Mistake in Trump Administration exposes secret war plans

A reporter for The Atlantic was mistakenly added to a Trump administration chat group where plans for an imminent bombing in Yemen were shared. This was revealed in an article by the reporter himself, Jeffrey Goldberg, after which Democratic congressmen began calling for the heads of senior White House officials.

Goldberg, editor of the magazine, claimed that on March 11 he received a connection request on the social network Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz, the name of Trump's national security advisor. Two days later he was included in a group called "Houthi PC small group" ("PC" or principals committee, referring to a team made up of senior national security officials).

"I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans," the reporter claimed. Its members appeared to include JD Vance, vice president, Marco Rubio, secretary of state, Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense, Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, Scott Bessent, secretary of the Treasury, John Ratcliffe, CIA director, and Susie Wiles, chief of staff.

In addition to reading a discussion among several of the participants about how airstrikes against Houthi terrorists in Yemen should be carried out, with JD Vance as the discordant voice, Goldberg claimed to have had access to "operational details" about an impending operation shared by Hegseth, "including information about targets, weapons the US would be deploying, and attack sequencing."

The The Atlantic editor's suspicions about the authenticity of the message chain were allayed by the first reports of detonations in Yemen: they were occurring at the location and time detailed in the chat.

After leaving the group, he consulted through other channels with several officials and Brian Hughes, spokesman for the National Security Council, replied that the conversation appeared "authentic." While acknowledging that they were reviewing "how an inadvertent number was added to the chain," Hughes welcomed the "deep and thoughtful policy coordination" it demonstrated and assured that the success of the military operation confirmed that there had been no risk to national security.

Calls for accountability

In response to a reporter's question, Donald Trump said he was unaware of the episode. "I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic," he added. "It's to me, it's a magazine that's going out of business." He stressed, however, that the attack had been successful.

"I've accidentally sent the wrong person a text. We all have," Nebraska Republican Rep. Don Bacon told Axios. "The unconscionable action was sending this info over non-secure networks. None of this should have been sent on non-secure systems. Russia and China are surely monitoring his unclassified phone."

His party and House colleague Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin told the same newspaper that there should be some form of "administrative accountability" if it had been a mistake and one of "legal accountability" if it had been on purpose.

From the Democratic bench they were combative, with Virginia Senator Mark Warner asserting in a series of posts on X that the Administration was "playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info" and that its actions would make US allies less willing to share sensitive information.

"This is an outrageous national security breach and heads should roll," wrote blue Congressman Chris Deluzio. "We need a full investigation and hearing into this on the House Armed Services Committee, ASAP."