists that you heard about from Zolan, they gave it up. And you also asked an interesting question earlier that I think we haven’t answered, which is who should be investigating this? Well, obviously the inspector general of the Pentagon. Oh, wait — we don’t have an inspector general at the Pentagon. All the inspectors general have been fired. Right. This question of accountability, what accountability might actually look like at this point, I think is really important. So the Pentagon inspector general is gone. Is that, is that some kind of test or does that raise questions for Pam Bondi? She came out and said it was confidential but not classified. It was confidential information, unclassified and inadvertently disclosed. I don’t know how she could do that. I also don’t see why that’s a factor in whether you would open an investigation. The Espionage Act doesn’t mention — it depends on the classified information. It depends on the information before it was classified. So I don’t think we should get into this whole classified, classified discussion at all. It’s just — again, a lot of what the administration does is try to hide behind semantics. They hide behind, “Oh, these weren’t war plans. These were strike sequences.” They're hiding behind this whole classified versus unclassified — unclassified. Hegseth has the authority to declassify anything. So he, as defense secretary, theoretically could have declassified the war plans after he — presumably he would have done it before he put it in a Signal chat with a journalist. But it's not about — forget all that semantics. And I think it's just really important that we look at what actually happened, and you look at what was actually done, and you ask yourself how you would feel if you were a fighter pilot in this country, and you sat in the cockpit, and you knew that senior officials were discussing what you were about to do in a commercial chat room. And as we hear this kind of semantic response from the White House about what was classified and what wasn't, I think we also have to remember that a lot of these people have talked a lot about classified information and the importance of keeping it secret. Are you talking about Hillary? After Hillary Clinton and her emails. Apparently, the standard operating procedure in Secretary Clinton's office was to send emails that otherwise couldn't be printed to a maid, print them out of a secure area or a secure area, and then hand them over. Any security professional, military, government or otherwise, would have been fired on the spot for that kind of behavior and would have been prosecuted for that kind of recklessness with that kind of information. Now, as Zolan said earlier, that gave the Democrats a single line of attack. But at the same time, we're seeing Democrats who have downplayed the email issue for years suddenly asking for their resignations and going along with it. Is there an element of hypocrisy there, do you think? I think this moment kind of shows how hypocritical Washington is. And how that connects to the actual basis of policy sometimes. Democrats, as you said, spent years downplaying that there was any problem with the Hillary Clinton emails episode, and now, as I said, after weeks — it could have been many times, they could have said, we're going to attack the Trump administration on this or that, furloughing workers, various immigration policies. And it was inconsistent. Now they're uniting around this. At the same time, Republicans have been attacking Democrats for years over their handling of information, over the Hillary Clinton emails scandal. Remember, “Lock her up” was such a theme during the Trump campaign. So fraudulent Hillary. Wait, fraudulent. You should lock her up, I'm telling you. By the way, also Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, the two people we talked about, any level of oversight, were two people in the past who focused on this and said that Hillary Clinton should face some form of prosecution. We're not seeing that response from Republicans this time. We're seeing them also basically across the board trying to downplay it, downplay it, and move on. So we're seeing that this is a time to seize on this kind of issue, to criticize it when it's politically advantageous for your party. Well, Attorney General Bondi said this morning, “If you want to see classified data, not sensitive data, look at Hillary's email and email server.” Well, I covered that. Helen was covering that at the time, and my memory of those memos — and this is not an excuse — she should not have had the server in her home. She should not have put anything classified on it. These were not operational details. These were debates about diplomatic disputes that they were having with different countries. They weren't supposed to come out, but they weren't life and death in the way that the operational details are here. There's another great irony here, and that is that just this week we saw the administration go to court and invoke state secrets privilege. So they wouldn't have to describe the flights that were taking gang members or suspected gang members out of the country. That was a state secret. But the sequence that Helen described is just sensitive, but not exactly secret. I mean, I just don't know. Not military plans, right. So, I mean, I just don't run into many national security people during the day. I haven't met a single one this week who just doesn't think the arguments here are farcical. And by the way, these deportation flights have already happened. And they're saying that's a state secret here. Whereas in this case, we're talking about information that was being discussed in a commercial application two hours before the strike. But this is not — This is an administration, as you said, David, that invokes secrecy when it’s convenient, when it sees it — when it sees it in its own interests. One person we haven’t talked about much is National Security Advisor Mike Walz. He’s the one who created this Signal chat in the first place. Then he went on TV to try to explain himself, rambled a little bit about how Jeffrey Goldberg might have been pulled into the chat somehow. But like a number — have you ever had someone’s contact show their name, and then you, and then you have someone else’s number. I never make that mistake. You have someone else’s number in contact with someone else. So, of course, I haven’t seen this loser in the group. What are we learning about him, and what are we learning about what might be next for him? Yeah, I mean, I’ve never heard of anyone being pulled into a chat without being invited first. First? By the way, would anyone like to drag me into any chats? Go ahead. The first time we saw Walz respond to this was actually in front of Trump, when Trump was asked about this. This journalist, Mr. President, wants the world to talk about more hoaxes and this kind of nonsense, not the freedom that you're providing. Then we later saw him take some responsibility for this. And you saw the president say Mike Walz is a good man. He's doing a good job, and defended him. But we've seen a more aggressive defense of Pete Hegseth from now on. Hegseth is doing a great job. He had nothing to do with this. How did you drag Hegseth into this? He had nothing to do with this. Look, look, this is all a witch hunt. Before all this happened, Mike Walz was on shaky ground. At one point, everyone thought he was going to be the next Secretary of Defense. That's right. He was — he was considered for this job. So he's experienced. He knows what's going on. In a way, you have to feel sorry for him a little bit, because who didn't make a mistake here — Not that bad. I didn't do that. Anything like that? And certainly not a military operation. But he made a mistake here. And whereas Hegseth made the decision to put the timeline of the attack in an unclassified channel. And that's part of what makes it remarkable that Trump seems to be doing so much to support Hegseth at this point. Yeah. Yeah. We'll just have to see how Mike Walz survives this and how Hegseth does. And Hegseth has a long-standing relationship with the president that will probably serve him well. His main problem right now is with his allies and with his own troops, as Helen pointed out. And with Congress. And he's going to have problems with Congress. I mean, obviously Hegseth seems like the kind of guy that Trump likes. He's got the Fox News persona, he's got the hair. Trump obviously likes that. But I think Hegseth was confirmed — J.D. Vance had to come in and cast the tiebreaking vote. He was confirmed 50-50 by the Senate, almost on the brink of death. And he's stumbled one after another. So I think Hegseth, for all the trouble Mike Waltz might be in, I think Hegseth is probably in the same trouble. Absolutely. And now, one thing that this whole episode raises, I think, is the question: What other chat rooms are out there? What else is being planned in unsafe places? Who might be doing this? Do we have any sense of whether there's a broader security problem in the government? What questions does that raise for you? Well, the fact that no one in that chat at any point while Jeff Goldberg was there said, “Hey, maybe we should take this to the Situation Room,” tells you that they do this all the time. I mean, it seemed completely normal. There wasn’t — Well, they were until Monday. Yeah. So I would say there were probably many, many others that were going on, maybe — Do you think they stopped? Well, probably for that kind of planning. Signal serves a really important purpose. I mean, we all use it, right? And we all use it because it’s the best encryption that’s commercially available — in this case, for free. The White House, the military, intelligence officials use it frequently to communicate with people outside their world. They should. But the trick is knowing what it can and can’t be used for. And of course, we know that China and Russia are also trying to penetrate Signal. There was a scam that didn’t involve a vulnerability in Signal, but just the way you connect your phone to your computer is a way that the Russians could try to exploit. Specifically, they tried to get into the system that way. But I think people are going to have to come to some kind of real understanding of what you use Signal for and what you don’t use it for. Just in case they don’t come to that understanding. I want to end with one last question for you guys: What group chat would you randomly want to be added to? I doubt they’re in any of them, but I wouldn’t mind being in a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris group chat. Because we’re still assessing what happened with the last election, and we’re still trying to look back on the relationship between those two — Absolutely. — and maybe let’s add some of their senior staff to help address some of the issues, like should the vice president break up with the president sooner? But I guess that’s for another roundtable, which I’d be happy to have. What about you? I would love to be in the Taiwan group chat. Wouldn’t that be nice? Who’s in — who’s in this? Who’s in that chat? Everyone who was in the other chat. Yeah. Yeah. I want to be in the chat when they realize Jeff Goldberg was in their chat. Cleanup chat. Oh, secondary chat. Secondary. Oh my god. Did you see what just happened? When they saw “JG has left the chat.” Yeah. Well, I would love to be in a group chat with all of you. Thank you so, so much for joining us today and taking the time out of your schedules. And I can’t wait to read your next stories on this topic. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jess. I was going to say I wanted to be in the next Zolan party group chat. I’ll leave you there. I was two seconds away from saying, “Don’t do it.” You throw parties and don’t invite me? Well, that’s the only way. I just said that.

The revelation of the secret plans to attack Signal has sparked a storm of criticism in Washington. We discuss the fallout from the scandal and what it says about national security decision-making under President Trump.Credit

Host: Jess Bidgood

Starring: Helen Cooper, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. Sanger

Produced by Sophie Erikson and Chevaz Clarke

Video by Eddie Costas, Amy Marino, Ray Whitehouse and Jordan Ganz

It's a national security scandal no one expected, and the first major test for a new administration that prides itself on breaking norms.

This week, we learned that some of Washington’s top officials orchestrated the bombing campaign in Yemen — via the messaging app Signal. Their messages, accidentally leaked to a journalist at The Atlantic, have sparked a backlash over the administration’s handling of state secrets and offered a rare glimpse into military decision-making in the age of emoji.

New York Times reporters Jess Bidgood, Helen Cooper, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and David E. Sanger discuss what the Signal chat leak reveals about the Trump administration and the state of politics in Washington.

In today's episode

Jess Bidgood is chief correspondent for the On Politics newsletter.

Helen Cooper , Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The New York Times covering President Trump and his administration.

David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times.

Jess Bidgood is The Times's chief correspondent and author of On Politics, a guide to the 2024 election and beyond. More about Jess Bidgood

Helen Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. Previously, she was an editor, diplomatic correspondent, and White House correspondent. More about Helen Cooper

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration. More about Zolan Kanno-Youngs

David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security issues. More about David E. Sanger

Chevaz Clark is the visuals editor at The New York Times, working closely with the Live team on visual coverage and focusing on video stories. More about Chevaz Clark

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