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Atlantic releases transcript of Trump team’s Signal chat

Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House national security adviser Michael Waltz. (Kent Nishimura for The Washington Post; Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post; and Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/TWP)
By Alex Horton and Missy Ryan Washington Post

The Atlantic on Wednesday published a transcript of top Trump administration officials’ group chat this month discussing an imminent U.S. attack on Houthi militants in Yemen, offering a fuller accounting of the sensitive information they exchanged after the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was mistakenly added to the conversation that occurred over an unclassified, commercially available messaging platform.

The newly disclosed material adds fuel to a mounting controversy about the decision by several officials – including President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, his secretaries of defense and state, the director of national intelligence, the CIA director and Vice President JD Vance – to discuss sensitive operational plans over the messaging app Signal, which is encrypted but not permitted by government rules for discussions of classified information, and to do so in a group including a journalist.

The episode has infuriated Democrats, who have demanded the resignations of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Michael Waltz and put the White House in the uncomfortable position of having to defend the judgment of nearly all of the Trump administration’s most senior national security figures.

The president’s defenders have acknowledged that Goldberg was inadvertently included in the chat while seeking to downplay critics’ assertions that the material shared over the messaging app, had it been compromised by an adversary, would have jeopardized the lives of American service members involved in the operation.

The Trump administration has vowed to take a harder line against the Houthis – who have carried out attacks on commercial ships, American naval vessels and planes and U.S. ally Israel – and against Iran, which has long provided the Houthis with financial and military support.

The transcript published by the Atlantic on Wednesday includes a message sent from Hegseth at 11:44 a.m. Eastern time on March 15, the day of the Yemen operation, confirming the precise timeline of the planned strikes scheduled to commence roughly two hours later. Hegseth wrote:

TEAM UPDATE:

TIME NOW (1144ET): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w Centcom we are a GO for mission launch.

1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)

1345: “Trigger Based” F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)

1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)

1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier “Trigger Based” targets)

1536: F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.

MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline)

We are currently clean on OPSEC .

Godspeed to our warriors.

Waltz later provided the group with information on the strikes’ impact, saying a building had collapsed and that multiple targets were believed killed – including a “top missile guy” who was allegedly struck while “walking into his girlfriend’s building.”

“Pete, Kurilla, IC, amazing job,” he wrote, referring to Hegseth, U.S. Central Command chief Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla and the intelligence community.

In testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, both of whom participated in the Signal chat, asserted to lawmakers that nothing in those messages was considered classified.

Some former intelligence officials have rejected those claims, describing a projected schedule of attacks like the one Hegseth shared with the chat group as a closely guarded secret that should be discussed only in a secure environment.

“This information was clearly taken from the real-time order of battle sequence of an ongoing operation. It is highly classified and protected,” said Mick Mulroy, a former CIA paramilitary officer and Marine Corps veteran who served as a senior Pentagon official during the first Trump administration. “… Next to nuclear and covert operations, this information is the most protected.”