Signal Chat Scandal: Top Officials Text Yemen War Plans to a Reporter

A Reporter in the War Room

On March 11, 2025, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz created a group chat on the consumer messaging app Signal called “Houthi PC small group.” Into it he placed the most senior national security officials in the U.S. government: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and others. He also, by mistake, added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

For the next four days, Goldberg watched the principals of the Trump national security apparatus argue over, plan, and ultimately execute U.S. airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen — on his phone, in real time. On March 15, two hours before the bombs fell, Hegseth typed into the chat the exact targets, the specific aircraft and missile types being used, and the timing sequence of the operation. At 1:55 p.m. Eastern, Goldberg watched explosions hit Sanaa on social media, then watched the chat fill with congratulatory emoji from cabinet officers.

Goldberg published the story on March 24, 2025.

What Was Shared, And Why It’s a Crime in Most Buildings

CNN, citing administration sources, reported that the strike details Hegseth shared were classified at the time he sent them: “It was classified when it was shared below the principal level.” The Pentagon’s own contemporaneous documents about the operation carried classification markings and contained the same information Hegseth dropped into a commercial app. Independent national security lawyers and former Defense officials described the disclosures unambiguously: pre-attack target lists, weapons systems, and timing are exactly the kind of information that gets junior officers court-martialed when leaked.

Hegseth’s response was to insist that “nobody was texting war plans.” A separate New York Times report later revealed he had been running a second Signal chat about the same Yemen strike that included his wife, his brother, and his personal attorney — none of whom had any operational need for the information. American Oversight sued the administration on March 26 for using a self-deleting consumer messaging app to conduct government business in violation of the Federal Records Act.

The Punishment: A Promotion

In any prior administration of either party, the careers of the officials involved would have ended on March 24. Hegseth, as Defense Secretary, would have been the obvious resignation. Waltz, as the man who added a journalist to a war-planning group, would have been gone by sundown.

Trump’s response was the inverse. He told reporters Hegseth “did nothing wrong.” He said Waltz “has learned a lesson, and he’s a good man.” Within weeks, Waltz was nominated to be U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations — a promotion. Hegseth kept his job. Days before his ouster from the NSA role in May, Waltz was photographed during a Cabinet meeting with what appeared to be a Signal-like messaging app open on his phone.

This is the second-presidency pattern in miniature. Failure of judgment is not punished. Failure of loyalty is. Officials who leak classified war plans by accident keep their jobs; officials who decline to lie for Trump get fired. The signal sent down the chain of command is unmistakable: opsec discipline matters less than political discipline.

A Government Run on a Consumer App

The deeper scandal beneath the leak is that this is how the Trump national security cabinet was actually conducting its business — on auto-deleting commercial software, outside the records system, in a venue where every adversary’s intelligence service has been documented to mount intercept and exploitation operations. Russia, China, and Iran do not need to penetrate the Pentagon’s classified networks if the Secretary of Defense is texting the strike package on Signal.

The “Houthi PC small group” episode is not an isolated mistake. It is a window into an administration where the people charged with safeguarding the most sensitive secrets of the United States treat those secrets as casually as a group thread about a fantasy football league — and where the only firing offense is embarrassing the president, not endangering the country.