Democrats slam spy chiefs over Trump team’s Signal leak of war plans
Senate Democrats on Tuesday hammered the Trump administration’s top intelligence officials on how and why the vice president, defense secretary, national security adviser and other top Cabinet members made the “reckless” decision to use a commercial messaging app to discuss secret war plans for Yemen – while also inadvertently including a journalist in the group chat.
The Senate hearing, which featured five of the nation’s top intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe – both of whom were involved in the group chat over the Signal messaging app – was meant be a forum for the nation’s spy chiefs to offer their assessments of the top national security threats facing the nation.
Instead, the routine annual hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence became a staging ground to interrogate the kind of “mind-boggling” behavior that the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark R. Warner (Virginia), said would easily have gotten a lower-ranking military or intelligence officer fired.
In the Signal group chat, convened by national security adviser Michael Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others reportedly detailed the targets, the attack sequencing and the weapons they would use in a U.S. air attack on Yemen’s Houthis, before the Pentagon launched the strikes on March 15, according to a bombshell report published Monday by the Atlantic.
“If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer, and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired,” Warner said in his opening remarks at Tuesday’s hearing, noting that in addition to the targeting information, the text chain included the identity of an active CIA officer. “This is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly toward classified information,” exhibited by the Trump administration, Warner said. “This is not a one-off.”
How is it that “nobody bothered to even check? … Who are all the names?” Warner added.
Gabbard, Ratcliffe and the other government witnesses provided few answers. After Gabbard at first declined to say whether she was involved in the group chat at all, she and Ratcliffe then told senators that the information shared over Signal was not classified. At other times, they denied the details contained in the Atlantic’s reporting or said they could not recall the exact contents of the messages. They repeatedly deferred to Trump’s defense secretary and national security adviser to answer for them.
The deflections triggered an incredulous and angry backlash from the committee’s liberals.
Warner, who accused Gabbard of “bobbing and weaving and trying to filibuster,” demanded repeatedly that she reconcile her conflicting assertions that the information in the text chain was not classified, but also that she was not at liberty to talk about it. “If there are no classified materials, share it with the committee. You can’t have it both ways,” he said.
“You’re the head of the intelligence community,” Sen. Angus King , I-Maine, said, apparently baffled, when Gabbard said she would “defer to the secretary of defense, the National Security Council, on that question” of whether targeting information should have been classified. “You’re supposed to know about classifications,” King said.
“Did you know that the president’s Middle East adviser was in Moscow on this thread while you were, as director of the CIA, participating in this thread? Were you aware of that?” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado , asked Ratcliffe, referencing special envoy Steve Witkoff and suggesting Russian intelligence could have hacked the chat.
Sen. Jon Ossoff , D-Georgia , highlighted the timing of a military campaign, saying the officials had effectively revealed “the time period during which enemy air defenses could target U.S. aircrews flying in enemy airspace.”
“This is utterly unprofessional,” he said. “There’s been no apology. There has been no recognition of the gravity of this error. And, by the way, we will get the full transcript of this chain, and your testimony will be measured carefully against its content.”
The security breach has presented an uncomfortable test for Republicans, who have maintained an unflinching public loyalty to President Donald Trump, even as many GOP centrists have privately expressed alarm about his administration’s policy decisions and rhetoric.
On Tuesday, Senate Republicans appeared committed to avoiding public discussion of the leak entirely, leaving to Democrats the questions as to why the administration’s top national security officials were coordinating a secret military operation over a commercial messaging app and how they failed what Warner called the “security hygiene 101” task of checking who was included in the text chain.
Sen. Tom Cotton , R-Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, conspicuously avoided any mention of the Signal debacle as he opened Tuesday’s hearing and later sought to defend the government’s witnesses as Democrats grilled them on the inconsistencies in their testimony.
While some Democrats called Tuesday for Waltz’s and Hegseth’s resignations, the White House in a statement called their outrage over the incident “a coordinated effort to distract from the successful actions taken by President Trump and his administration to make America’s enemies pay and keep Americans safe.” The strikes against the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen killed senior leaders of the organization, the White House said.
FBI Director Kash Patel, another witness at Tuesday’s hearing, told the senators that he was first briefed on the Yemen chats Monday evening, but he gave no hint of whether he would open an investigation.
Amid the sharp exchanges over the leak, the annual global threats hearing also highlighted the deepening divisions between the Trump administration and the Democrats over which issues and adversaries present the greatest security risks to the United States.
Trump has emphasized foreign drug cartels as the country’s No. 1 threat and has focused his foreign policy agenda so far on seeking to establish U.S. economic independence via tariffs, while promising territorial expansion. Intelligence officials have long seen China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as the greatest threats.
In Trump’s first two months in office, he has threatened to annex sovereign countries and territories, including Greenland, Canada, Panama and the Gaza Strip.
He has also moved to restore relations with Russia, praising President Vladimir Putin as a would-be peacemaker and publicly ridiculing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a televised Oval Office meeting, after which he temporarily withheld weapons and intelligence support to Kyiv. Russia and Ukraine agreed Tuesday to expand an initial limited ceasefire, involving energy infrastructure, to include the Black Sea. But U.S. intelligence reports, including one in early March, have assessed that Putin has not veered from his maximalist goal of dominating Ukraine.
The annual threat report released Tuesday by Gabbard’s office for the first time puts foreign drug traffickers atop the list of security threats facing the U.S. Gabbard, in her prepared remarks, briefly mentioned Russia as a threat but focused on its nuclear weapons arsenal and cyber capabilities.
She also told senators that American spy agencies continue to assess that Iran, despite its extensive accumulation of highly enriched uranium, has not restarted efforts – paused in 2003 – to build a nuclear weapon.
Trump this month sent a letter to Iran offering negotiations but threatening military action if a deal to stem its nuclear program could not be reached. While Tehran publicly rejected talks, Witkoff said Friday that Iran had “reached back out” through third parties. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Israel may launch military strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites in the coming months.
Democrats have warned that the president’s actions and rhetoric have only weakened U.S. national security and cited the Signal leak as another exacerbating incident.
During his first months in office, Democrats say Trump has hindered law enforcement officers’ ability to interdict domestic and foreign terrorist plots by slashing personnel at the FBI, CIA and Pentagon, and has paused or eradicated departments and policies meant to prevent corrupt practices and foreign influence in U.S. politics.
They have accused him of endangering critical alliances and intelligence-sharing between allies, and strengthening China’s influence by shuttering foreign-assistance programs in strategic regions abroad. Progressives have accused him of emboldening Israel’s hard-line prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to break a tenuous ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in a year and a half of war.
But the nascent Trump foreign policy took a back seat at the hearing to the scandal of the moment. Warner on Tuesday said the committee had managed to glean little new information in the closed session of the hearing that followed the morning’s public spectacle. “They won’t even say whether the phones [used in the Signal chat] were personal or business,” he said.